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The Plextor brand is synonymous to quality writing and the robustness of their drives, and is probably one of the more famous name in the optical storage industry. Also one of the largest OEM supplier, Plextor have taken a backseat of late however, especially with the emergence of its competitors - notably from Taiwan-based LITE-ON. While the likes of LITE-ON have been steadily churning out CD-RW drives progressively (with some vendors even having announced their 52x-write CD-RW models), Plextor had only recently launched their new PX-W4824TA CD-RW drive.

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The headphones very comfy after they adjust to your head for a few hours (self adjusting headband), you need to position the cups themselves right though, which is pretty simple. These are not as comfy as some other big-name headphones, but enough to wear for hours on end blasting your favorite tunes. :)

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"The OC System Enhanced GeForce4 Ti4600+ 128MB Video Card is one fast card who's default speed it 315MHz/740MHz and with a great cooler on the core and heatsinks on the memory it can be overclocked even further. Also, nVidia based graphics cards are known for their overall compatibility and stability. Watch the Video to find out more..." ~3dGameMan.com

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The main benefit of AGP 8X will be for applications with large amounts of polygons, where gobs of vertex data are being shotgunned through the AGP port to the graphics processor (GPU). Recall that in Direct3D every vertex consists of 32 bytes of data, and if you've got a million polygons per scene at 60fps, you're talking about a worst-case vertex data load of 1.83GB/sec, assuming no shared vertices. Of course, there are almost always shared vertices, since it's a great way to economize rendering resources, but even AGP 8X would be hard-pressed to sustain that kind of throughput plus texture data and possibly vertex and pixel shader programs.

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The main benefit of AGP 8X will be for applications with large amounts of polygons, where gobs of vertex data are being shotgunned through the AGP port to the graphics processor (GPU). Recall that in Direct3D every vertex consists of 32 bytes of data, and if you've got a million polygons per scene at 60fps, you're talking about a worst-case vertex data load of 1.83GB/sec, assuming no shared vertices. Of course, there are almost always shared vertices, since it's a great way to economize rendering resources, but even AGP 8X would be hard-pressed to sustain that kind of throughput plus texture data and possibly vertex and pixel shader programs.

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DDR433 needs a memory speed of 217MHz and most motherboards have trouble supporting this because in most cases some overclocking is necessary. When overclocking other components other than the memory system are stressed in excess of their recommended specifications. And as a result in this test a memory speed of 217 MHz was never achieved. The highest speed attained was 207 MHz.

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We bring you a first look at details of the board with Socket 754 for ClawHammer. Top secret: new info for manufacturers from VIA, NVIDIA and AMD, as well as an overview of roadmaps.

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One of the key questions is, who has this kind of memory? And if you search the net for a while you will find that Samsung promised volume production of this DDR II memory capable of up to 1GHz speeds in Q1 2003. This means that some volumes will exist for December, when this card should appear on the shelves. Nvidia's CEO, Jen Hsun, never said that there will be loads of cards but there will be some cards shipping and on the shelves for that time.

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Sapphire has been around for longer than you may think, producing OEM boards for ATI and selling mainly to OEM’s. This is why you probably haven’t heard much of them – but they want that to change. Sapphire’s Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro is a retail product with a lower price than one with the “Built By ATI” branding, though it is virtually the same card. ATI has been providing board makers with their own cards until the board makers are ready to launch their own PCB’s. Because of this, the Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro is pretty much an ATI card, though it has a custom heatsink and uses the “Powered By ATI” drivers.

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We are going to look at some of the next - generation rounded cables by Cooler Master. I have purposefully held off for a long time writing another "rounded cables" review. It felt so, "Been there, done that." Was there really anything significantly different than the first time I had written about them that would merit another review? I am happy to report that the answer is yes.

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The majority of these tests show that the Radeon 9000 PRO puts out some impressive figures up to and including 1024*768, after which the card is struggling. For a budget card intended for the budget market where one would assume people are not wanting to play games at 1600*1200 at 4 speed Anti-Aliasing, the Radeon 9000 PRO provides an excellent solution.

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Another excellent feature is what Thermaltake call over voltage protection. The way it works is fairy common sense, as pretty much does what it says. It protects your power supply by cutting out after a certain amount of voltage. If the voltage goes above the specified voltages it will cut out and prevent the death of your new power supply. It really is a handy feature and anything that prevents you from having to buy another PSU due to too much voltage is definitey a good thing. Thermaltake has set the trip point fairly high, so dont expect to see any downtime unless there really is a reason for it.

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Fifteen days have past since reviewing ESGN's new NanoTherm Silver thermal paste product. So why am I here with an update? Well, I got an email from the CEO of ESGN, and he told me that his company revised their new Nanotherm Silver paste and he also said that the new paste dropped their CPU temps considerably. This new paste ESGN has created is so good that they are calling it Nanotherm Silver Xtreme Temperature Compound or XTC for short.

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Asus has long made motherboards with the enthusiast in mind. No matter the chipset or processor being supported, they have been there. Come join TweakTown as they delve into one of their latest offerings; the Asus P4S8X Motherboard. Using the new SiS 648 chipset, we will look at a number of areas to see if this newcomer can stand up to the Asus reputation. Come find out.

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The CPU is not the only item that requires extensive cooling. There are other components that are also in need of active cooling in order to withstand the heat build up that's coming from the other system components, like the chipset of either your motherboard or graphics card. I have here the Blue Orb Chipset Cooler from ThermalTake, a well-known company specializing in cooling products. This cool-looking item works on either your motherboard's chipset, or you can toss it on to your graphics card if necessary.

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These are some pretty hefty claims for sure. FYI, XMS Stands for eXtreme Memory Speed. This XMS branding is aimed at high-performance computer users who demand only the best, such as overclockers ;) Corsair uses 5.0 nanosecond chips on both the 256 MB and 512 MB versions of this XMS 3500. These 3500 modules are pretested on an Asus A7V8X board and are guaranteed to run at the specified speeds. Not only are they pretested on the A7V8X, but they have also been benchmarked over multiple motherboards, chipsets and processor configurations. A lifetime warranty is provided on these modules. Lifetime warranties are a great thing.

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