Archive for the ‘review’ Category

CoolIT Vantage – Review

This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net

When it comes to your gaming PC, getting the most bang for your buck(explosion out of your dollar) is of the utmost importance. For many, this means overclocking components such as the CPU and video card, to milk every last bit of performance from the hardware without paying anything extra. The downside to this is of course the additional heat generated from pushing your hardware to its limits.

So how do you keep your rig running cool without breaking the bank? Obviously upgrading your stock cooling system is going to be your first line of defense against heat. Now do you go with air cooling, or a liquid cooling setup? These days, I’m all for the latter. For a minimal increase in cost, you can greatly reduce not only the temperature of your components, but the noise as well.

Overview

Today we’re looking at another liquid cooling system from CoolIT. This time around is their Vantage A.L.C. It is a step-up from the ECO, which we reviewed earlier this year. The main difference between the two is the inclusion of a “brain” into the cooling unit.

The “brain” allows you to control the functions of the cooling unit, and to get a readout on the current temperature of the liquid. Rather than letting the motherboard dictate how fast or slow the fan spins (and thus how loud it is and how effective the cooling is), you can program the unit manually. It has three different settings: Extreme, Performance, and Quiet. Other things can be programmed as well, such as the color of the LCD, the orientation of the screen and other little things. The ability to change the fan speeds is what really makes this one interesting.

Installation

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the installation, as it’s essentially the same as the ECO.  That’s certainly not a bad thing, as the ECO was a breeze to install. Once again you have different brackets for the various types of CPUs on the market. Simply select the right one, attach the back plate, screw down the cooler, and put four screws into the fan. Plug in the cable to the fan, and one to the motherboard and you’re all set. Again, the whole process takes around 10-15 minutes, which is quite impressive for the improvement it makes.

Testing

Since there are three different modes for the cooler, we’ve gone ahead and broken the tests down to reflect the results of each mode both while the system is idling, and under full load for 10 minutes. All components are running at stock speeds. Here is a rundown of our test system:

CPU: Intel i7 950
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD3R
RAM: 6GB OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Platinum
GPU: MSI Radeon 4890 OC Edition
HDD: OCZ Summit 64GB SSD
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Chasis: Thermaltake Element V

You can see that under load, it makes a huge difference, up to 20-degrees on the most aggressive setting. There is still a noticable change on idle temperatures, but that is not terribly surprising, as the CPU just isn’t heating up that much to begin with.

With only the small differences in temperature between the different settings, I just ended up setting it on ‘Quiet’ and leaving it there. If you start getting into overclocking, that is likely the only time you’ll want to kick on the ‘Extreme’ mode.

Conclusion

CoolIT has already shown their worth with their previous liquid cooling products. The Vantage A.L.C. takes an already great cooling solution and adds a level of control that will appeal to a variety of people. Anyone from the user looking for a quieter PC to the overclocker that depends on the extra cooling power to keep their system running stable. With a price tag of around $115, it’s a good choice for those that want more control over their cooling solution. If you’re the kind of person that’s just going to leave it on the standard ‘Performance’ mode, you might want to stick with the ECO A.L.C. as you’ll really see the same benefits at a cheaper price.

[ CoolIT ] VIA [ GamerFront ]

Samsung Moment review

In the world of Android, it’s not yet clear who’s going to come out victorious — QWERTY sliders or their keyboardless brethren — but does there really need to be a winner? We say there’s room for just about everyone in this open-source party, and Sprint is starting to round out its Android offerings by introducing the keyboard-equipped Samsung Moment to saddle up alongside the the HTC Hero that was released a few weeks ago. In the scheme of things, the platform is still extraordinarily young which means that virtually every new handset that’s announced brings “firsts” to the table; in the Moment’s case, it’s both the first Android device with an 800MHz ARM11 core and the first Android QWERTY phone with an AMOLED display (you’d have to go back to another Sammy, the Galaxy, to find the first AMOLED Android phone regardless of input method).

Being able to stuff Android, AMOLED, QWERTY, and 800MHz all into one sentence certainly sounds like a winning combination, but does the Moment deliver? Let’s find out.

Filed under: Cellphones

Samsung Moment review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Canon G11 Review: Makes You Feel Like a Real Photographer (Almost) [Review]

It’s fat. It’s $500. It takes fantastic photographs.

The G11 is Canon’s top-of-the-line point-and-shoot. It occupies a sorta strange spot, towering over the average point-and-shoot in basically every metric—image quality, size, weight and price—but sits just below entry-level DSLRs and more recently, micro four thirds cameras.

So, there are two ways to look at the G11: It’s an amazing street camera. More discreet than a DSLR, but more powerful than a run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot. You can’t stuff it in your jeans pocket, but that’s fine, because you want to sling it over your shoulder anyways. The other way is that you can buy a more versatile entry-level DSLR that’s not much larger for around the same price, especially if you step back a generation or so.

It’s all about your priorities.

H-h-h-h-hardware

Everything about this camera is just—solid. The full-metal jacket makes it feel indestructible, while the shape evokes the classic cameras you feel like you’re supposed to be taking photos with. It’s thick, remarkably so, in part because of the flip-out swivel LCD screen. And it’s definitely more along the lines of a rangefinder-style camera than a typical point-and-shoot.

The real magic of this camera lies in the dedicated control dials. You’ll fine three on top—exposure compensation, ISO speed, and shooting mode. They feel cramped and tiny, at first, but the snap they make as as you rotate them is surprisingly deep and satisfying. Having these settings at your fingers at all times is so much of why the G11 feels like a camera that’s a step above point-and-shoots, a tool for creating photographs.

The back dial is the most frustrating part of controlling the camera—a ring surrounds a four-way d-pad with a button in the center. Ultimately, you wind up pressing buttons on the d-pad when you’re trying to rotate the dial to adjust shutter speed or aperture, or simply pressing the wrong button because it’s so small. The menu system, otherwise, is a pretty standard Canon setup, which looks a lot like the G10’s—it’s not dead simple, but it’s not overly complicated either, and a couple minutes of fiddling will reveal all of its secrets.

The viewfinder is utterly depressing. I want to use it, badly. It just feels intrinsically wrong to hold a camera of this caliber out in front of me to shoot, not up to my eyeball. Meanwhile, the G11’s viewfinder is so small, and the coverage is so bad (you can see the lens through it!), that it’s nigh useless, like trying to compose through a pinhole.

One of the shooting modes, quickshot, sounds like a good idea on paper, but is ruined by this viewfinder. The camera constantly adjusts parameters while waiting for you to take the photo, so you can fire off instantly without worrying about missing the shot. Unfortunately, you have to use the minuscule viewfinder in quickshot, and I wound up botching far more photos than I did nailing them.

So, you’re pretty trapped to using the decent flip-out swivel LCD display. Honestly, I probably would’ve preferred the static-but-larger 3-inch version on the G10, to the 2.8-inch, 461,000-dot display on the G11.

The LCD is really bright, though, and perfectly usable in direct sunlight, with a wide viewing angle to boot. But the video feed is not quite crisp enough on it to use it for manual focusing—in this mode, a zoomed in box appears in the center of the display as you spin the back dial to bring it into focus. The experience of focusing becomes a bad iPhone game.

Can we talk about the photos please?

With the G11, Canon pulled the bold maneuver of cutting megapixels—to 10, from 14 on the G10—in order to get better quality and low-light performance. It was the right move. Low-light images are definitely improved, and more detail is preserved up through ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 are definitely usable at web resolutions, which is pretty impressive for a compact camera. You should stay away from the special “low light” shooting mode, though, which cuts the size of pictures in half to try to extract every ounce of light possible—it produced uniformly bad pictures.

The G11 has a wide-angle zoom lens with the same basic specs as the G10, starting at 28mm and going up to 140mm, which is versatile enough to shoot just about anything you’d want. I’m not sure, however, if it corrects some of the problems at the wide-end with the macro mode, though, since I didn’t have a G10 to compare it with.

The runthrough of the ISO range goes a couple ways—on programmed auto, letting the camera figure out what to make of the ISO setting I picked, and then another set where I dictated shutter speed, so you can see how much you gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) as you ratchet up the ISO setting.

Like past G series cameras, you can shoot in RAW, but if you do, you’re stuck with using Canon’s software to process it for the time being. In the full sample gallery above, I’ve marked the handful shot in RAW.

In a world where phones and gadgets the size of a jumbo pack of Juicy Fruit shoot 720p, the fact that video’s limited to 640×480 resolution on such a stacked camera gets a big frowny face. But, the video the G11 produces at that resolution is generally excellent (just compare to the video-shootin’ iPod nano). That’s because it’s packed with data—the bitrate averages around 10Mbps, which is more than the Flip Mino HD, at 9Mbps for 720p video. Sure, 720p out of this would be nice, but I’d take VGA video that looks great over HD video that looks like crap.

Okay, but do I buy it?

I like this camera a lot. It’s what I’d reach for whenever I wouldn’t feel like tugging along a honkin’ DSLR, and I’d feel like I wasn’t sacrificing too much. The real question, I think, it how it stacks up against Panasonic’s Lumix LX3, which is in the same demographic—a lauded $500 point-and-shoot—and outgunned the G10 in many respects (though the G10 tried to cram 14 megapixels onto the same-sized sensor the G11 only squeezes 10 megapixels onto). The slightly cheaper S90 offers the same sensor as the G11 as well, and inside of a pocketable body—though you lose perks like the dedicated control dials and a viewfinder, as far as that’s a perk on the G11.

If you do buy the G11, you won’t regret it—you’ll be too busy taking pictures.

Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera

Solid low-light performance

Built to smash into people’s spaces and live to smash again

It’s huge

The viewfinder is basically useless

HP Pavillion dm3t and its terrible touchpad get reviewed

The dm3 series of laptops might be HP’s biggest potential seller. Hitting that 13-inch sweet spot, they are neither too small, nor too big, neither underpowered, nor overly encumbered, and — unlike the Envy 13 — they’re actually priced within reach. Laptop Magazine had a $839 configuration in for review, and were immediately impressed with the ultrathin aluminum-clad body, describing it as “one of the best looking notebooks of the year.” Opening it up, they found a “thoughtfully designed” keyboard, above-average display and speakers, and a stonking 9 hours of battery life under a WiFi-enabled web browsing test. Their gripes related to a heat issue on the bottom left side and, more significantly, an overly glossy touchpad that refused to play nice and left the reviewers feeling like they were fighting, rather than using, it. Read link shall enlighten you on the full spec and relative performance of the ULV processor inside.

Filed under: Laptops

HP Pavillion dm3t and its terrible touchpad get reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Iomega Ix2-200 NAS Review (It Does All This?) [Review]

Iomega’s Ix2-200 NAS shows that you don’t need to run Microsoft’s Windows Home Server to take care of everything a home, or even a small business, needs for its network storage. It’s just surprising that it’s this cheap.

The Price:

1TB for $270, 2TB for $370 and 4TB for $700

The Verdict:

It does a lot, and it does it pretty well.

Here’s a list of the exciting bits on the Ix2-200’s feature list:

• Automated backup and restore: Full Time Machine support for Macs as well as Retrospect, a different backup scheme, for PCs and Macs.
• Automated copy jobs, which can automatically and incrementally copy (either with Windows file sharing or rsync) files off of network shares and dump it onto its own storage, or the other way around. Perfect for backing up other network shares for double data security
• RAID1
• DLNA, iTunes Servers
• Quiet running
• SMB features like email notifications, event logs, iSCSI, automated video surveillance (provided you have a compatible camera) and USB printer support
• A load of networking support, like Apple File Sharing, Bluetooth, FTP, NFS, Rsync, SNMP and standard Windows File Sharing (CIFS)
• Torrent downloading
• Remote access

Instead of building a Windows Home Server, like so many others have done, Iomega decided to build their own system from their own technology, and came out pretty feature-rich because of it.

The setup process is slightly finicky—you install the Iomega Solutions CD and wait while it searches your network for the server. This can actually take a few hours (we thought the Mac version was malfunctioning until it completed its setup and discovery process), but once you’re up, you’re up.

You control the server with a web interface, which works with a local app to provide integration into your file system. It’s pretty simple to use, and there aren’t too many tabs or options to confuse users with.

Backup and file storage

Time Machine works as well as if you were just shoving in a USB hard drive, and there’s little difference compared to running your backups over the network as if it were a Time Capsule. Iomega tells us that they’ve learned from HP’s first Windows Home Servers, the ones who weren’t able to run a complete Time Machine restore in the event of a total drive failure, so Mac users shouldn’t need to worry.

Retrospect, another backup software, can also configure backup plans on a schedule and automatically execute them without any input from you. Just choose which drives and folders you want to back up—it even backs up your network folders—and pick your schedule. If you don’t have a Windows Home Server on your network to handle your Windows backups, this is a pretty good substitute. And of course you can use Retrospect to restore your backups to your machine, in case of data failure.

Automated copy jobs is another feature that’s especially sweet for me, since I have a lot of network storage and I always worry about what would happen if one fails. This way, the Ix2-200 can maintain up-to-date copies of whatever’s sitting on other network drives, and act as the schoolmarm for all your data.

Networking and other features

Some of the other features are pretty much evaluated on a yes/no basis in terms of whether or not they work. The fan is very quiet even when transferring a mass load of files—although the hard drive is not, so that’s kind of moot—but is virtually silent otherwise. RAID1 works, and comes set up by default. The DLNA and iTunes streaming works in their respective clients, and Xbox 360/PS3 has no problem streaming files off of the server.

BitTorrent download works, but the server gets confused if you give it a URL to download a .torrent file from, so to play it safe you should just go ahead and download the .torrent yourself and feed that instead. Download speeds are decent, and you can configure what the maximum upload/download speeds are so as to not saturate your internet connection. You should also change your default port as well, since ISPS throttle that 6881 port hard.

All the networking stuff works as expected, as do the email notifications and event logs. The rest of the higher end stuff, like video surveillance integration and iSCSI we didn’t test, so we can’t say if there are any issues with them or not. It’s more than likely that they do work, but we don’t know if there are any quirks you should watch out for.

It’s a pretty good deal

Iomega’s aiming this at both the prosumer and the SMB market, which means that for most people, it’s going to have a lot of features that they don’t need. But that doesn’t matter! The Ix2-200 is so packed with stuff that it should satisfy the needs of just about any user who’s hurting for a network storage solution. And at a starting price of only $270 for the 1TB version, it’s a cheaper alternative than Windows Home Servers, and can do just about all the same things. Plus with its user-replaceable drives and three USB ports, you can easily upgrade the storage yourself and expand your storage after the fact. [Iomega]

Great backup options including Time Machine and Retrospect

Small, quiet and fast

Feature loaded

Fairly cheap for what you get

Setup process isn’t as easy as it could be

« Older Entries