The most recent articles from PC Magazine

Asus P5GD2 Premium Wireless

PC Magazine Team — 2004-08-31T13:03:31.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Tuesday 31 August 2004 at 13:03:31

This motherboard from Asus is loaded with features.

One of the most feature-rich motherboards we have ever seen, the P5GD2 Premium from Asus is so full of extras that one of the LAN connections is supplied on an expansion plate, as there is just no free real estate left on the board for it.

When it come to the feature list you'll need to take a deep breath: triple RAID array support (Ultra ATA/133 and two SATA), onboard Wi-Fi 802.11g, dual Gigabit LAN, FireWire 800, loads of Asus software utilities and the biggest bundle of accessories you?re likely to see.

With the P5GD2, Asus has taken a close look at the heat generated by Prescott motherboards. If you turn the board over you'll notice the proprietary Stack Cool cooling system, an Asus patented technology that conducts heat away from the power components.

The system is a miniature circuit board that is stacked against the main PCB - Asus claims this gives a heat reduction of 10 deg C.

Passive heatsinks are used on the Northbridge and Southbridge and even the power phase circuits are cooled by a passive copper heatsink.

The P5GD2 uses the R version of the ICH6 Southbridge so you get RAID 0 and 1 support for four of the eight SATA ports. A Silicon Image 3114R chip provides support for SATA RAID 0/1/10 and JBOD ('just a bunch of disks') arrays on the other four SATA ports.

RAID 5 can be added via software patch, available as a download from www.asus.com. If this still isn't enough there are two Ultra ATA/133 ports that support RAID 0/1/0+1 and JBOD arrays.

As well as a 16X PCX graphics card slot there are three 1X PCX slots and two standard PCI slots. One of the two Gigabit LAN controllers also uses the PCX bus. The second Gigabit LAN port is provided via an expansion plate that plugs into a header on the motherboard.

When you first open the box, you might wonder how Asus managed to close it in the first place. There are 10 SATA cables, four dual-plugged SATA power cables, two Ultra ATA/133 data cables, plus an 80-conductor EIDE cable and a floppy cable.

There are also four expansion plates, one with an RJ-45 LAN port and two FireWire 800 ports, one with just a single serial port, a game port that also has two USB 2.0 ports and a plate with two SATA connectors for use with external SATA drives. Last, but not least, there's an antenna for the Wi-Fi adapter. It has a huge number of features, but unless you need them all it might be a little over the top.

Contact: Dabs.com

www.dabs.com

Storpac 40

Alex Arias — 2004-08-25T16:12:00.000Z

Alex Arias, PC Magazine, Wednesday 25 August 2004 at 16:12:00

Extra storage on your desk.

As demand for storage continues, and the need to back that data up becomes ever greater, Storpac's desktop RAID system may provide a useful solution if you?re struggling to back up gigabytes of data.

It's certainly an eye-catching product, with a contoured metallic silver casing and a blue illuminated LCD display, disguising up to a terabyte of raw data capacity.

The four drive bays support Ultra ATA/100/133 hard drives, with each easily fitted into a proprietary caddy that slots into the backplane.

Internally there's a FireWire and USB bridge chip that provides two rear FireWire 800 ports and a single USB 2.0 port. Additional devices can be daisy chained to the FireWire ports and there's also a serial management port.

No drivers are needed, nor are there any software requirements, because the drive automatically appears within Windows, and can be managed through the Windows disk manager. Initially it takes a while to format the drives, at two and half hours for a terabyte at RAID 5 750GB useable capacity).

The front LCD panel provides status information on each drive and environmental data such as temperature, fan speed and power supply. Although not as noisy as ordinary PCs, it's still noticeable in use. If the fan fails it can be replaced quite easily.

The unit comes with Dantz Retrospect backup software, which is straightforward to use.

The Storpac 40?s only real disadvantage is its high price - as an alternative it may be worth considering a NAS device, although this would require more administration. However, as a solution for a single desktop PC it's attractive if you can afford it.

Contact: Lapistor 01274 610800

www.lapistor.com

Specifications:

Dimensions 17.5x40.2x20cm
Number of drives 4 hot swappable. Ultra ATA/100/133.
Max capacity 1 terabyte (4x250GB drives)
Interface USB 2.0/Firewire 800 RAID Levels Supported 0 or 5 with spare
OS supported Apple Mac 9.x/X.x + later versions, Windows 98/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP
Software included Dantz Retrospect
Warranty One year on-site

Price details:

£1,799 (ex. VAT) 480GB

£2,199 (ex. VAT) 1TB

Corsair TwinX CMX512-3200XLPT

Simon Crisp — 2004-07-29T11:31:16.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Thursday 29 July 2004 at 11:31:16

Fast performance memory from Corsair.

One of the major thorn in the sides of any overclocker is the latency of the systems memory. Latency is the time it takes for requested data to be ready for reading from the memory, so it?s pretty obvious the lower you can get the latency values, the faster the memory will perform. Corsair has taken some of the pain away with its DDR400 modules, which feature the lowest latency timings available ? 2-2-2-5, making them the fastest around.

The new modules feature Corsair?s Plug-n-Frag technology, which has the latencies pre-programmed into the SPD (Serial Presence Detect) chip on the module. This means that the modules automatically boot up at the lowest settings, thus avoiding any more tweaking in the BIOS.

As with most of the Corsair range, the modules are available separately or more usefully as TwinX matched pairs .

Contact: Overclockers UK (0870) 443 0880

www.overclockers.co.uk

Price details:

Single 512MB module £123.38 (inc VAT)

1GB TwinX (2x512MB modules) £240.88 (inc VAT)

Thermaltake Silent Pure power 480W

Simon Crisp — 2004-07-28T11:30:36.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Wednesday 28 July 2004 at 11:30:36

This cooling fan from Thermaltake supplies both power and less noise.

It's been a challenge for many of the manufacturers of power supplies to square the usually incompatible needs for more power and less noise.

Thermaltake' Silent Purepower 480W scores well on both points; the 480W supply has an incredible claimed noise level of 17dBA during normal operation, but this obviously rises as you increase the speed of the fans, which is unavoidable in powerful systems.

It' not the usual anonymous grey box either, but has a black and silver finish with dual 8cm orange cooling fans.

As with most higher end PSUs, the main cable loom is wrapped in a nylon net.

The three main power cables are a useful 112cm long and there are plenty of connectors to go around: one 20-pin ATX, one 6-pin auxillary, one 4-pin 12V ATX, nine 4-pin Molex, three floppy and one SATA, plus single-speed monitoring and speed controller cables.

The intake fan is thermostatically controlled for safety but the exhaust fan is manually adjustable through either the rear expansion plate control or the 5.25in bay control, both of which are bundled in the box along with all fixing screws, a mains lead and a manual.

Contact: Perfex (0870) 141 7161

www.overclock.co.uk

VIA EPIA MII1200

Simon Crisp — 2004-07-27T13:44:29.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Tuesday 27 July 2004 at 13:44:29

Via's latest EPIA platform motherboard.

VIA has been quietly getting on with improving the performance, connectivity and features of its EPIA platform, the most recent of which is the MII1200.

The MII1200 uses the latest version of VIA's Nehemiah C3 CPU, the C5P. The board also features VIA's Padlock Advanced Cryptography Engine (ACE) and an integrated Cardbus controller.

At the heart of the 17cm square motherboard sits the C5P CPU, a 0.13-micron processor that features 20.5 million transistors and runs at 1.2GHz with 64KB of full speed Level 2 cache.

Instead of the 3DNow instruction set used on previous C3s, the new chip uses SSE instructions that should improve 3D performance - as should the use of a full speed floating point unit.

Not only does the board feature a Random Number Generator, but with Padlock ACE there's extra performance for encryption and decryption. It can encrypt or decrypt data at an impressive sustained rate of 12.8Gb/sec. ACE directly supports all three AES key sizes (128, 196 and 256-bit) in hardware without any loss in performance.

Both the VIA Apollo CLE266 Northbridge and the VT8235 Southbridge sit under a passive double heatsink. The CLE266 provides support for a single DIMM slot for up to 1GB of DDR266 memory and integrated S3 Unichrome graphics, which provides only rudimentary 3D performance as it?s primarily a 128-bit 2D graphics engine that has been optimised for multimedia playback.

The Southbridge supports Ultra ATA/133, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports and 5.1 multi-channel audio.

The back panel of the MII1200 shows just how much you can get on to these small platforms. Including the card reader there are 15ports: two PS/2, serial, VGA, LAN, two USB 2.0, S-Video, RCA, three audio and a single FireWire port.

Contact: Mini-ITX.com

www.mini-itx.com

Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo

PC Magazine Team — 2004-07-23T16:02:34.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Friday 23 July 2004 at 16:02:34

Gigabyte's flagship motherboard.

The flagship of Gigabyte's 8 Sigma range of motherboards makes full use of the Intel 915P's support for a maximum of 4GB of either DDR or DDR2.

To get around the limitations of the single Ultra ATA/100 port there are two ATA RAID-enabled ports that can be switched to a normal ATA role, freeing the single Ultra ATA/100 port for use with optical drives.

In RAID mode it supports RAID 0, 1 and 0 +1 and further configurations are available through the four SATA ports and Intel's ICH6R chip.

There's plenty of space around the components; even the memory latches are clear of the 16X PCI Express (PCX) graphics slot.

For expansion two PCI and three 1X PCX slots complement two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a PCI Wi-Fi 802.11b/g card is also included.

The board has dual BIOS chips to help protect against system failure. A large orange slot on the board is provided for.

Gigabyte's own U-Plus Dual power system, an eight-phase power circuit card that fits into its own slot on the motherboard, designed to increase the board's stability by smoothing out power fluctuations Gigabyte's GA-8GPNXP Duo takes advantage of the new Intel technologies and ia a stable, fast motherboard.

Contact Dabs

www.dabs.com

Siwara Systems SW 20GB

PC Magazine Team — 2004-07-20T12:25:11.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Tuesday 20 July 2004 at 12:25:11

A pocket Hard drive from Siwara.

More and more small, pocket sized external hard drives are hitting the shelves. The SW Pocket drive from Siwara Systems is available in 20, 40, 60 and 80GB versions.

It measures 12.4 by 7.3 by 1.8cm and comes in an ABS shell that can resist shocks of up to 800g/ms. The whole package weighs a mere 160g so it lives up to its pocket label.

The drive itself is a 2.5in Ultra ATA/100 disk with either a USB 2.0 or FireWire interface, the one we looked at had USB) and is powered though the USB or FireWire port.

Provided with the drive are a useful selection of utilities. SW Backup lets you choose which files to back up. If you select the same files again, the software will back up only those files that have been modified since the last backup.

SW Format is a formatting and partitioning tool that works under both Windows and Mac.

SW VDCS allows the drive to be used as a virtual optical drive. CDs and DVDs can be copied to the drive and then accessed as if they were on the original media.

Contact: HKi Systems (0845) 644 5333

www.hki-systems.co.uk

Gigabyte 3D Cooler Pro (PCU21-VG)

PC Magazine Team — 2004-07-09T09:45:17.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Friday 9 July 2004 at 09:45:17

A CPU cooler from Gigabyte.

There is a trend at the moment for CPU coolers that can fit both Intel's socket 478 processors and AMD's Sockets 754 and 940 chips.

One of the latest CPU coolers, and Gigabyte's first, is the Cooler Pro. In line with another trend it's a big beast but weighs only 462g.

The Cooler Pro stands out from the crowd because it uses an upright central blower, with both top and bottom inlets, and its 360 degree design also cools components near the processor.

It comes with a rheostat that can be mounted in a 3.5in drive bay or a spare expansion slot. Both options are supplied but to use the expansion plate version you have to dismantle the drive bay This isn't as easy as it should be, thanks to the hazy instructions.

Needless to say the beastie lights up, and yes it's blue, fact a very bright blue.

It's not the quietest cooler around, but it is far from nosiest and when it's lit certainly stands out.

Contact: Overclocker

www.overclocker.co.uk

Transcend TS20GHDU1

Simon Crisp — 2004-06-09T11:01:18.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Wednesday 9 June 2004 at 11:01:18

A 20GB USB 2.0 hard drive.

If you are used to carrying your data around with you in the form of a USB Flash key and wished you could have higher capacity with the same ease of transport, then Transcend's latest external hard drive will be just up your street.

Housed in an attractive pearl white and chrome case is a 20GB 1.8in hard drive with a USB 2.0 interface that also provides the drive's power. A 40GB version of the drive is also available.

The drive measures just 95x71.5x15mm and weighs 115g, including its carrying case and USB cable. It comes with a two-year warranty.

It may seem expensive but carrying around this much capacity has never been easier.

Contact: Orca Logic (01306) 640700

www.orcalogic.co.uk

Vantec Vortex

Simon Crisp — 2004-06-08T11:45:48.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Tuesday 8 June 2004 at 11:45:48

Hard drive cooler from Vantec.

Some of today's large hard drives tend to run hot, which can shorten their life span. It's fine if you have a case with front fans housed in front of the drive bays but if you have a standard case then the hard drive is usually mounted in a dead spot, where the circulating air never reaches.

Enter the hard drive cooler. Vantec's Vortex cooler is a well designed, well built unit that fits into a spare 5.25in drive bay. You mount the drive inside the cooler on special mounts that help to absorb any vibration and the heat sensor is then attached to the drive.

The Vortex will take any 3.5in drive - Serial ATA, ATA or SCSI. Cooling is provided by an adjustable cross-flow blower, which is surprisingly quiet. Even at its highest setting you would only notice the noise in a very quiet system.

The front of the unit contains a drop down door, behind which sits a replaceable filter to help reduce dust buildup; Vantec supply three spare filters with the Vortex.

The rest of the front panel is made up of a display that shows the drive's temperature and a three-way switch to control the fan. The unit comes with additional filters, screws and a user guide.

Contact: Perfex (0870) 874 0074

www.overclock.co.uk

LiteOn SDW-431SX

Simon Crisp — 2004-06-07T14:26:11.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Monday 7 June 2004 at 14:26:11

A compact and lightweight DVD burner.

If you're looking for a easily portable DVD burner, or you're a mobile user whose notebook doesn't have a DVD burner option, then LiteOn's Dual format SDW-431SX should fit the bill nicely.

The unit weighs a meagre 600g including the diminutive power supply and is small enough to fit into a large pocket, including the power supply, so carrying it around presents no problem.

The SDW-431SX uses a USB2.0 interface, has a 2MB buffer and burns both DVD-R and DVD+R discs at 4X while the DVD-RW and DVD+RW performance is a slower 2X. It reads DVD-ROMs at 8X, while its CD/R/RW performance is rated at 24X 10X 24X.

Built into the SDW-431SX is Smart-Burn technology, which provides buffer underrun protection, and Smart-X technology, which provides stable audio CD, VCD and DVD playback as well as smooth data extraction.

Bundled with the drive is a copy of Sonic's MyDVD Suite and Cyberlink's PowerDVD, plus a disc in both the 4X DVD-R and DVD+R format.

Contact: Micro Direct (0870) 444 4456

www.microdirect.co.uk

Thermaltake Silent Boost K8

Simon Crisp — 2004-06-02T11:16:19.000Z

Simon Crisp, PC Magazine, Wednesday 2 June 2004 at 11:16:19

A CPU cooler that looks and feels well built.

If you want to replace the stock cooler for the Athlon 64, or want to overclock one, then the Silent Boost K8 from Thermaltake is worth serious consideration.

The unit looks well built and feels it too; this beast weighs a substantial 500g but still manages to fit in the standard heatsink retention frame.

Its copper base has some 46 fins soldered to it and, although it isn't polished to a mirror like finish, the sanding marks are shallow and easily filled by the supplied thermal grease.

On top of the aluminium frame sits an 80mm fan running on ball bearings and spinning at 2,450rpm, producing a quoted 27.5CFM flow of air at 21dB.

As well as the necessary thermal compound, Thermaltake comes with a useful colour installation poster.

Contact: Perfex (0870) 1417161

www.overclock.co.uk

Sparkle nForce2 400

PC Magazine Team — 2004-03-30T10:17:06.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Tuesday 30 March 2004 at 10:17:06

Well known for their graphics cards Sparkle have now released their first motherboard.

Unusually for a motherboard, Sparkle's nForce2 400 is available only in the UK at the present time. The nForce2 400 is the first motherboard from a company well established in the graphics card market sector.

Neatly laid out on an ATX format PCB, the nForce2 400 has - surprise, surprise - an nVidia nForce2 400 + MCH at its heart, and uses a plain, passive heatsink to keep cool.

A single memory channel option for AMD's Duron, Athlon and Athlon XP range of processors, with support for CPUs with FSB speeds of 266, 266, 333 and 400MHz, the nForce2 400 also provides support for the three DIMM slots and can accept a maximum of 3GB of either PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR memory.

Feature-wise the board is basic, but there is nothing wrong with that. If you just want the basics, why pay a whole lot more for features you're never going to use. There's no SATA or RAID but there are integrated graphics, 10/100 Ethernet and 5.1 audio.

The back panel holds two USB ports but the board will support up to six, and there are five PCI cards for expansion.

The nForce2 400 - Sparkle's first venture into motherboard manufacture - is easy to set up and, more importantly, ran stably under test conditions.

If you are looking for a no fuss, low-cost board for AMD's processors, then the nForce2 400 is a worthy competitor in a crowded market.

Contact: Overclockers UK (0870) 443 0880

www.overclockers.co.uk

ECS Photon AF1 Lite V1.0 Platinum

PC Magazine Team — 2004-03-29T14:34:19.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Monday 29 March 2004 at 14:34:19

A graphics heavy motherboard with flashing LEDs and a cardboard spaceship kit inside the packaging!

In complete contrast to AOpen's minimalist packaging is the graphics-heavy offering from ECS. Not only does it feature a space ship on the front, but there's also a cardboard kit of the said spaceship inside the well filled box. If you like your Athlon XP motherboards colourful with lots of LEDs, then the AF1 from ECS is the board for you.

The Northbridge cooling fan has an array of six coloured LEDs that flash in sequence, there are LEDs to indicate the type of AGP card installed - yellow for AGP 4X or blue for AGP 8X - and each PCI slot is accompanied by a blue LED.

Leaving aside the gimmicky, flashy bits, the AF1 is built on a six-layer PCB for improved stability. It's a well laid out and there's plenty of room - even the memory can be changed without removing the graphics card. It's built around VIA's KT600 chipset, a single channel memory solution for AMD's Athlon and Athlon XP processors. The VIA VT8237 Southbridge supports the two SATA and four USB 2.0 ports.

The board comes in three versions: Deluxe with RAID, FireWire and Gigabit LAN; AF1 without RAID; and the AF1 Lite, which lacks the RAID and FireWire controllers and has 10/100Base-T Ethernet instead of Gigabit Ethernet.

The six-channel audio is controlled by a C-Media CMI9739A chip that is compliant with the AC97 2.2 specification and supports coaxial and optical S/PDIF output ports. Network duties are taken care of by a 3Com 3C920 chip.

Instead of the usual dual BIOS setup, ECS includes a Top Hat Flash module, which installs on top of the original BIOS. Once the BIOS has been flashed the module is removed.

Included with the AF1 are E-IDE cables, floppy cable and SATA cables, an expansion plate with two USB 2.0 ports, and a bracket for installing two USB ports in a 3.5in bay.

Contact: Protac (01908) 481800

www.protac.uk.com

AOpen AK89 Max

PC Magazine Team — 2004-03-26T11:10:57.000Z

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine, Friday 26 March 2004 at 11:10:57

This motherboard is packed with goodies.

The first thing that strikes you about AOpen's latest offering for AMD's Athlon 64, the AK89 Max, is the understated white box, which makes a nice change from the usual box of garish graphics. It may be plain, but it's well packed with goodies.

Based around nVidia's nForce3 150 chipset, the feature-rich board is built on AOpen's familiar glossy black full size ATX PCB and comes with integrated Serial ATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, 5.1 audio and FireWire. The nForce3 MCH chip is passively cooled by a low profile aluminium heatsink.

This isn't a board for the more compact case as the three DIMM slots sit at the top of the board near the CPU, making access difficult in some case designs. The three slots provide support for up to 3GB of DDR400 (PC3200) memory. For expansion the board has five PCI slots, with the fifth having its own separate 3.3 volt power supply, ideal for PCI cards that have constant high power needs, such as RAID and SCSI cards.

A Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip controls the SATA RAID setup. With four SATA ports you can set the RAID up as RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 1+0 (mirrored stripe). Realtek chips provide support for the audio and LAN functions; an ALC655 provides 5.1 audio plus S/PDIF input and output functions; and a RTL8110S-32 chip supplies 10/100/1000Base-T network capability.

Also featured is AOpen's Die Hard BIOS, which comprises two BIOS chips and provides useful protection against the main BIOS chip being damaged by a virus or bad flashing.

As with all the top end AOpen boards it comes loaded with useful utilities, including AOConfig, a basic DMI utility; EzClock, a Windows based overclocking tool; and EzRestore, which allows you to restore the PC to before it was infected by a virus or made unstable by a bad installation of software or hardware.

Perhaps the most useful tool is EzWinFlash, which allows the BIOS to be flashed under Windows; similarly, WinBIOS lets you make adjustments to the BIOS under the Windows environment.

Underneath the cardboard tray that holds the motherboard lies an Aladdin's cave of extra hardware. There are three expansion plates holding extra ports - one with a game port and two USB 2.0 ports, one with two FireWire ports, and an S/PDIF plate with in/out RCA and optical ports. Cables comprise floppy, E-IDE (40 and 80 conductor), SATA data and power. AOpen's customary colour setup poster also explains the functions of the motherboard's components.

Overall, the AK89 Max is a richly featured and well priced motherboard.

Contact: Dabs.com

www.dabs.com

Specifications:

Form factor: ATX
CPU socket: Socket 754
Northbridge: nVidia nForce3 150
Memory supported: Up to 3GB DDR400 (PC3200)
PCI slots: 5
I/O ports: 2xPS/2, 2xserial, 1xparallel, 4xUSB 2.0, 3xaudio, LAN
Cables supplied: Floppy, 40 and 80 conductor E-IDE, SATA data and power