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Posts Tagged ‘motherboard’

A deluxe board with an enthusiast price tag

Let’s be frank: If you’re even thinking about buying into Intel’s deliciously fast LGA2011 platform this early, you are an enthusiast—Enthusiast with a capital-freaking-E, since you can’t even look at LGA2011 without buying a $550 chip.

So if you’re jumping in, you might as well use both feet. Asus’s P9X79 Deluxe certainly fits that bill, delivering cool features and a stout price tag: This X79-based board will set you back a cool $400.

“Deluxe” features on board include digital VRMs, Asus’s trademark UEFI, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, with a bundled smartphone … [Read More...]

It’s been a long road for the Cosmos II, but it’s finally here. The long-awaited successor to Cooler Master’s blockbuster Cosmos was supposed to ship in September—around the same time as our 2011 Dream Machine, which used a prototype version of the Cosmos II as its chassis. Well, after some trips back to the drawing board, the Cosmos II is finally ready for prime time. It’s real. And it’s spectacular.

The Cosmos II, which Cooler Master bills as an “Ultra Tower,” is 20 percent larger than the original Cosmos—it’s more than 27 inches tall, 26 deep, and 13.5 inches at … [Read More...]

Whether you just built or bought a new PC, it pays to optimize your setup from the start

Nothing holds more promise than a brand-new PC. The hardware is fresh and full of potential, the OS is clean and clutter-free, and you have nothing but pure, unadulterated storage space awaiting your precious data. It’s an exciting time, indeed. But before you start dumping old files onto your new rig willy-nilly, and downloading every shiny bauble of an app that catches your eye, take some time to consider a more measured approach to moving in. After all, you only have this … [Read More...]

From afar, there’s little to distinguish the Antec P280 from such long-in-the-tooth predecessors as Antec’s P183. The steel side panels are all black, without mounting holes for additional fans or windows to provide a look inside. There’s no LED glow, either. The only exterior visual clues that reveal this to be an entirely new chassis are the front-panel connections, including two USB 3.0 connectors with an internal header, which are located above the case’s front door.

The P280′s front door doesn’t, for once, hide the power and reset switches; Antec’s engineers moved them up where they belong.

Remove the sound-dampening … [Read More...]

Despite Microsoft’s apparent lack of love for Windows Home Server 2011—the company stripped Drive Extender from the final version, and good luck finding a retail Windows Home Server 2011 box in the U.S.—it’s still a great server OS for a Windows-heavy home environment. Backups are effortless, streaming is hassle-free, it’s easy to administer, and there are tons of add-ins available.

Given a choice between buying an off-the-shelf product and building one myself, I’ll opt for the build any day. And since you can’t get a retail WHS box in the U.S. anyway, I figured what the heck. I pinged Michael … [Read More...]

990-series board offers modern mobo amenities

To be honest, between Z68 this and Sandy Bridge that, we haven’t had much time to check out AMD’s latest motherboard offerings.

It’s not that we don’t care; it’s just that the fire is burning on the other side of the fence these days. That’s not to say that the 990X chipset in Asus’s midrange M5A99X Evo is a slouch. As a real AM3+ board, it’s guaranteed to work with the upcoming Bulldozer line of CPUs from AMD. On the other hand, plenty of older 890FX boards will also work fine with Bulldozer, so … [Read More...]

Absurd speed—for an absurd price

OCZ just keeps pushing the envelope on its PCI Express SSDs. The first RevoDrive contained two 60GB SF-1200-powered SSDs in RAID 0, with a Silicon Image PCI-to-SATA controller. The RevoDrive X2 kept the same architecture, but added a second PCB with two additional controllers and two more 60GB sets of NAND. OCZ’s RevoDrive3 X2 updates the platform to second-generation SandForce, but the new SSD controller isn’t the only change.

The OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 contains four second-gen SandForce SF-2281 solid-state drive controllers, each with 16 8GB Micron 25nm asynchronous NAND modules. The RevoDrive3 X2 is, then, … [Read More...]

Two GTX 580s, one gargantuan videocard

Imagine a graphics card weighing 5.25 pounds with three (yes, three) 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. Now imagine this card taking up three PCI Express slots and almost sucking the life out of an 850W power supply.

That may be one reason Asus named this card after the Roman god of war. It’s probably the most powerful single graphics card we’ve tested, but that power comes at a substantial cost. You’ll need the right type of motherboard and case, too—one where you can install a three-slot-wide card that’s 12.25 inches long and 5 inches … [Read More...]

Literally the coolest case we’ve tested this year

Like the God of Thunder for which it is named, Rosewill’s Thor is a mighty full-tower chassis, with phenomenal cooling capabilities and enough power to smite the competition.

The Thor is a steel chassis with plastic trim along the sides of the front and top of the chassis. The front fan filter and optical drive bezels are black mesh, and the top of the case includes plastic vent fins that can be opened and closed using a sliding mechanism. If that seems familiar, Alienware offered a similar, though powered, venting system on … [Read More...]

Get Gaming on an HTPC

I don’t want to watch cable TV. I don’t want to use a controller. I just want to watch 3D Blu-rays and frag people with a mouse and keyboard, all on a box that fits on my entertainment center. Is that too much to ask?

We’ve built our fair share of home theater PCs in the past, with all sorts of different use cases in mind. Our August 2010 HTPC was a stunner built for 3D, with passively cooled GPU, CPU, and PSU, as well as a four-channel CableCard tuner and Blu-ray 3D support. In … [Read More...]

Three platters, three terabytes

Since time began, man has looked at four- and five-platter 3TB hard drives and dared to say, “That’s cool, but when will we get hard drives with one terabyte per platter?” Man is impossible to please. Nevertheless, drive makers have cracked the 1TB-per-platter limit, and this year we’ll see 4- and 5TB drives, and even one-platter 1TB drives. The first 1TB/platter drive to cross our bench, though, is Seagate’s new 3TB Barracuda.

This is the first from Seagate’s simplified consumer 3.5-inch drive lineup. The LP and XT brands, for “green” and “enthusiast,” respectively, are gone. In fact, … [Read More...]

When it comes to protecting the data on your computer, you can’t do better than strong encryption. Properly encrypted, your files are safe even if a ne’er-do-well gains access to your computer, either physically or through a network. In the past, we’ve discussed how to use various encryption tools to encrypt individual files or create virtual, encrypted drives. Now, we’ll look at how to get maximum security by encrypting your boot disk using the BitLocker full-drive encryption system that’s built into Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise.

Step 1: Assess Your System

Ideally, you have a motherboard with a Trusted Platform … [Read More...]

Intel’s Core i7 2700K processor is new in town and boy does she get around. We mean that in a good way, and it’s totally with the blessing of her folks from Santa Clara who told her, “Hey, you’re unlocked, go have a good time.” The 2700K took those words to heart and, among other places, found herself hanging around Maingear where she’s running laps at 5GHz and beyond.

Maingear tells us they’ve added the 2700K to its Shift and F131 desktop systems. The less expensive F131 starts out at $1,104, or $1,339 with the 2700K option, and includes an … [Read More...]

It’s easy to build a gaming machine on a budget if you’re playing at 1650×1080 or 1920×1200, but if you’re rocking 2560×1600, you need a little more oomph

As Maximum PC senior editor Gordon Mah Ung puts it, building a budget gaming rig for a 30-inch panel is the metaphorical equivalent of slapping a Ferrari engine into a crappy Ford car. If you can afford a display that rings up north of $2,000, then why the heck are you trying to cut corners on the system you’re connecting it to?

I can’t answer that one for you. But what I … [Read More...]

Biostar has been trying to reinvent itself as an enthusiast brand, a hard sell considering most seasoned vets have a hard time shaking the notion that Biostar’s focus is squarely on the budget buyer. The truth of the matter is Biostar holds several overclocking records under its belt, and it’s because of high end boards like the new TA990FXE.

In case there was any doubt, Biostar comes out and says it’s targeting “the most demanding overclockers and gamers” with its new board. The appropriately named TA990FXE is based on AMD’s 990FX chipset. It supports all socket AM3+ processors, including AMD’s … [Read More...]

The ultimate GTX 580 is one big muthah

The Asus Matrix GTX 580 Platinum is quiet, fast, and really, really easy to overclock. It’s also massive.

How massive? When we got the box, we thought Asus had shipped us a motherboard by mistake because the box was so large.

The size of the pacage is a clue to the size of the card itself. Asus builds a variant of its DirectCU II dual-fan technology onto the GTX 580, resulting in a card that’s fully three expansion slots wide. If you ever plan on running two of these in SLI mode, … [Read More...]