Gaming System

The idea that “time is money” often escapes all but the wealthiest of enthusiasts, and even a few bucks-up buyers would prefer the experience of building things themselves. But game time is worth far more than build time to the folks who buy fully-configured gaming systems. These results-oriented buyers typically place high value on their leisure time and have no problem paying someone with more experience to deliver an often higher-quality product with backing in the form of a warranty.

Boutique builders have catered to high-end buyers since the earliest days of PC whiteboxes, but only the most competitive survive. Among these are VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest and Vigor Gaming, which are responsible for the three systems in our lab today…almost.
by thomas soderstrom

Foxconn and Gigabyte

Combining minimal power requirements with decent desktop performance seemed to be a nearly insurmountable task for many years, but it now seems to be possible. There are processors and chipsets on the market that will allow you to run a decent desktop system at a very low idle power level, while providing amped-up CPU performance when it’s needed. We’ re taking a look at two motherboards , which their vendors Foxconn and Gigabyte aim at power-conscious customers, and pairing them to one of the most affordable mainstream processors on the market: Intel’s Core 2 Duo E7200.
by Patrick schmid and achim roos

New LQ1000 Integrated Liquid-Cooling Chassis

Dominating the performance PC market, liquid-component cooling lets enthusiasts put a large radiator in a better-optimized location compared to standard heat sinks , but without the complication, noise, or decreased reliability of “extreme cooling” alternatives.

On the other hand, bulky external components and severe case modifications have typically limited the best liquid-cooling configurations to the world of “case mod freaks,” rather than true performance fanatics. Though Koolance has produced a few well-finished liquid-cooling cases for as long as most of us can remember, the majority of alternative designs have either been bulky or under-powered.

Because it has stood the test of time, Koolance became an easy choice when we were searching for a suitable reference point to compare a fresh entry in the liquid-cooling market. That competing product is Zalman new LQ1000 integrated liquid-cooling chassis, which we first photographed for our CES 2008 coverage.
by Thomas Soderstrom

Intel Core 2 Duo

Two years ago, Intel pulled off a coup with the introduction of its Conroe architecture , which surfaced as the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. With this move, the company won back the performance crown after losing a bit of favor in the debacle that was its Pentium 4 "Prescott" design.

At that time, Intel announced an ambitious plan to return to evolving its processor architectures at a rapid pace, as they had done in the mid-1990s. The first phase of the plan was the release of a “refresh” of the architecture 12 months after its introduction, to take advantage of progress in fabrication processes. That was done with Penryn. Then a whole new architecture was set to arrive 24 months later, with the code name Nehalem . That new architecture is the subject of this article.
by fedy abi chahla