Month: May 2008

In our reviews of the Sapphire 780G Motherboard and Hybrid CrossFire and Sapphire ATI Radeon HD3870 Toxic, I used a 2GB DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC CrossFire Certified kit (OCZ2RPR1066A2GK) provided by OCZ. Although DDR2 prices are lower than ever, it's still easy to pick out the good brands from the bad. The 2GB DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC CrossFire Certified kit is no exception.

As an owner of two fresh new 500 Gigabyte HDDs, At the time I was lacking a second SATA cable to hook up the second drive, so I found this a perfect opportunity to try out the ThermalTake BlacX Hard Disk Drive Dock. ThermalTake has been manufacturer of reliable case equipment for years.

Not every PC case fan was designed to be quiet, nor do most LED fans give have a switch used to turn the LEDs off. Enter the Rheobus controller: giving users the ability to control the speed of PC case fans, and the brightness of the LEDs. Sunbeam recently sent BIOS LEVEL the Rheobus Extreme for review, which promises up to 30W per channel, as well as cool LED lighting.

Typically, I try to avoid integrated chipsets. Integrated chipsets are usually meant for mainstream use and don't feature gaming-class graphics options. Fortunately, ATI recently introduced the new 780G chipset with more than just a beefier integrated graphics solution: Hybrid Crossfire.

The two big players in discrete graphics these days are nVida and ATi. nVidia won the performance crown with the release of the 8800-series in late 2006. ATi, now owned by AMD, released the new HD-series of Radeons. Sapphire was nice enough to send us the Radeon HD3870 TOXIC edition for review.