Just forty years ago the first computerized mouse was invented and made practical, yet even today we haven't seen a mouse that is both highly comfortable while still able to retain a high amount of quality-features (ergonomic mice seem to lack necessary features). eSportNova, a company with 15 years of experience in the peripheral market, has decided to hopefully solve that problem with the Nova Slider X600. Today, we're going to take a look at this new product and see if it offers what consumers are looking for - a comfortable, high performance mouse." Click here to read more

Ok, a little while back I ran a somewhat large USB Flash Drive Comparison with 21 drives compared, today I got part two of that comparison. I’ve taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total, and formatted them FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT and ran all of the tests over again for a comparison of how the file systems work on the drives. And yes I truly ran all of the tests over again, I recently upgraded to SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP2, so I needed to re-do all of those tests as well. I’ve been at this for quite some time now, and I’ve got a whole lot of information for you inside. The reason for this is out of my curiosity and other people mentioned as well why not compare the file systems, so to satiate my curiosity and to give everyone as much information as possible I took a very large chunk of my time and dedicated it to this rather large article. So sit back, relax and continue on, I’ve got tons of graphs for you all broken down and separated by file systems and tests. Click here to read more

The XCM Cross Fire Converter for the Xbox 360 will allow you to use your Playstation 3 / PS3 controller on your Xbox 360 console! This is the first adapter of its type and is expected to debut in late Feburary 09. More information to be posted as it is released. Stay tuned. Sidenote: If this is anything like the Cross Battle Adapter for the Playstation 3, it will be plug and play compatible and have rapid fire, but thats just speculation at this time. Click here to read more

OCZ may not have created the Solid State Drive, but they've done more to bring SSD technology mainstream than any other company in the industry. Once SSDs could outperform their HDD counterpart, it was all about price and capacity. The OCZ Core Series helped to offer affordable Solid State Drive technology to the masses, but capacity and stuttering became new issues. Using a pair of JMicron JMF602B SSD controllers to organize two banks of Samsung K9HCG08U1M DRAM modules into a JMB390 controller, the new OCZ Apex Series SSD offers an impressive capacity with internal RAID-0 performance to subdue stuttering. Benchmark Reviews tests the performance of the OCZSSD2-1APX120G against over two dozen other products in this article. Click here to read more

Picture with me a high end gaming rig with an i7-965 Extreme CPU, a X58 Chipset capable of Crossfire or SLI, 7.1 channel Audio, and one or two of today's high end video cards. If you're like me you would be picturing one of today's large high end cases holding it all together. Now most of you have heard of Shuttle Computer Group with their compact form factor PC's that have been perfect for businesses, low power pc builds, and HTPC's. Shuttle is getting ready to release their new X58 chipset barebones called the SX58H7. The SX58H7 promises to be a great platform to build your high end gaming rig packed into a case that is literally the size of a breadbox.

I didn't schedule a meeting with our friends over at the Thermaltake booth this year, but that doesn't mean that I didn't find time to stop by and check out their booth.

I think I walked atleast 50 miles in the four days. In that time I only really ate a few times, mostly just a cookie and water at some of the meetings. But durring all of that I did manage to see some amazing things. Here are just a few of them!

If you don't own a Nyko Wiimote charge station you probably know someone who does. The charge station is the highest selling third party peripheral in North America. Because of that I would be really surprised if you didn't know who Nyko is or why I was excited to see what they are up to. I wasn't surprised to see a charge station at our meeting, but the one I was looking at had a few small changes. What I saw had updated batteries and a gauge to show you how charged your Wiimote's are. I was happy to hear that this will not be a new model but rather a on the fly update to the current model. It is good to see that they aren't planning on just letting things ride, they are going to continue to update all of their products as needed to stay competitive in the market.

I stopped by the In-Win booth to check out their upcoming line of products. We have seen their products both on here and at our lan parties. They had their standard line of cases and enclosures to show off along with a few prototype's and a upcoming case that I am looking forward to.

In the headset world, it is hard to make a product that stands out. Psyko Audio Labs introduced there 5.1 headphones at CES this year. Apparently, they stood out enough for CES to give them there "Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Award". I took a few minutes to look and listen while I was at CES.

Running from booth to booth and meeting to meeting, I did find the time to stop by the Buffalo suite to check out what's in store for the next year from them. I was excited to hear that they were going to bring back there wireless products. There wireless products were very popular in the modding community due to their ability to be flashed with DD-WRT. I sat down with a few people from Buffalo I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised by very down to earth people who just want to get the word out that they are back in the wireless market. They had a whole selection of interesting products that I found interesting.

In my travels around CES I saw countless different designs for keyboards and mice. I set out to find a booth from our friends over at Razer, counting down to CES they were really hyping up an upcoming product that they would announce the first day of CES. Razer decided to skip out on the booth this year and instead had a meeting room. It wasn’t hard to find the Razer meeting room considering it was fully covered in black and green designs. I went inside and meet up with Nicholas Depalmer, you might remember the name from our “Interview with a gamer”.

My first meeting of the week was with a company called ioSafe. IoSafe designs and manufactures disaster proof storage solutions. They aren't new to the scene having been around for the past 4 years with a focus on business grade products. This year at CES they are introducing a new line of personal products for the average consumer.  With the promise of 1500 degree flames and 10,000 gallons of water to try to kill a hard drive I signed up with some excitement. I scheduled my meeting with ioSafe in the evening to get the chaos of CES started. For some reason they wouldn't allow ioSafe to do their torture tests in the convention center so they rented out a house just off of the strip. I was picked up in a nice Limo directly from our hotel and driven out to their house. On the way there I had a lot of time to talk shop about ioSafe's decision to jump into the personal market with their "Solo" model, along with more details on how they where able to keep the hard drive cool while it's running but protecting it from fire and water any other time.

Our good friends at Coolermaster decided to forgo the trouble of having a booth at CES this year and instead go all out with a suite in one of Vegas's famous hotel casinos. The money saved not having a booth they were able to pickup the penthouse suite in the Palms hotel. They invited both my wife Alex and I to their CES party on top of our scheduled meeting. We showed up to their party late after a long first day walking the CES floor. Even though I had an upset stomach and a head ache I made it anyway. When you get invited to a penthouse party in Vegas you can't turn that down, lol. Once we got there I noticed right away that the view was amazing. After being introduced to all of the important people from Coolermaster USA they gave us a tour of their current and upcoming products.  The following pictures were taken the next day at my meeting; I didn't have the camera when we came to the party.

After taking flight delays due to ice in Dallas (ice in Dallas, WTF?) we made it to our hotel really late Monday night. After unpacking and finding something to eat it was time to get some rest. With a day before any CES activities to do we had a chance to meet up with my step brother and to hit the strip. After a short walk we ended up in a Denny's to get something to eat, apparently being a Denny's on the strip means you can get away with having rude and shity service. Having experienced what I can only imagine is the worse service on the strip we decided to go back to the hotel and hit the Casino floor and to check out the shows. To get the full Vegas experience without breaking the bank we hit up the penny slots. It turns out Alex is very lucky (I guess she does have me, proof that she is lucky) winning back almost all of my losses on the slots. Considering her apparently addictive personality (WoW anyone?) introducing her to gambling may come back to bite me in the future lol. I heard from Tania from Razer and we decided we would all meet up someplace on the strip. Without a car we just started walking. This is the point where I can say that I wish I sometimes thought about things more, instead my feet are paying for my ignorance.  We did make it all the way to the other end of the strip. We stopped at the Harley Davidson Café and hung out with Tania from Razer, I would like to thank her on here also for the wonderful dinner! (hey look Tania I can use an explanation point :-P). We also learned that not all of the service on the strip is bad. Finishing up our trek down the strip there was no way we were going to be able to walk back without my feet falling off. We decided to "Ride the Deuce", the Deuce is a two story city bus that only runs the strip. As it turns out my past experiences and assumptions with the bus can't be applied to the Deuce. This is the most high tech bus I have ever seen and frankly it is so clean that its hard to believe that its ever been used. That caps off our CES -2 day, you can find a full gallery of pictures HERE, stay tuned for more.

When given the chance to interview Nicholas Depalmer a professional gamer from Team Pandemic we jumped at the chance. Considering how many people play games and how few manage to find a way to make a living from it I thought it would be interesting to see how he did it. It turns out his back story was very interesting. If you would like to read even more about Nicholas you can also check out his website at propeekay.com.

You may remember our Crackheads candy review. Check out this video from John the inventor on "Minutes to Millions segment of Donnie Deutsch's, "The Big Idea", panelists included Kevin Nealon and others.

GELID Solutions designs and manufactures innovative, virtually silent & high-performance CPU coolers, case fans, thermal compound and other computer hardware for both gamers and silent enthusiasts. They provide computer hardware distributors, retailers and system integrators with top quality one-stop thermal solutions – from bearings to thermal compound, from design to shipping, from the molding of the fan to the print on the box – with state-of-the-art machines and experienced staff. Expect to see more of them around very soon; in fact we will be taking a first look at their thermal compound over the next week. Take a look at there website to see what they are all about! www.gelidsolutions.com

Computex was all of last week. Interested in hearing about upcoming product releases and seeing pictures of the amazing displays I spent most of the week digging for anything I could find from some of our main sponsors. Noctua send us a few pictures and some information on there display at Computex. Click to check out the pictures and see the upcoming products.