[Review] Antec KÜHLER H₂O 9200 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on February 3, 2012
Introduction
There have been many discussions on the interwebs of whether or not traditional air cooling is efficient enough and if it can provide enough performance or if water cooling can supersede it and offer things that air cooling just can’t. Noise, power draw, reliability, performance and pure price are among common categories mentioned in these discussions. The camps are still divided but the manufacturers aim at the middle and hopefully will change that. A few years ago we started...
[Review] Akasa Venom Voodoo3 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on December 11, 2011
Introduction
We got some Voodoo in the lab. No seriously, some Venom Voodoo. I think you got it now. Correct, The Akasa Venom Voodoo spooked it’s way in our labs. Let’s hope that the black magic doesn’t effect the results.
The company Akasa is well established. Akasa has development and manufacturing operations in Taiwan, China, Brazil and England to makes this an international operation. There is a wide range of products Akasa is developing and manufacturing. We will focus on...
Review: Gelid Tranquillo Rev28 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on November 7, 2011
Introduction
A sample from our next contender comes from Gelid. The company is based in Hong Kong with management in Swiss. The company is a fairly young player in the industry and was founded in 2008 by Gebhard Scherrer and VC Tran. Gelid is Gebhard Scherrer’s latest project after co-founding the well known Arctic Cooling brand. Gelid’s name established quickly and well in the industry, rather known for their case fan product line, Gelid now is also more determined to get a foothold...
[Review] GA-990FXA-UD5: More Fu2 Comments By NeuromancercloseAuthor: NeuromancerName: Rich Smith Email: rsmith@nettronic.net Site: About:See Authors Posts (27) on October 5, 2011
The Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD5 is the first AM3+ board reviewed by TechREACTION, and could not have been a better product to review. Coming from the overclock-minded Gigabyte company, the 990FX is built on the Ultra Durable platform that is well known to overclockers the world over. Bulldozer is just around the corner, and this board will bring you exactly what you need to get clocking from the get go.
The Features
The board features many of the standard AM3+ features, such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6 GBps...
[Review] Cooler Master H612PWM1 Comment By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on September 14, 2011
Introduction
Today we have an exclusive Cooler Master release product on the bench. The H612PWM is an ambitious attempt to take the cooling crown. We are very proud to be one of the first to have it to get an exclusive look at what could be the future of the air cooling market.
Looks like sheer size and the brutal force of 6 heat pipes is the magic behind the Cooler Master H612. The cooler was not intended for small cases but performance was the primary idea behind this design. The H612 feature...
[Review] eVGA Frostbite vs Arctic Silver Céramique1 Comment By miahallencloseAuthor: miahallenName: Jeremiah Allen Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com Site:http://www.ironmods.com About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role.
My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable!
Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world.
The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles.
After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei.
My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on July 20, 2011
Introduction
With the market for extreme PC cooling growing at a rapid rate over the past few years, we are seeing a much greater number of PC components and accessories geared to this end of the spectrum. This goes back to the Foxconn “Quantum Force” line, which was kicked off with a killer mainboard, the BLACKOPS with features that had never been seen before. Fast forward a few years, and now all the top manufacturers are mimicking elements from that board, and pushing forward ...
[Review] ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU1 Comment By The DukecloseAuthor: The DukeName: Drew Briggs Email: drew@techreaction.net Site:http://www.techreaction.net About: Just keeping it real for the average joe overclocker and computer user.See Authors Posts (168) on July 19, 2011
Today, we have the ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU, with a custom PCB design, that will be going onto our test bench to see how closely it performs to the marketing hype. The DirectCU line of cards from ASUS are catered to the overclockers out there in the market. The DirectCU has precision mounting, putting the copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU for better cooling performance. ASUS has also implemented their SAP, Super Alloy Performance technology, which uses high quality capacitors, MOSFETs...
[Review] Sapphire Radeon HD6770 Vapor-X3 Comments By ArchercloseAuthor: ArcherName: Kevin Marlin Email: kevinsmarlin@embarqmail.com Site:http://www.techreaction.net About:See Authors Posts (18) on July 15, 2011
Sapphire Technology has been around for ten years and has learned how to get things done the right way. Being one of the, if not the, largest supplier of AMD/ATi video cards Sapphire is a leader in design, innovation and application of new processes. Through what many consider a conservative approach to innovation; Sapphire has maintained a strong market share in an ever growing field of competitors. Is this HD6770 is one of the reasons why:
Though the packaged is a rather plain, no frills, box;...
Review: Xigmatek GAIA SD12836 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on July 7, 2011
Introduction
Last but not least in our Xigmatek review lineup is the Xigmatek GAIA SD1283. We have been talking about the company in previous reviews already and won’t go into much detail again. Xigmatek has impressed consumers with a good quality product line up and performance that can be shown off, remaining at an affordable price level. Xigmatek’s “ICE” philosophy is well-illustrated in the company and its products.
“ICE” = Impressive / Creative / Essentia...
[Blog] FFF&FM Rev2.0 – water cooling built for benching!10 Comments By miahallencloseAuthor: miahallenName: Jeremiah Allen Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com Site:http://www.ironmods.com About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role.
My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable!
Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world.
The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles.
After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei.
My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on May 28, 2011
The original recipe
A couple years ago, I put together a simple water cooling system that I dubbed FFF&FM.
Form
Follows
Function
and
Fully
Modular
And the name really tells you everything you need to know. It was not a pretty system, nor did it need to be….but it did work very well for cooling my HW while pretesting for more serious benching session with liquid nitrogen. Here is a link to the original forum post where I detailed the build.
FFF&FM Rev1.0 parts
The original syste...
[Review] Noctua NH-C14 – Built To Perform2 Comments By GSG-9closeAuthor: GSG-9Name: Levi Tomes Email: gsg-9@mediocrocy.com Site:http://StypticDesign.com About:See Authors Posts (13) on May 14, 2011
Introduction:
Our friends at Noctua recently sent us their latest and greatest heatsink for review, the NH-C14. The NH-C14 is a top-flow heatsink of similar design to the NH-D14, which is a cross-blowing heatsink.
The Noctua NH-C14:
The NH-C14
The NH-C14 supports the following processor sockets:
Intel:
LGA1366
LGA1156
LGA1155
LGA775
AMD:
AM2
AM2+
AM3
Next: Specifications and Dimensions
[Review] Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2133 (3×2GB) – DDR3 with Thermal Monitoring3 Comments By miahallencloseAuthor: miahallenName: Jeremiah Allen Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com Site:http://www.ironmods.com About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role.
My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable!
Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world.
The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles.
After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei.
My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on April 26, 2011
Introduction:
The performance memory market has continued to push the performance envelope over the last few generations of hardware, each new development ushering in more speed and better performance. But beyond speed, memory has not yielded much material to the marketing departments. We all know that the marketing departments are tasked with getting products on the market and into your hands. But other than performance, the only marketable aspects in the segment are fancy heat spreaders, ...
[Review] ASUS HD 6950 2GB – Voltage Tweak3 Comments By The DukecloseAuthor: The DukeName: Drew Briggs Email: drew@techreaction.net Site:http://www.techreaction.net About: Just keeping it real for the average joe overclocker and computer user.See Authors Posts (168) on April 4, 2011
ASUS has sent us their version of the Radeon HD 6950 to run through the paces today. The ASUS HD 6950 2GB is factory overclocked right out of the box by 10MHz, which really is not anything to write home about, but it’s there nonetheless. ASUS does include their voltage tweak software to help gain a better overclock, which we aim to attempt as we have in all of our reviews. The ASUS HD 6950 is also fitted with a non-reference, full aluminum cover to help dissipate heat better. The HD 6950 c...
[Review] SunbeamTech Twister 1207 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on March 10, 2011
Introduction:
We are very excited to have the latest product from SunbeamTech in the house. SunbeamTech has been in business since 2000 and has been just shy of being an enthusiast household name. The name really started sinking in when SunbeamTech spun off with the Tuniq line of CPU coolers. The Tuniq line quickly took the CPU cooling crown and held it for quite some time. SunbeamTech recently released the Twister 120 which is the cooler we will be reviewing today. The Twister 120 is SunbeamTec...
[Review] Noctua NH-U12P SE20 Comments By BoTcloseAuthor: BoTName: Edward Reese Email: bot@codisha.com Site:http://www.codisha.com About:See Authors Posts (14) on January 20, 2011
Introduction:
Continuing with Noctua’s line-up, we follow up with the Noctua NH-U12P SE2.
The Noctua NH-U12P SE2 still represents the premium model of the Noctua CPU cooler line-up. The Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU was considered a high-end CPU cooler when it was first released almost 3 years ago. It has since been overtaken by the Noctua NH-D14, however Noctua invested a good amount of R&D into the design of the thermal characteristics and cooling technologies used in the Noctua NH-U12P SE...
[Review] ASUS Radeon HD 6970 2GB10 Comments By The DukecloseAuthor: The DukeName: Drew Briggs Email: drew@techreaction.net Site:http://www.techreaction.net About: Just keeping it real for the average joe overclocker and computer user.See Authors Posts (168) on January 18, 2011
The codename “Cayman” represents the 6900 series of cards from AMD. The refined GPU boasts of more performance per mm², new and improved image quality features, enhanced multimedia acceleration and next-generation display technology with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2. It should also be pointed out that with the new 6 series launch, there is a new naming strategy from AMD. The 6900 series are now considered the high-performance cards and the 6800 series have now taken on the roll of being t...
[Review] Zalman CNPS8000A – A Simple Top-Down Cooler4 Comments By miahallencloseAuthor: miahallenName: Jeremiah Allen Email: miahallen.ironmods@gmail.com Site:http://www.ironmods.com About: Well, I was playing with computers ever since my Dad got a Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old (1986), when I was 10 (1990) he bought a custom build 486DX33, and I was in love. Mostly back then I was just a kid playing games, but my fascination with computers had a start. Because I had no money of my own, I was stuck playing with my Dad's computers, and really couldn't "play" too much. So in 1998, the year I graduated, I spent some of my college savings to by a "computer for school", haha. It had two Voodoo2 12MB 3D accelerators in it, so you can imagine how much school work was done on it ;-) It had an AMD K6-233 that I had a really mild OC on, but my custom computer builder friend Aaron had done all the work. So I can't really take the credit there. My fascination with graphics just kept growing and growing over the years, and I was constantly in a struggle to keep my games looking as sharp and smooth as possible. OCing played a big role.
My whole world was rocked in 2004 when I was deployed to Iraq as a US Army soldier. The whole year I was there I had a cheap IBM Thinkpad R40 with a 2GHz Celeron, 1GB DDR-333 RAM, a 60GB 4200RPM HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility graphics (same technology as a 7000 series with only 16MB of memory). It started out rough as I was really into Command and Conquer Generals at the time, and the machine would only play the C&C slide show LOL. So, I downloaded PowerStrip, and OC'ed the GPU by 40%...amazingly, the game was playable!
Things changed dramatically in 2007 when I met a guy named Matt while I was stationed in Japan. He introduced me to www.ocforums.com, and the "Benchmarking Team" there. I had not had much interest in benchmarking previously, I always though of myself as more practical. But, I thought I'd play along and I joined the team. My first introduction to an actual competition was was is "The Raptor Pit", "Forum Warz 2008" in the spring of 2008. I was running a Q6600 and an 8800GTX. With air cooling I was able to bench my Q6600 at over 4GHz, and tore up the competition in my class. Overall OCF won the Forum War in 2007, Winter and Summer of 2008, and 2009...that means five in a row. I was not part of the first one in 2007, but the four since then, I have participated in. After winning the 2008 Winter and Summer Warz, Tom's Hardware Guide announced they were looking for nominations for individuals to compete in their first ever international overclocking competition, called "Overdrive". I was nominated, and chosen to compete in the North American semi-finals in Los Angeles in November 2008. I was placed on "Team IRONMODS" as they only had two guys, yet three man teams were allowed. We won the semi-finals in LA, and our prize was a trip to Paris the following month, to compete with the best in the world.
The following month, Ton, Jake, and myself flew to Paris as "Team USA" to face off against the best from Taiwan, France, Germany, and Italy. It was a very intense competition, but after two heated days of battle (16 hours of benching), we emerged the victors. Amidst our celebration, Ton and Jake officially invited me to join "Team IRONMODS" on a permanent basis, and I graciously accepted. Ton, aka "TiTON", is a world renown case moder, and is also very well known for some of the AMD overclocking he has done. Jake, aka "CPT.Planet", is a genius overclocker, and a really fun guy. The team has a great synergy when working together, we really have complementary styles.
After winning the world championship in December 2008 things were a bit quite for a couple months, then in the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to the 2nd annual Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship "GOOC". I would compete in the North American semi-final in LA, where the winner would win a ticket to the world championship in Taipei Taiwan during CES in June 2009. The competition was tough with 14 of the best from North America gathering for a 1 on 1 competition of OCing. But once again, I completed the competition well, and rose above the others. I won 1st place and the trip to the world finals in Taipei.
My luck ran dry in Taipei where I started off with a bad motherboard, and went through 5 more during the course of the competition due to various reasons. Despite the poor finish in Taipei, I have high hopes to redeem myself next year.See Authors Posts (24) on January 14, 2011
Today we have a quick look at a top-down cooler from Zalman, a 4 heatpipe design with an integrated fan known as the CNPS8000A. While I will hold to our HSF testing methodology as best I can, I will only be testing with the integrated fan, and with the CPU at 2.8GHz. This cooler is not designed for serious overclocking, and fell flat on it’s face when presented with our overclocked settings. Not that I expected anything different from this cooler, it’s just not designed with a ...
AMD @ CES: Zacate…it’s so tiny!2 Comments By EnJoYcloseAuthor: EnJoYName: Alex Joy Email: alex@techreaction.net Site:http://www.techreaction.net About:See Authors Posts (53) on January 11, 2011
Rounding out our coverage of CES 2011, Drew and I stopped by AMD’s meeting rooms at the Las Vegas Convention Center. We had a meeting setup with AMD’s John Taylor to discuss Fusion, as well as the upcoming processor road maps. Some interesting discussion ensued…
Girl: "It's so tiny!" *giggles*
Check out that image above (Don’t laugh!). That is a Zacate APU, featuring 2x Bobcat cores and the equivalent of a Radeon HD5450 DX11 graphics processing unit, wi...
MSI @ CES: P67 Big Bang Marshall and new AMD board?3 Comments By EnJoYcloseAuthor: EnJoYName: Alex Joy Email: alex@techreaction.net Site:http://www.techreaction.net About:See Authors Posts (53) on January 9, 2011
While we attempt to finish up our coverage of CES 2011, we paid a visit to our friends at MSI to discuss some of their new and upcoming products. MSI has been hard of work this past year, investing heavily into the overall quality and features of their motherboards. Check out the gallery below for shots of some of their products. We’ll go into greater details on some of the most interesting products further down.
#gallery-2 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-2 .gallery-item ...
Introduction
There have been many discussions on the interwebs of whether or not traditional air cooling is efficient enough and if it can provide enough performance or if water cooling can supersede it and offer things that air cooling just can’t. Noise, power draw, reliability, performance and pure price are among common categories mentioned in these discussions. The camps are still divided but the manufacturers aim at the middle and hopefully will change that. A few years ago we started... 
Introduction
We got some Voodoo in the lab. No seriously, some Venom Voodoo. I think you got it now. Correct, The Akasa Venom Voodoo spooked it’s way in our labs. Let’s hope that the black magic doesn’t effect the results.
The company Akasa is well established. Akasa has development and manufacturing operations in Taiwan, China, Brazil and England to makes this an international operation. There is a wide range of products Akasa is developing and manufacturing. We will focus on... 
Introduction
A sample from our next contender comes from Gelid. The company is based in Hong Kong with management in Swiss. The company is a fairly young player in the industry and was founded in 2008 by Gebhard Scherrer and VC Tran. Gelid is Gebhard Scherrer’s latest project after co-founding the well known Arctic Cooling brand. Gelid’s name established quickly and well in the industry, rather known for their case fan product line, Gelid now is also more determined to get a foothold... 
The Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD5 is the first AM3+ board reviewed by TechREACTION, and could not have been a better product to review. Coming from the overclock-minded Gigabyte company, the 990FX is built on the Ultra Durable platform that is well known to overclockers the world over. Bulldozer is just around the corner, and this board will bring you exactly what you need to get clocking from the get go.
The Features
The board features many of the standard AM3+ features, such as USB 3.0 and SATA 6 GBps... 
Introduction
Today we have an exclusive Cooler Master release product on the bench. The H612PWM is an ambitious attempt to take the cooling crown. We are very proud to be one of the first to have it to get an exclusive look at what could be the future of the air cooling market.
Looks like sheer size and the brutal force of 6 heat pipes is the magic behind the Cooler Master H612. The cooler was not intended for small cases but performance was the primary idea behind this design. The H612 feature... 
Introduction
With the market for extreme PC cooling growing at a rapid rate over the past few years, we are seeing a much greater number of PC components and accessories geared to this end of the spectrum. This goes back to the Foxconn “Quantum Force” line, which was kicked off with a killer mainboard, the BLACKOPS with features that had never been seen before. Fast forward a few years, and now all the top manufacturers are mimicking elements from that board, and pushing forward ... 
Today, we have the ASUS HD 6870 DirectCU, with a custom PCB design, that will be going onto our test bench to see how closely it performs to the marketing hype. The DirectCU line of cards from ASUS are catered to the overclockers out there in the market. The DirectCU has precision mounting, putting the copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU for better cooling performance. ASUS has also implemented their SAP, Super Alloy Performance technology, which uses high quality capacitors, MOSFETs... 
Sapphire Technology has been around for ten years and has learned how to get things done the right way. Being one of the, if not the, largest supplier of AMD/ATi video cards Sapphire is a leader in design, innovation and application of new processes. Through what many consider a conservative approach to innovation; Sapphire has maintained a strong market share in an ever growing field of competitors. Is this HD6770 is one of the reasons why:
Though the packaged is a rather plain, no frills, box;... 
Introduction
Last but not least in our Xigmatek review lineup is the Xigmatek GAIA SD1283. We have been talking about the company in previous reviews already and won’t go into much detail again. Xigmatek has impressed consumers with a good quality product line up and performance that can be shown off, remaining at an affordable price level. Xigmatek’s “ICE” philosophy is well-illustrated in the company and its products.
“ICE” = Impressive / Creative / Essentia... 
The original recipe
A couple years ago, I put together a simple water cooling system that I dubbed FFF&FM.
Form
Follows
Function
and
Fully
Modular
And the name really tells you everything you need to know. It was not a pretty system, nor did it need to be….but it did work very well for cooling my HW while pretesting for more serious benching session with liquid nitrogen. Here is a link to the original forum post where I detailed the build.
FFF&FM Rev1.0 parts
The original syste... 
Introduction:
Our friends at Noctua recently sent us their latest and greatest heatsink for review, the NH-C14. The NH-C14 is a top-flow heatsink of similar design to the NH-D14, which is a cross-blowing heatsink.
The Noctua NH-C14:
The NH-C14
The NH-C14 supports the following processor sockets:
Intel:
LGA1366
LGA1156
LGA1155
LGA775
AMD:
AM2
AM2+
AM3
Next: Specifications and Dimensions
Introduction:
The performance memory market has continued to push the performance envelope over the last few generations of hardware, each new development ushering in more speed and better performance. But beyond speed, memory has not yielded much material to the marketing departments. We all know that the marketing departments are tasked with getting products on the market and into your hands. But other than performance, the only marketable aspects in the segment are fancy heat spreaders, ... 
ASUS has sent us their version of the Radeon HD 6950 to run through the paces today. The ASUS HD 6950 2GB is factory overclocked right out of the box by 10MHz, which really is not anything to write home about, but it’s there nonetheless. ASUS does include their voltage tweak software to help gain a better overclock, which we aim to attempt as we have in all of our reviews. The ASUS HD 6950 is also fitted with a non-reference, full aluminum cover to help dissipate heat better. The HD 6950 c... 
Introduction:
We are very excited to have the latest product from SunbeamTech in the house. SunbeamTech has been in business since 2000 and has been just shy of being an enthusiast household name. The name really started sinking in when SunbeamTech spun off with the Tuniq line of CPU coolers. The Tuniq line quickly took the CPU cooling crown and held it for quite some time. SunbeamTech recently released the Twister 120 which is the cooler we will be reviewing today. The Twister 120 is SunbeamTec... 
Introduction:
Continuing with Noctua’s line-up, we follow up with the Noctua NH-U12P SE2.
The Noctua NH-U12P SE2 still represents the premium model of the Noctua CPU cooler line-up. The Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU was considered a high-end CPU cooler when it was first released almost 3 years ago. It has since been overtaken by the Noctua NH-D14, however Noctua invested a good amount of R&D into the design of the thermal characteristics and cooling technologies used in the Noctua NH-U12P SE... 
The codename “Cayman” represents the 6900 series of cards from AMD. The refined GPU boasts of more performance per mm², new and improved image quality features, enhanced multimedia acceleration and next-generation display technology with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2. It should also be pointed out that with the new 6 series launch, there is a new naming strategy from AMD. The 6900 series are now considered the high-performance cards and the 6800 series have now taken on the roll of being t... 
Today we have a quick look at a top-down cooler from Zalman, a 4 heatpipe design with an integrated fan known as the CNPS8000A. While I will hold to our HSF testing methodology as best I can, I will only be testing with the integrated fan, and with the CPU at 2.8GHz. This cooler is not designed for serious overclocking, and fell flat on it’s face when presented with our overclocked settings. Not that I expected anything different from this cooler, it’s just not designed with a ... 
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