As brands go, Prolimatech is a new one. The company has only been around since 2008, after all, and it offers a bare handful of products. But the company was founded by people who clearly know a lot about CPU cooling, as it’s accrued considerable cred in just a couple of years. Its best-known cooler, the Megahalems, was designed for overclocked 1366 chips. We told Prolimatech about our new Socket 1156 cooling test bed, and the company sent over a newer cooler, ominously named Armageddon.

At 5.6 inches wide by 2 inches thick by 6.3 inches tall, the Armageddon is wider but slimmer than our champion air cooler, the CM Hyper 212+. While the Hyper has four direct-contact copper heat pipes, the Armageddon’s six heat pipes run through a more standard heat exchanger and up through a stack of heat-dissipation fins. The Armageddon’s mounting system is a bit complex—requiring a backplate, three retention bars, four bolts, four o-rings, four double-headed thumbscrews, four nuts, and two spring screws. But the end result is a stable, solid install with no give and no potential pressure- or torque-related failure points.

Continue reading after the jump.

Ever heard the phrase, “Do one thing, and do it well?” Hitachi surely has. The company took that advice, considered it, threw it out the window, and released an external backup drive bundled with a media suite that does many things—some of them potentially interesting, but none of them particularly well. The Hitachi LifeStudio Plus is an external backup drive with an interesting dock, a cool companion USB key, and a clunky, awkward integrated software suite.

The hardware itself is attractive, in a retro, family-friendly sort of way. It consists of a black (or white) docking station that holds a removable 2.5-inch external drive (in tasteful grey and light blue, graphite, or white), and a 4GB USB flash drive. The removable hard drive slots onto a mini-USB connector, but the flash drive connects magnetically. When connected, the drive automatically syncs with a folder or folders of your choice. Ideally. In practice, it’s very good at syncing files from your computer to the flash drive, but it doesn’t work the other way. Despite checking the requisite boxes on the settings menu, the so-called “MyKey” refused to copy files from the flash drive to the folder it was allegedly synched to, which makes the whole thing much less useful than it should be.

Continue reading after the jump.

Prior to StarCraft II’s release, there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Blizzard’s decision to split StarCraft II across three games. “Why pay full price for a third of a game?” was the not-unreasonable question. Fortunately, after playing a lot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, we can tell you that this is emphatically not a third of a game. In fact, it’s the most polished, full-featured single- and multiplayer RTS we’ve ever played.

The action in the single-player game takes place across 29 missions, all but four of which see you leading space cowboy Jim Rayner’s band of mercenaries into combat. Though you’re limited largely to the Terran race, StarCraft II’s incredibly polished level design makes every mission feel like a completely different experience, from a zombie invasion to a mission where you must build up a force while on the move, always keeping one step ahead of a steadily advancing firestorm.

Continue reading this review after the jump.