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[Blog] Gaming in Tight Spaces…..mini-ITX (featuring Gigabyte, Silverstone, and Prolimatech) 8 Comments By miahallen on August 13, 2010 History of mini-ITX I was sitting in my office, browsing tech news online almost a decade ago when I first saw the mini-ITX form factor. My mind immediately started fantasizing about the possibilities such a small system would afford. Thoughts of internet terminals built into kitchen cupboards, or car PCs entertained my imagination for years. As the early VIA based systems got into reviewers’ hands and performance results started hitting the press, like many others, I was left wanting. ...
[Blog] College-Kid’s-Budget Gaming PC Building – Things to Avoid and Things to Adore Like Your First Pony 9 Comments By TheDramaLlama on June 30, 2010 Hello, everyone! My name is Alvin (a.k.a. TheDramaLlama) and I’d like to poke fun at all the old… er, say hi to everyone here at TechREACTION. For my first blog, I’m going to do a rough overview on budget PC building. No, not your run-of-the-mill budget PC building, I’m writing about college-kid’s-budget gaming PC building, since college kids like me belong to a fantastic little niche, filled with people in situations I like to describe as, “Mommy, I have no...
Rewriting the Book on CPU HSF Testing 9 Comments By Archer on June 21, 2010 To test a heat sink and fan assembly to the limit, a computer is not the best option. With some of the many variables, which can be attributed to the computer alone and completely outside the control of the tester, software and hardware results can be skewed to the point of being outright wrong. Things that can be controlled are often ignored and sometimes forgotten. Factors contributing to unreliable test results that can be controlled by the tester: Air temperature and humidity: When doing a ...
[Guide] Converting your VHS collection to digital and a little more! 0 Comments By Archer on May 26, 2010 A lot of people have an old VHS collection gathering dust, or content that was purchased on their gaming device that must be kept on that device. What does it really take to get this content on to a DVD? Not much. Using a hardware video trans-coder, such as the ADS DVD-ExpressDX2 (does not work with Vista or later without software issues), a DVD+/-RW Drive and an external HDD for portability, converting a video collection as fast as you can play them (even direct to DivX) is pretty simple. So wh...
[Guide] Air Cooling 101 – Fans 0 Comments By mav2000 on May 12, 2010 Fans Welcome to the next edition of our Air Cooling 101 series of guides. In case you missed part 1 on CPU cooling, you can find it here. We move on to a topic in which there are consistently a lot of discussions around the net. When we buy fans, we look at three main criteria: 1. CFM – Cubic Feet per Minute, or in simpler words, the amount of air that the fan can push/pull in a minute. 2. Static Pressure – The force with which the fan generates this airflow. 3. dBA – This is...
[Guide] Air Cooling 101 – CPU Cooling 1 Comment By mav2000 on May 7, 2010 Hello and welcome to the first article in my series on Air Cooling. Over the last year or so, I have reviewed a number of air coolers and also a number of different fans and cooling setups. I thought that sharing my experiences would be useful to a lot of people and this is the reasoning behind the writing of this series. This series will cover a number of topics and to start with we will take a look at CPU cooling, which is by far the most important part of our computers. So, why do we need to...
[Review] Seven Way AM3 Cooler Shootout – Winner Takes All 11 Comments By mav2000 on April 19, 2010 Introduction Hello and welcome back to the last installment of the AM3 round up for this half of the year. Over the last year, we have done a number of cooler reviews on the AM3 platform and this review will look to add to these results. But before we begin, we would like to thank Noctua and Thermalright for helping us to put this extensive shootout together. Over the last two years, there have been a number of changes in the rankings of the top air coolers. The TRUE was at the top for a long ti...
[Blog] Calculating Monitor Height and Width from Diagonal Size 8 Comments By Oj101 on April 5, 2010 Firstly, this isn’t your typical blog. There are no pictures included as all of the following is pure math. Leave a comment if you don’t understand and I’ll see if I can draw the formulae and scan them sometime. Alright, so you want to buy a new 30″ monitor but you’d like to know the exact height and width of the panel to get a feel for the viewable are on your desk before you buy it. How do you do it? Simple. You need the following: ————R...
Overclock Your Holodeck | X86 Voyages To Your Living Room 1 Comment By 64NOMIS on March 25, 2010 X86 has one more chance in the race toward the living room and it starts now. Behold, the only platform with the roadmap to bring the vision of virtual reality into the present. Or transform the television into an entertainment platform. The upcoming AMD Phenom II X6 processor and its progeny may well find its way into your living room - through an inevitable cascade in living room applications. I am a biased insider, so take caution as you consume what lies below. The High End | Virtual...
[Blog] Anti-Virus for Your PC at No Cost 6 Comments By cralor on March 5, 2010 Hello. This is my first Blog post! I hope to continue to write once in a while. NOTE: This is just Anti-Virus software. If you are looking for Anti-Spyware and Anti-Malware, two free solutions I recommend are SUPERAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes. Check them out! Today I will be looking at ways to help protect your computer without spending money for all different types of software. Currently, there are many free alternative software choices that do almost as good (in some cases as good) as ones t...
Guide: Overclocking a fan 0 Comments By OverShocked on February 26, 2010 How to overclock a fan. What are we doing? There are 2 different mods we can do, both of them will increase the voltage going to fan resulting in a higher fan speed. Fans are meant to run at 12v. We are going to run these fans at 17v and 24v. Are their any risks? Of course there are risks, its called overclocking for a reason. It will not be that risky though because we are not dealing with enough electricity that will cause harm to the body. Always proceed with caution though. The main ri...
A Guide Regarding Old Graphics Cards Throttling & More 0 Comments By Oj101 on February 12, 2010 So you’re sitting a few second away from the end of your world record run of 3DMark2001 and the graphics card isn’t even chilled – you’re so hardcore you’re letting the poor GeForce 4 Ti4400 sweat it out with air cooling. Everything’s going smoothly until halfway through Nature when suddenly your framerate drops through the floor. Yip, you’ve hit thermal throttling. First off, lets get the nitty-gritties out of the way. As I’m sure you’d have...
[VID] Chew* Demonstrates Black Edition Profiles w/ MSI GD70 Mobo 3 Comments By EnJoY on January 21, 2010 Chew* has posted a quick how-to guide on the new OCZ Cas8 Black Edition memory modules using the MSI GD70 790FX motherboard for AMD. In the guide, he shows how fast and easy it is to implement the BE profiles, despite what some users on various forums are suggesting. Check out the video below, and be sure to thank Chew* for his time in making it.
E8400 and Qx9650 Battle Windows 7, Windows XP, and Eachother : Who or What Will Reign Supreme? Part 2 2 Comments By The Duke on December 31, 2009 What will we cover in this installment of our adventure into figuring out all this ‘he said, she said’ mumbo jumbo? I will be exploring the STOCK e8400 and how it handles windows XP and windows 7. Do you lose a lot of performance by upgrading? We will find out later on. Is there a huge difference in anything the 2 operating systems do or is everything negligible? Hopefully we will find out later on. This segment could prove very informative for the average computer user who does no...
Piecemeal Upgrades Pt 4 Data Protection 0 Comments By Neuromancer on December 21, 2009 The Piecemeal Upgrade pt4 Data Protection: Redundancy, backups, offline and online storage. With limited funds in a single PC household it is important to have a PC that is never down for too long. One of the key problems associated with piecemeal upgrades however is the need to occasionally reinstall the operating system. This can be a nightmare trying to back up documents, photos, settings, applications as well as operating system tweaks one may prefer. Learning how to properly maintain y...
Basic Computer Building Guide for ‘Noobs’ 0 Comments By The Duke on December 21, 2009 Guide to building a complete system: (specs will vary) First off, System Specs: Intel E8400 3GHz (with Thermalright extreme 120 black heatsink) ASUS Maximus 2 P45 motherboard G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK PC Power and Cooling 750 quad XFX 8800GT (with Accelero S1 Rev2 cooling) 2×2 Western Digital Raptors in Raid0 1 Seagate 250GB slave Super writemaster samsung DVD -r Silverstone TJ-09 black case To start everything off I think it is somewha...

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