Extended batteries. When I mention those two words, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Does anything even come to mind for you? Well, to most people that I talk to about getting an extended battery for their phone or other mobile device they just respond with “I will just make sure that I plug it in every day.” But what if you use your device all-day, every day, and you find yourself on a long flight across the Pacific? What if you are just too lazy to plug your phone in every night? Well, the Power Fort is a device that claims to be the savior of those moments. But how does it hold up in testing? Let’s find out!

With AMD’s new HD 7970’s rocking the boat slightly with both price and performance it’s about time we started to see the slow trickle of GPU’s that will fill in the rest of the HD 7000 series video cards. First on the list is the HD 7950, a card that a lot of people have been waiting for because of the high price of the HD 7970. There is no doubt that it’s not going to outperform the HD 7970, but how will this new card compare to the GTX 580? Today I’m not taking a look at a reference card, we have skipped directly to the XFX Double Dissipation Black Edition Overclocked version, similar in design to what we saw with their R7970.

I recently posted up our HD 7970 crossfire results. AMD released their 8.921.2 RC11 driver update the same day as our last post. Here are updated graphs showing the crossfire performance with the new drivers. I still experienced flashing and artifacts when in game water was in view and our test bench would have odd lockups when left sitting idle for a while. The performance increases with the new drivers are impressive, I hope they work out the rest of the bugs. Two HD 7970's is the best performance you can get currently (short of adding even more cards, lol) but without the driver support its going to be a tough sell. 

Everyone and their mom have jumped into the mechanical keyboard party over the past year. Typically each of the keyboards has a fairly standard layout with a few small differences to help them stand out. When we saw Cooler Master’s new offering I was excited to see something a little different. If you have ever seen a Filco keyboard this may look familiar. The new Cooler Master QuickFire Rapid is a compact keyboard without a number fad for those looking for something that doesn’t take up very much room on your desk. Sounds like a perfect keyboard for going to LAN’s doesn’t it? We thought so, let’s take a look.

When looking at cases for your next build, there are several ways that you can go.  On the high end, you have a plethora of options and can spend hundreds of dollars on one.  Then, there is the middle-of-the-road good quality case.  For a budget build, there are is also a litany of options.  When looking at a budget case there are some sacrifices that you make for the sake of price.  Today we are looking at the MSI Raptor case, a budget case with some interesting options.  Does this case’s unique options make up for the shortcomings of being a budget case, or is this another case you should skip even on a budget build?  Let’s put it through its paces and find out.

With 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.

For 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!

Now 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!

All 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!

The 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.  

Naming 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!

Merry 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.

When 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.

In 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.

It’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.

I 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.

It'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 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.

One 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.

When 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.