[Review] GELID Icy Vision Rev 2 GPU Cooler5 Comments By GSG-9closeAuthor: GSG-9Name: Levi Tomes Email: gsg-9@mediocrocy.com Site:http://StypticDesign.com About:See Authors Posts (13) on October 12, 2011
Recently, GELID Solutions sent over some of there flagship cooling products. First up, is the Icy Vision Revision 2 GPU cooler.
Some words from GELID themselves:
The “Rev. 2 ICY VISION” cooler contains 5 power heatpipes in a unique heatpipe constellation. The heatpipes are interlaced into 85 optimized high-quality Aluminium fins. Together with a flat stack fin soldered Copper base, they enable the most efficient heat transmission and dissipation from GPU core in its class. Besides the heatsi...
[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] EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Superclocked Edition4 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 (169) on March 24, 2011
EVGA has supplied us with their take on the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, the EVGA Superclocked Edition. The EVGA SC edition is the second-lowest-clocked card of their factory overclocked cards. The first is the FPB edition, then the SC, followed by the SSC and the FTW editions. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti comes overclocked by about 75MHz on the core and 50MHz on the memory. Judging from previous overclocking results on past cards, this should still leave plenty of headroom to go higher. We will find out just h...
[Review] Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 – King of the Hill18 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 (169) on March 24, 2011
The GeForce GTX 590 is the new flagship for Nvidia that is finally hitting the marketplace after a long awaited release date. Based on the GF110 graphics processor, the GTX 580 was built to be the world’s fastest DirectX 11 GPU. For the elite gamers who are not satisfied with the performance of just one GTX 580, Nvidia created the GTX 590; combining the power of two GF110 GPU’s on a single graphics card to deliver the ultimate gaming experience. Nvidia has also equipped the GTX 590 w...
[Review] ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU TOP3 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 (169) on March 18, 2011
Introduction:
With the new release of the GTX 550 Ti upon us, we have the ASUS factory overclocked GTX550 Ti DirectCU TOP for review today. The 550 Ti is not intended to a be top contender in the market, but rather a lower-end card with great upgrading potential via overclocking and SLI. With the ASUS 550 Ti coming with the DirectCU cooling solution, we anticipate seeing some very low temperatures. The ASUS GTX 550 also comes with SAP (Super Alloy Power) design which is said to deliver 15% perf...
[Review] Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti2 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 (169) on March 15, 2011
The Sniper is on the prowl again as Nvidia reloads their 400-series lineup. The new GTX 550 Ti option for gamers is aimed at people who want more performance than the GTS 450, while maintaining a price point below the 460 (~$150). Equipped with faster clocks and a wider 192-bit memory interface, the GTX 550 Ti should provide you with about 28% faster performance on average, and 20% more performance/watt. Will the new Sniper lay waste to the older, slower 450 sniper? Continue on…
The GeFo...
[Review] Zotac GTX 560 Ti4 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 (169) on March 3, 2011
Today we look at Zotac’s take on the “Hunter” – the GTX 560 Ti. Running at stock speeds (822/1000) this is Zotac’s entry level GTX 560 Ti card. They have three GTX 560 Ti cards on the market, the basic version which we have for review today, as well as the factory overclocked AMP! and OC editions. Using the GF114 silicon, we expect to see a noticeable improvement in power consumption, temperatures and performance. Let’s get down to business and toss the Zotac ...
[Driver Comparison] Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 – 266.58, 263.09, 262.99 Compared10 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 (169) on February 7, 2011
Today we are going to take a look at the “top dog” in the marketplace, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, along with the three latest drivers, the 266.58 WHQL, 263.09 WHQL, and 262.99 WHQL. Our goal is to see what performance difference and improvements are available in each driver set, if any. We hope that by the end of this we will have provided you with enough information to choose the best driver available. We will be testing the majority of games/programs listed in the 266.58 release n...
[Review] Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti – GF114 is mean!8 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 (169) on January 25, 2011
The hunter has been released, again, but most people will come to know it as the GTX 560 Ti. The Ti on the end may bring back memories to many of the old-school gamers. Around 2002, Nvidia came out with the Ti line. First with the GeForce 3 series and later with the GeForce 4, however, it disappeared shortly thereafter. But now it is back with a vengeance on the GTX 560 line of cards. Of course, this premium line of cards will go for a little more money, but hopefully the performance makes i...
[Review] ASUS Maximus IV Extreme – Sandy Bridge VS The World (Part 2/2)14 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
Introduction – Part 1 Recap:
On January 2nd, NDA was lifted for the new “Sandy Bridge” architecture from Intel. TechREACTION was ready with a hands-on look at the new Republic of Gamers motherboard from Asus, the Maximus IV Extreme. With minimal time for testing, we were only able to bring you a portion of the review in Part 1, but we promised a follow up article to answer the remaining questions about the Maximus IV Extreme, and real world use with Sandy Bridge. Well, to...
[Review] EVGA GeForce GTX 570 SuperClocked4 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 (169) on December 29, 2010
EVGA has sent us their first factory overclocked GTX 570 card to hit the market. The SuperClocked edition of the GTX 570 will be followed by two more factory overclocked editions, the SSC and FTW. The latter two have not yet reached the marketplace, so until then, the EVGA GTX 570 SC will have to quench our thirst for a powerful GTX 570 graphics card. The GTX 570 is supposed to bring improvements in power consumption and temperatures using the new GF110 architecture. We will be sure to test ...
[Review] MSI N480GTX Lightning1 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 (169) on December 24, 2010
Another addition to the MSI Lightning line is the GTX 480, which we will be reviewing today. MSI has slightly overclocked the GTX 480 Lightning by 50 Mhz on the core and 75 Mhz on the memory. This is also not a reference designed card from MSI. They have installed improved voltage controller circuitry and to help cool it all off they have tossed on their custom Twin Frozr III dual fan cooling solution. They have also added dual BIOS, voltage measuring points, and the ability to change three volt...
[Review] ASUS GeForce GTX 580 Voltage Tweak9 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 (169) on November 30, 2010
Earlier this month, NVIDIA released their new powerhouse card, the GeForce GTX 580. ASUS has sent us their GTX 580 to put through our strenuous suite of testing. The reference design used by ASUS was somewhat surprising as they will typically use their own custom PCB. The GTX 580 is supposed to bring improvements in power consumption and temperatures using the new GF110 architecture. We will be sure to test to see just how these improvements add up in the real world. Read on…
Packag...
[Blog] Corsair Graphite Series™ 600T – all internal dual loop9 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 November 28, 2010
One of my co-workers is a hardcore gamer and power user. Since we’ve met, he’s become more and more interested in the hardware aspect of computing, and recently asked me to help build him a new system.
He previously had a Phenom II X4 940 based system with 4GB of memory and dual GTX 260 graphics cards. Everything was run at stock speeds as he preferred to spend his time gaming as opposed to tweaking. Although his system was no slouch, as any hardcore gamer knows; “the fas...
[Review] EVGA GTX 460 FTW Edition4 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 (169) on October 28, 2010
With the success of the GTX 460 release, Nvidia is looking to continue providing top quality products with their new line of 4XX series GPU’s. The EVGA GTX 460 we have today is made with a new Fermi-based architecture, GF104, which primarily boasts of lower power consumption and lower temperatures. We will be diving in to evaluate how the GF104 stacks up to the older GF100 in order to see if the improvements are noticeable. Also, we will be putting the EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW Edition through th...
[Review] EVGA GeForce GTS 450 FTW Edition3 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 (169) on September 13, 2010
With the new release of the GeForce GTS 450, Nvidia has targeted a specific segment of the market with a suggested MSRP starting at $129, which makes this a very budget-minded card. They went after, or as they say “laser targeted”, the gamers who don’t play everything on max settings with super high resolutions. Instead, their focus was on the people who play with resolutions of 1280×1024 through 1680×1050 on monitors of 17″-22″. The GTS 450 is the repla...
[Review] EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SuperClocked 1024MB EE3 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 (169) on August 16, 2010
With the success of the GTX480 release, Nvidia is looking to continue to provide top quality products with their new line of 4XX series GPU’s. When we reviewed the GTX480 a couple of weeks ago, it was built on the older Fermi architecture, GF100. The GTX460 we have today is made with a new Fermi-based architecture, GF104. The GF104 primarily boasts lower power consumption and lower temperatures. We will be diving in to see how the GF104 stacks up to the older GF100 in order to see if the...
[Blog] Palit GTX460 Launching in the Philippines0 Comments By bartman1973closeAuthor: bartman1973Name: Ronaldo M. Bejarin Email: rmbejarin@yahoo.com Site: About:See Authors Posts (1) on August 6, 2010
Palit Microsystems, one of the more popular Graphics Cards manufacturer, launched their latest GTX460 in the Philippines last July 27 with the help of PCtrends, the official local distributor, Nvidia Singapore and Tipid PC, an established PC website in the Philippines. It was held at the Oasis Pavilion, New Manila Quezon City, to which around 250 PC enthusiasts got an exclusive invitation from the owner of TipidPC.
Early birds were greeted by a photo opportunity with girls from Nvidia. Some enj...
The ‘He Said, She Said’ Shootout: GTX480 vs. HD587012 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 (169) on July 18, 2010
After seeing plenty of topics in various tech forums regarding the decision between the GTX480 or the HD5870, we figured it was time to chime in on the debate. With support from ASUS allowing us to review these two cards, the ENGTX480 and EAH5870, we have all of the information we need for this stand alone head-to-head. We hope that after seeing the comparisons we can help put to rest some of the debates and provide a clear cut answer to “which is the best for my money?”.
The Break...
Recently, GELID Solutions sent over some of there flagship cooling products. First up, is the Icy Vision Revision 2 GPU cooler.
Some words from GELID themselves:
The “Rev. 2 ICY VISION” cooler contains 5 power heatpipes in a unique heatpipe constellation. The heatpipes are interlaced into 85 optimized high-quality Aluminium fins. Together with a flat stack fin soldered Copper base, they enable the most efficient heat transmission and dissipation from GPU core in its class. Besides the heatsi... 
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... 
EVGA has supplied us with their take on the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, the EVGA Superclocked Edition. The EVGA SC edition is the second-lowest-clocked card of their factory overclocked cards. The first is the FPB edition, then the SC, followed by the SSC and the FTW editions. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti comes overclocked by about 75MHz on the core and 50MHz on the memory. Judging from previous overclocking results on past cards, this should still leave plenty of headroom to go higher. We will find out just h... 
The GeForce GTX 590 is the new flagship for Nvidia that is finally hitting the marketplace after a long awaited release date. Based on the GF110 graphics processor, the GTX 580 was built to be the world’s fastest DirectX 11 GPU. For the elite gamers who are not satisfied with the performance of just one GTX 580, Nvidia created the GTX 590; combining the power of two GF110 GPU’s on a single graphics card to deliver the ultimate gaming experience. Nvidia has also equipped the GTX 590 w... 
Introduction:
With the new release of the GTX 550 Ti upon us, we have the ASUS factory overclocked GTX550 Ti DirectCU TOP for review today. The 550 Ti is not intended to a be top contender in the market, but rather a lower-end card with great upgrading potential via overclocking and SLI. With the ASUS 550 Ti coming with the DirectCU cooling solution, we anticipate seeing some very low temperatures. The ASUS GTX 550 also comes with SAP (Super Alloy Power) design which is said to deliver 15% perf... 
The Sniper is on the prowl again as Nvidia reloads their 400-series lineup. The new GTX 550 Ti option for gamers is aimed at people who want more performance than the GTS 450, while maintaining a price point below the 460 (~$150). Equipped with faster clocks and a wider 192-bit memory interface, the GTX 550 Ti should provide you with about 28% faster performance on average, and 20% more performance/watt. Will the new Sniper lay waste to the older, slower 450 sniper? Continue on…
The GeFo... 
Today we look at Zotac’s take on the “Hunter” – the GTX 560 Ti. Running at stock speeds (822/1000) this is Zotac’s entry level GTX 560 Ti card. They have three GTX 560 Ti cards on the market, the basic version which we have for review today, as well as the factory overclocked AMP! and OC editions. Using the GF114 silicon, we expect to see a noticeable improvement in power consumption, temperatures and performance. Let’s get down to business and toss the Zotac ... 
Today we are going to take a look at the “top dog” in the marketplace, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, along with the three latest drivers, the 266.58 WHQL, 263.09 WHQL, and 262.99 WHQL. Our goal is to see what performance difference and improvements are available in each driver set, if any. We hope that by the end of this we will have provided you with enough information to choose the best driver available. We will be testing the majority of games/programs listed in the 266.58 release n... 
The hunter has been released, again, but most people will come to know it as the GTX 560 Ti. The Ti on the end may bring back memories to many of the old-school gamers. Around 2002, Nvidia came out with the Ti line. First with the GeForce 3 series and later with the GeForce 4, however, it disappeared shortly thereafter. But now it is back with a vengeance on the GTX 560 line of cards. Of course, this premium line of cards will go for a little more money, but hopefully the performance makes i... 
Introduction – Part 1 Recap:
On January 2nd, NDA was lifted for the new “Sandy Bridge” architecture from Intel. TechREACTION was ready with a hands-on look at the new Republic of Gamers motherboard from Asus, the Maximus IV Extreme. With minimal time for testing, we were only able to bring you a portion of the review in Part 1, but we promised a follow up article to answer the remaining questions about the Maximus IV Extreme, and real world use with Sandy Bridge. Well, to... 
EVGA has sent us their first factory overclocked GTX 570 card to hit the market. The SuperClocked edition of the GTX 570 will be followed by two more factory overclocked editions, the SSC and FTW. The latter two have not yet reached the marketplace, so until then, the EVGA GTX 570 SC will have to quench our thirst for a powerful GTX 570 graphics card. The GTX 570 is supposed to bring improvements in power consumption and temperatures using the new GF110 architecture. We will be sure to test ... 
Another addition to the MSI Lightning line is the GTX 480, which we will be reviewing today. MSI has slightly overclocked the GTX 480 Lightning by 50 Mhz on the core and 75 Mhz on the memory. This is also not a reference designed card from MSI. They have installed improved voltage controller circuitry and to help cool it all off they have tossed on their custom Twin Frozr III dual fan cooling solution. They have also added dual BIOS, voltage measuring points, and the ability to change three volt... 
Earlier this month, NVIDIA released their new powerhouse card, the GeForce GTX 580. ASUS has sent us their GTX 580 to put through our strenuous suite of testing. The reference design used by ASUS was somewhat surprising as they will typically use their own custom PCB. The GTX 580 is supposed to bring improvements in power consumption and temperatures using the new GF110 architecture. We will be sure to test to see just how these improvements add up in the real world. Read on…
Packag... 
One of my co-workers is a hardcore gamer and power user. Since we’ve met, he’s become more and more interested in the hardware aspect of computing, and recently asked me to help build him a new system.
He previously had a Phenom II X4 940 based system with 4GB of memory and dual GTX 260 graphics cards. Everything was run at stock speeds as he preferred to spend his time gaming as opposed to tweaking. Although his system was no slouch, as any hardcore gamer knows; “the fas... 
With the success of the GTX 460 release, Nvidia is looking to continue providing top quality products with their new line of 4XX series GPU’s. The EVGA GTX 460 we have today is made with a new Fermi-based architecture, GF104, which primarily boasts of lower power consumption and lower temperatures. We will be diving in to evaluate how the GF104 stacks up to the older GF100 in order to see if the improvements are noticeable. Also, we will be putting the EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW Edition through th... 
With the new release of the GeForce GTS 450, Nvidia has targeted a specific segment of the market with a suggested MSRP starting at $129, which makes this a very budget-minded card. They went after, or as they say “laser targeted”, the gamers who don’t play everything on max settings with super high resolutions. Instead, their focus was on the people who play with resolutions of 1280×1024 through 1680×1050 on monitors of 17″-22″. The GTS 450 is the repla... 
With the success of the GTX480 release, Nvidia is looking to continue to provide top quality products with their new line of 4XX series GPU’s. When we reviewed the GTX480 a couple of weeks ago, it was built on the older Fermi architecture, GF100. The GTX460 we have today is made with a new Fermi-based architecture, GF104. The GF104 primarily boasts lower power consumption and lower temperatures. We will be diving in to see how the GF104 stacks up to the older GF100 in order to see if the... 
After seeing plenty of topics in various tech forums regarding the decision between the GTX480 or the HD5870, we figured it was time to chime in on the debate. With support from ASUS allowing us to review these two cards, the ENGTX480 and EAH5870, we have all of the information we need for this stand alone head-to-head. We hope that after seeing the comparisons we can help put to rest some of the debates and provide a clear cut answer to “which is the best for my money?”.
The Break... 
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