Could any component in a router’s BOM (bill of materials) cost less than an LED? Don’t think so. So why the heck did Belkin design its Play Max wireless router to use a single LED to inform you of its operating status?

Granted, the Play Max’s street price is $20 to $30 cheaper than many other concurrent dual-band wireless routers, and there might even be a lot of folks who don’t pay much attention to details like the status of their router’s ports or whether or not both of the router’s radios are operating. We do though, and a single LED that glows green when the router has an Internet connection and amber if something is amiss doesn’t cut it.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

More often than not, a monolithic public corporation acquiring a small independent company ends up stifling innovation, sacrificing quality for quantity, and inexorably suffocating the golden goose. Happily, that scenario never played out when Logitech bought Slim Devices. While we don’t have any insight as to what’s gone on behind the scenes, we can tell you that the Touch—the fourth addition to the Squeezebox family of digital audio receivers under Logitech’s reign—is utterly fabulous.

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Like all the cases in Antec’s Sonata line, the Proto is a consumer case with an emphasis on quiet performance. In fact, it’s virtually identical to its predecessor, the Sonata III 500, except for a few small details. It’s not a gaming chassis—it lacks such essentials as cable management, toolless bays, multiple fans, or a removable right-side panel—but it doesn’t claim to be. It does claim to be silent, efficient, and affordable. So is it?

The Sonata Proto is on the small side for a mid-tower chassis, at eight inches wide, 16.5 inches high, and 18.5 inches deep. Its frame and side panels are steel, with a plastic front bezel and door. The side and top panels are painted a mid-quality matte black, with a glossy front panel and door. The door hides the front drive bays as well as the power and reset switches, and both it and the side panel have barrel locks on them. The rest of the case is unpainted metal. It supports microATX, Mini-ITX, and standard ATX motherboards, although a full ATX mobo will leave your rig feeling cramped. The motherboard tray is not removable and does not contain cutouts for CPU cooling backplates or cable management. In fact, the left side and top panel are one solid piece of rolled steel riveted to the frame, thus making the job of installing a system much harder than it needs to be.

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Our notebook benchmarks had barely recovered from the wailing they took at the hands of AVADirect’s Core i7/SLI-wielding X8100 (reviewed June) when Eurocom’s D900F arrived to inflict further punishment. At least this time around they suffered a different set of injuries.

Eurocom’s 17-inch desktop replacement flexes its muscle in the form of a 3.33GHz Core i7-980X, making it the first hexa-core notebook we’ve tested. The humble 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo T9900 in our zero-point notebook didn’t stand a chance. We watched in awe as the D900F tore through the applications benchmarks with brute force. From its 450 percent lead in Premiere Pro to its 222 percent lead in ProShow Producer to even its 56 percent lead in the mostly single-threaded Photoshop test, the D900F was merciless. It even walloped the 1.73GHz Core i7-820 quad-core in AVADirect’s X8100, with leads ranging from 29 percent (Photoshop) to 225 percent (Premiere Pro).

Continue reading this review after the jump.