For most hardcore enthusiasts, the sound coming from their PC is just as important as the quality of graphics on their screen or how high they can clock their newest CPU. Even though new motherboards come with onboard sound with 5.1 speaker capabilities, most don't rival a stand alone sound cards quality. With the exception of the audio available with new nForce2 rigs that have an Audio Processing Unit (APU) built into the south bridge, most of the onboard audio setups are typically poor in quality and lack a nice feature set.

The Lepont SF-201B Aluminium Mg case is very well constructed and has all the usual features that you would expect from such high quality cases as the Lian-li or Coolermaster cases, it has a removable motherboard tray, removable hard drive mounting bracket, 6 80mm cooling fans with gold grills, all the sharp edges have been folded for safety reasons and also have plastic edging.

DDR400/333/266, Dual DDR, RDRAM 16 bit and 32 bit, SDRAM... almost every memory technology on the market is available for the Pentium 4 platform. One of our previous technical articles discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the different architectures of Rambus and SDRAM based memory technology such as DDR and DDR-II. In this article, we will investigate how the different memory technologies and their supporting chipsets compare on the test bench.

I like my machine's temperatures to run as low as possible while still having a good "livability" quotient. Sure, we could stick a few 80 x 80 x38mm Delta screamers in a case and run cool but you can forget all about hearing any audio from your box. My personal machine is water cooled because I have grown to hate excessive noise. I do want to be able to sleep, hold a conversation with someone over the phone, etc., without needing to put 50 feet between me and my machine.

The MSI K7N2-L Nforce2 AMD mainboard comes in that now traditional red colored solder resisted appearance and does not portray a cluttered designed layout. Included in the MSI K7N2-L version is the on-board LAN driven by the PH163112 component which is located just behind the LAN out connection on the back panel I/O plate. The I/O plate is laid out in the now familiar trend where we see the inclusion of four USB ports supporting the USB 2.0 protocol and USB 2.0 is also available by using the additional on-board header which then is connected to the external D-Bracket.
The sound stage is provided by the Realtek ALC650 controller and this may seem confusing to some as the Nforce MCP is present but the MCP is only converting the digital signal to analogue i.e. known as D.A.C. in the HI-FI enthusiast world. We found the audio playback from a MP3 collection to be more than adequate and were able to reproduce a reasonable un-distorted sound at high volume levels.

same shape as a CD-Rom player. Well that's actually meant to be, this system is supposed to fit into a 5" 1/4 bay. You pretty much get the basic stuff you need to watercool your cpu: a reservoir, radiator, pump, fans, all this is brought together into the big/main component, you also get the tubes, they are already mounted. A little bottle with 100% pure water to avoid the pump from malfunctioning. This unit can be installed on a Pentium 4 or an AMD system. You also get some mounting screws, and of course the waterblock.

The Gigabyte 8GE667 board is just the right product of the kind: in its extended make, the board has 6 PCI and 1 CNR slot, 10 USB 2.0 ports, plus allows plugging in flash card readers and integrated RAID controller. But our test lab we received a "cut-down" version of the board. How far it is really "cut-down", you will see later from this review.

One of the key features I would like to touch on here is the level of brightness on this monitor. Solarism rates this display at 600cd/m2 (candela per square meter). This is leaps above the standard 200 - 250cd/m2 that you will find on most other LCD. So what does this mean for you? Well, over time the brightness level of an LCD monitor will slowly decrease. So in a few years, a standard LCD monitor could possibly have dropped to a brightness level which you are not comfortable with. However, with Solarism's ABT (Advanced Brightness Technology), this problem would not affect you for many years to come.