Reviews

With Solid-State Drives (SSD) on the verge of mass consumer adoption, we're left wondering what kind of performance we're going to see from these drives. We already know SSD's require less power than drives with moving parts, but what kind of performance gains will we see? To get an idea, we took one the faster drives on the market, the OCZ Rally2, and ran it through our benchmarking process. To make things more interesting (and see how much performance we could squeeze from the technology, we're using two drives later in this article to use the drives in a RAID0 configuration.

The Ballistix Tracer memory is being advertised specifically for enthusiasts and case modders. Not only does the RAM feature lower latency, but it's got LEDs built into it as well! More on the LEDs later, though. This RAM is meant to please everyone!

We've got the Thermaltake Soprano DX on our bench today.The name Soprano, much like Antec's Sonata, makes us think of something cheap and quiet. This cases is something of a little brother to the Thermaltake Tsunami line, as they both feature similar designs, but different materials and hardware. The Soprano is considered an entry-level case. It's a perty piece of hardware sitting on our desks, but does bring us the quality case Thermaltake is known for? Let's find out!

When it comes to mousepads, most gamer's will tell you the best is Ratpadz. Ratpadz has been dedicated to making gaming mousepads since 1999, and was one of the innovators for the mousepad surface industry. Now, Ratpadz original mousepad has been re-released as the Ratpadz XT. We're going to be looking at how the Ratpadz XT performs in everyday computing, gaming, and it's durability.