PC COMPONENTS

Scythe Ninja 3 CPU cooler
Scythe has been a name in the CPU cooler industry that is known for reputable but also unconventional cooling design. We've seen the weirdest forms, shapes and performance levels coming from these coolers. But overall, they have always been able to push out really interesting coolers, often to be positioned in the upper level of heatpipe coolers in terms of performance versus low noise levels

The all new Ninja 3 we test today is compatible with all current CPU and modern; AMD and Intel, Socket AM2 and AM3 in addition to Intel LGA775, 1156 - and 1366. The new cooler has a bit of an extra ordinary design, with four separate fin / heatpipe segments and a total of eight heatpipes.

The new setup of the aluminum fins, in cooperation with the eight U-shaped copper heatpipes marketed as M.A.P.S. (Multiple Airflow pass-through structure) guarantees high performance. This will get more clear in the photo-shoot though. According to Scythe, that translates into 7 per cent more heat removal compared to a cooler like the previous Ninja. The cooler is equipped with a 120mm-ventilator that can be regulated with the help of an included fan-controller in RPM from 470 to 1900 RPM with noise levels varying from 7 to 37dBA depending on your preference.

An improvement over the previous series is the new mounting system, Scythe marketed that up a little and calls it Super Flip Mount Back-Plate 2). The revised design of the back-plate offers increased compatibility.

The Ninja 3 is a big cooler at 120x120x160mm.

MSI GeForce GTX 460 HAWK

MSI is pre-overclocking this 1024MB HAWK model towards 780 MHz.

And then there's the overclock potential ... a new voltage regulation circuitry was embedded, allowing not only to play and tweak around with GPU voltages, nope ... they added voltage control for the memory and Auxilary/PLL voltage as well. As a result this board can get easily overclocked to 900 ~ 950 MHz, and if you are lucky maybe even 1 GHz.

OCZ RevoDrive 120GB

The SSD market has been explosively expanding ever since the past year or two. New technologies, new features and high capacity drives are key features in the evolving trend.

Anno 2010 we have however reached a bit of a bottleneck, fact is that while SATA 6G has been launched, the adoption rate is going slow. And that's next to the fact that all SSDs are still equipped with the lazy ass SATA 2 3G connector. Peak performance of the SSDs however is roughly the maximum of SATA 2, and as such we reach the upper limit in terms of speed and performance with the current NAND FLASH based SSD drives.

Sure in the future the SSD drives will become even faster with higher channel controller configurations and faster NAND flash, but meanwhile for the real freaks there are options. If 270 MB/sec is just not fast enough for you, then you can setup say two SSDs in RAID0, and nearly double up performance. Not a lot of people like that though, as RAID still is a dirty word somehow.
So the next best thing to lookout are PCIe based storage cards with NAND Flash memory. Pretty much two SSDs slapped onto a PCB, armed with a RAID controller. Pop it in, install the new storage unit and you'll have tremendous performance right off the shelves without the need to configure anything. 

PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 Single Slot in 4-way CrossfireX 

Look Powercolor HD5770 1GB GDDR5 Single Slot graphics card. Each Radeon HD5770 is clocked at 850MHz, has a 1GB memory partition running at 1,2GHz (x4 Quad data rate gDDR5) over a 128 bit memory bus. Each card comes with a Display Port, DVI-I and HDMI allowing much flexibility monitor wise.

Thermalright HR-02 CPU cooler

Thermalright is one of the bigger names in the CPU/GPU cooling industry, their products are reputable and often their reputation preceeds them. It was with much pleasure when we received a mail from them asking us if we were interested in checking out their latest and greatest of the Summer 2010 line-up.

Given the time we have available we opted to look at the all new HR-02 CPU cooler. Thermalright actually introduces this product as a passive CPU Cooler. The HR-02 is the second revision of the legacy Thermalright HR-01 cooler.

A newly designed heatpipe based cooler with six heatpipes and an amount of cooling performance that seriously caught us off guard. I think it's safe to say that the product we test today is easily one of the best products they have ever made, and armed with the right cooler you'll gain maximum performance while creating a near in-audible solution.

The cooler has a patented multiple support pressure vault bracket system, allow users to add pressure to the bracket system (40~70 lbs.), and have a more efficient and secure mounting (compatible with socket 1366/1156/775). You'll notice that the heatsink is all nickel plated to ensure the best quality and performance.