One of the most interesting nitches of PC and gaming is the Case Mod. You turn a PC into a work of art that is not only functional but also something even someone who cares nothing about PC’s could find interesting. We at LanOC Reviews have seen our fair share of mods at our events, on our forums, and in my other places around the net. Today it is my pleasure to announce a contest we have been putting together for some time. We are hosting a summer case mod contest.

When packing up your rig to head to a LAN party, you will find yourself trying to find the best way to pack your keyboard and other peripherals. I have seen people use everything from backpacks, totes, and even plastic shopping bags. The need for a good way to pack your equipment is there, but oddly enough you won’t find many options. Razer quietly introduced what they call the “Razer Gear Rack” last year along with their gaming gear line. Today we finally have a chance to look at their Gear Rack a little closer; maybe this is product we have been looking for.

How many times have you been away from an outlet and needed to give your cell phone, DS, or PSP a charge. I know I have found myself in that position more times than I can count. Choiix just released a product with that in mind called the Power Fort. Over the past week I have had the chance to put their Power Fort Advanced model, has it been helpful? Let’s find out.

Being the gamers and LAN goers that we are, we often sacrifice a good meal for a quick snack and more gaming time. Usually, it's more than our physical health that pays the price, it's also the health of our equipment. When we heard that a company had designed a snack food particularly for gamers, of course we were excited to check it out. Promises of no crumbs and grease transfer were appealing, but after checking out the product in-depth, we learned how much more it offered.

Based out of Michigan, MaxForce PC has been creating custom rigs tailored suited to customer requests since 2007. To further suit customer needs, they will even track down a part not listed on their site to install in your system. Max contacted us a while back to see if we were interested in reviewing one of his enthusiast gaming build's, the Javelin P55. Since it was right down our alley and had a perfect LAN situation to test it out in, we took the oppourtunity.

When you are looking for a fast and easy to use PDF reader you may come across a company called Fox-It. They make a fast, if not the fastest PDF reader; you can say they do a better job with adobe PDF files than Adobe themselves. When I found out last year that Fox-It was bringing out an e-reader, I was excited to see if their PDF knowledge would improve on the already great e-reader.

Bigfoot Networks is no stranger to LanOC Reviews, having the chance to personally speak with them on a number of occasions. If you're not familiar with the company, very simply BFN is a company dedicated to help reduce your lag in online gaming with their line of network cards. The Killer technology has been on the market for a while now, and BFN has been developing and enhancing their products to better fight network latency. Bigfoot has given us the oppurtunity to get a first-look at their new product, the Killer 2100 Network Card.

At the beginning of this year at CES, Sony unvelied a new device known as the 'Dash'. The design resembles many of the popular handheld devices such as the iPad, but has quite a different function. We all love those widgets that bring us news feeds, videos, and status updates; the Dash is the medium to bring all those to you in the palm of your hand. Experts lucky enough to get their hands on the device are calling it much simpler than the iPad, with a more modest price tag of $199 as well.

More details about the Sony Dash

What If I told you that you could pick up a 23 inch monitor today for less than 160 bucks? A lot of people including one of our staff would jump right on that. Of course, no matter what the price it won’t make any difference if it’s sporting dead pixels. That’s why today I will be taking a closer look at one of these hot deals, I’m sure you have already ordered yours so you can read about my experience with it while you wait for it to come in the mail.

computer monitors

When it comes to PC gaming, owning your competition in-game just isn't enough anymore. When you arrive to a LAN and first power on your rig, they should know that you mean business. Whether your looking to complete a theme, light your PC up like a Christmas tree, or just trying to spruce up an old build, nothing gets the job done like cold cathodes. VIZO has a long line of lighting options, including UV reactant cables and binding kits (which we've already had the pleasure of testing). Today, they've sent us a more simple option, a set of cold cathode lights, to see how they perform.

Its always sad to see a LAN come to and end, but as we awoke Saturday morning, there was still plenty of time to game before it was time to pack up and drive home. In relation to the previous days, we slept in a little, ignoring alarms and scoring a nine o'clock wake time. We quickly made our way to the building to find little change; it was still packed with gamers, the some of which were going strong after twenty-four hours of gaming. Not to be out done, we jumped on our PC's and got ready to game.

The next day began around ten after 7AM, a little late then we had planned. Our in-room alarm clock did a great job not disturbing neighboring rooms, and just as good a job of not bothering us, either. Luckily the Verizon tone I set just-in-case was more than willing to get us going. We hit a nearby McDonald's for a breakfast to go, and arrived at Stompfest shrotly after to finish setting up. Thanks to the kind staff at SF, we were able to drop our equipment off the night before, so all that was left was to hook them up in the harsh chill of an April morning.

Four of us from LanOC left Ohio City around 3:30PM, right on schedule to arrive early in Wanamaker, Indiana early enough to drop our rigs off at the Stompfest event building. After hearing horror stories from MML late last year (a close call involving a car break-in), we were a bit gun shy to leave our equipemnt in a car over-night. Initially armed with Mapquest printed connections, Wes (garfi3ld) soon upgraded us with his TomTom.

Before we packed up for CES this year I had the pleasure/luck of talking with Verizon about reviewing a few of their current and upcoming products. With CES now over I couldn't help but jump at the chance to try out the MiFi. With a whole group of us traveling around Vegas the MiFi would be perfect for helping us get the most current updates posted for everyone to read. Now that we are back to work catching up with all of our reviews, I finally have a chance to talk about my experience with it.

This past Friday our Managing Editor Tim was lucky enough to participate in a media conference call with the developers at 2K Marin, the development studio behind BioShock 2: the highly anticipated follow up to 2007's BioShock. Here's what LanOC Reviews found out about 2K's upcoming shooter.