Thermaltake Meka G Unit

IMG 5439 frontWith the release of the Meka G Unit, the keyboard category has the most players in Thermaltake's eSports line. The G Unit itself is the third reincarnation of the Meka family, featuring mechanical switches among other gaming enthusiast features. The professional gaming market has never been hotter, nor more demanding. Let's see how Thermaltake handles the heat.

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HD 7970 Crossfire Results

 

titleFor our write-up today I just want to follow up with our past reviews on the Sapphire HD 7970 and the XFX R7970 DD Black Edition Overclocked. Today we are going to show off the results of our crossfire benchmarks. This isn’t a review, just our results. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. For those of you in the Midwest like me try to stay warm and safe with all of the snow coming in!

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XFX R7970 DD Black Edition Overclocked

titleNow that we have had a chance to take a look at a reference design HD 7970 and see how dominating one can be I am excited to take a look at XFX’s new Black Edition Overclocked R7970. Unlike most of the other manufactures their version is both overclocked and equipped with their Double Dissipation cooling solution, a heatsink that has to be one of the sexiest coolers on the market. We know how the stock card performs, but how will it perform with a 1000Mhz clock speed and a badass cooler? Let’s find out!

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Sapphire HD 7970

titleAll of the holidays, New Years, and CES cause a chaos this time a year. Last year we had the Sandy Bridge launch in the mix. This year AMD's new GPU series launch is packed in as well. Around the holidays we saw a few reviews using AMD's reference design. Sampling was very limited; today all of the manufactures can finally release all of their reviews. Today we are covering Sapphires first card of many, the HD 7970. This card uses the reference design and cooler and should be a great way to judge the series’ performance without any overclocking or aftermarket cooling. AMD advertises the HD 7970 as the world’s fastest single GPU, let’s find out!

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Cooler Master Cosmos II

titleThe first case that I ever got excited about pre-release was the Cooler Master Cosmos. With a futuristic design packed full of features it was an impressive design. It wasn’t without its problems though and Cooler Master did a good job fixing them the Cosmos S. Of course the industry doesn’t stay still, manufactures have continued to innovate and change. Many of the features of both Cosmos’s are common place now. With competition like the 800D Cooler Master has been working on the new cosmos for a few years now, we even saw a fairly complete prototype almost a year at CES. Today we finally get to take a look at the result of all of that time and work with the Cosmos II.  

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HornetTek Fantasy

headerNaming a product after the subject of a Ludacris song definitely garners up images of fast cars, hot women, and wealth. Does the Fantasy from HornetTek live up to my fantasies of a personal media player, and is it something you should consider adding to your already crowded home entertainment system? Read on to find out!

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Beyond the Typical Light Show

LOD HeaderMerry Christmas to everyone! Being a geek, I find it extremely fascinating the various ways people who are of the geek persuasion celebrate the holidays. We do not just go purchase inflatable Santa Clauses on motorcycles and Rudolphs in helicopters to garnish our yards. We also do not just string a bunch of lights and call it quits. We engineer Christmas. Today, I would like to feature a local light display that is long on engineering. Lights on Douglas is an automated, synchronized to music, holiday light display. We go in-depth into the tech behind this type of display and talk to Dennis about how he makes something like this happen.

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Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Edition

titleWhen Thermaltake introduced the BMW designed Level 10 a few years back they got everyone thinking outside of the box. Of course with its price tag of almost 1,000 dollars they are few and far between. They followed it up with their Level 10 GT, a case inspired by the Level 10 but with a much lower price tag.  The Level 10 GT has been a popular case but we haven’t had a chance to take a look at it. When the Level 10 GT Snow Edition was introduced I knew it was time to finally see what the fuss is all about. Today we are going to take a look at one of Thermaltake’s flagship cases, lets dig into it and find out what it’s all about.

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NZXT Phantom Black and Orange Edition

titleIn order to break out of the normal mold NZXT took a different route than the other manufactures and paired up with PC Modder/Builder Craig Brugger (craigbru). Together they worked together to design the Phantom. The Phantom quickly became a popular case with both enthusiasts and case modders. Soon after, a white and black version was introduced, starting the trend of different color cases. When one of our members came across an orange and black version I couldn’t help but beg and plead to get one in. Considering the color combination is a Newegg exclusive I was really happy to find out they could get us one. Today we are FINALLY going to take a look at the NXZT Phantom LanOC Style.

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Antec P280

titleIt’s been a long time since we covered anything from Antec and frankly it’s been a long time since they have reinvented some of their lineup. When they introduced their P280 recently I was excited to see a little motion from their camp and when they contacted me wondering if we wanted to take a closer look I didn’t hesitate to jump on it. The new P280 is larger than any of the other cases from their P line but with more up to date features I’m excited to see where it stands compared to everything else we have seen recently.

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Fractal Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case

titleI recently took a look at our first Fractal case the Define Mini and I was very impressed. For a new company in the market I was very impressed with both their innovation and simplicity. Even more impressive and important was the price tag! The Define Mini is one of many cases from Fractal and I was very excited when they sent out another case to take a look at. This time a Mini ITX case that is designed to be a home NAS box called the Fractal Array R2. Without an optical drive and with room for lots of hard drives the Array R2 is a good candidate as a case for our event server rebuild.

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Case Week Introduction

caseweektitleIt's been a long time since our last theme week but with Christmas coming in less than a week we thought we would go over a few cases that you may want to consider for your new PC components. Everyone asked for pc goodies right? With holiday steam sales coming up its also a good idea to get your pc ready for all the gaming your going to do in the new year. 

 

Rosewill Future

titleRosewill is a brand name well known for putting out good budget products. They have a new offering called the "Future" that is targeting that budget gaming case market.   This is an extremely competative market with low profit margines, plus we gamers are a funny breed. We'd rather drop our gear into a case that's going to offer us superior performance at the cost of the looks of the case. With all the experience that Rosewill has in the budget case market, they've got a good feel for what the market wants. Will the Rosewill Future hit that mark? Let's find out.


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'Maximum Security' to Protect Your Gaming Addiction

finalheader1One of the really awesome aspects of being in the computer gaming hardware arena is looking at what people are doing in the terms of case modifications. Let me tell you, the feature that I have for you today is really quite special. Will at Custom Computer Creations agreed to let us bring his 'Maximum Security' build to you.

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Everki 18.4” Advance Laptop Bag

titleWhen I picked up an 18.4 inch laptop I knew that I would deal with problems while traveling due to its size. What I didn’t expect was to have as much trouble finding laptop bags. While at CES last year I was visiting a company we had seen the year before called Everki and noticed that they had a whole selection of 18.4 inch laptop bags. With CES coming up soon I finally set aside the time to get in touch and give one a try. Maybe their Advance Laptop Bag for 18.4 inch laptops would make traveling a little more convenient for me in the future.

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Rosewill Challenger

titleChanging standards and new technologies have made it some what hard to find a budget priced case that has all of the features that you want in a case. For some, cooling is an issue, or you have to sacrifice advanced features like USB 3.0. It's a challenge for the manufacturer, too, to get all the features that today's budget builders want in, and keep the price low. Today's case, aptly named Challenger, is from Rosewill. Let's take a look at the specs and see if this one has everything we'd want in a case.

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Noctua NH-D14 SE2011

titleJust a few weeks ago I had the chance to tell everyone about the Noctua heatsink that we have been running on our LGA 1155 test bench for almost a year. Because of how happy we have been with it we decided to give another Noctua heatsink a chance for our new LGA 2011 test bench. We went with the NH-D14 for the ultimate performance. We have actually taken a look at that same heatsink before in the past HERE, but with the special edition we decided to go over the new brackets and compare the NH-D14 to Intel’s water cooling. Will the monster air cooling outperform water cooling? Let’s find out.

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Ergotron LX Triple Display Lift Stand

titleTechnology is rapidly evolving both in the gaming computer arena, as well as in many workstations. This evolution has created a slowly increasing demand for multiple monitor support. For those of you who have been running multiple monitors, like me, one of the biggest challenges is fitting them all on my desk. Another issue that is just as important is running multiple monitors without cluttering up your work area. The only way to do that is to do it with a multi monitor stand. Our friends over at Ergotron have been great to us and our friends with support for LANs. Today we have a chance to take a closer look at one of their stands to see what it’s all about, the LX Triple Display Lift Stand.

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SteelSeries Simraceway S1

titleFor the most part SteelSeries has stuck to a fairly nitch market. Their products are normally mice, keyboard, headsets, and mouse pads. There have been a few products here and there that have broken that mold like their work with Gunner Glasses and a few products that carried over from their purchase of Ideazon. Surprisingly they recently introduced a new steering wheel, the S1. They worked together with Simraceway to enter into the wheel market. I say wheel because unlike every other product on the market, the S1 is simply JUST a wheel. There isn’t a pedal, gear shifter (other than paddle’s), or even mount for the wheel. With just a USB cord and an F1 inspired wheel between you and the game it’s a different solution, but will it work?

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Asus Rampage IV Extreme

titleFor X79 we have taken a look in detail at both the reference design and Asus’s professional solution. What about a model made specifically for gaming? The X79 platform is called an enthusiast platform; there are finally no limitations on bandwidth to video card, something that was an issue on 1155 motherboards.  Today we are going to take a look at Asus’s Rampage IV, their flagship motherboard designed specifically for someone who only wants the best. Will this be the end all be all motherboard? Let’s find out!

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