Sometimes you go to war with the hardware you have, not the hardware you’d like to have, and that’s what newcomer Project War Machine does with its M1 Elite, making controversial trade-offs in the name of stability.

Click Read More for more. 

Normal folk are looking to notebooks as replacements for their desktop PCs. But you ain’t normal folk—you want power, flexibility, and upgradeability in your mobile rig.

Click Read More for more. 

Quick, call Maxwell Smart. We’ve identified a KAOS plot aimed at destroying American worker productivity. Now thanks to 3DConnexion, that evil plot to have 90 percent of Americans flying all over the globe using Google Earth—instead of working — just got easier, and thus more KAOtic.

Click Read More for more. 

We’ve used too many Jack Bauer references lately, but c’mon, how could we review this key and not say it’s the one Jackie boy would use?

The 8GB Flash Survivor GT, after all, is shock and water resistant—and if your service automatic runs out of ammo, you can even fling its hard aluminum body at someone’s head. But how does it perform?

Click Read More for more. 

Gigabyte cranks up the specsmanship for its GA-N680SLI-DQ6, which offers no fewer than 10 SATA ports and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Yep. Four. What you’d ever need four Ethernet ports for, we don’t know.

Click Read More for more. 

MSI’s new motherboard doesn’t have a mere heat pipe to wick heat from the chipset and voltage-regulator modules. It has a full-on loop de loop heat ride through the amusement park known as the P35 Platinum. Why include the crazy Circu-Pipe? We don’t really know, but it sure does look cool.

Click Read More for more. 

It seems that most people would want to use a high-def video recorder to document their growing families or Star Wars action-figure collections, but can a case be made for purchasing a low-res camera? At 640x480, the Flip Video’s resolution isn’t VideoCD low, but you won’t stun your family when you proudly display your movies on a 60-inch, 1080p set.

Click Read More for more. 

One thing we respect about Overdrive PC is that it’s never predictable. These guys seem to always take the path of most resistance.

In this case, Overdrive PC has constructed a rig whose sole purpose seems to be smashing our benchmarks. The company’s theory: Why go with a quad-core setup when you can push a dual core to higher speeds and guarantee stability? Since the overwhelming majority of applications aren’t multithreaded for quad core, why not push the hell out of a dual core?

Click Read More for more. 

Maximum PC’s mandate has always been that performance rules all else. But recently we’ve been harping about nothing but stability. It’s not that we previously ignored this area, but lately we’ve been inundated with rigs that have been overclocked so aggressively they make our standard benchmarks blow up within minutes. Because of this, our new message has been stability, stability, stability.

Click Read More for more. 

PowerDirector 6’s powerful features are handcuffed by a mildly frustrating interface. Unfortunately, the app just won’t let you easily tweak things, which is strange because the product seems aimed at pleasing the button-mashers.

Click Read More for more. 

SSD’s have been hyped up lately, but it’s not exactly a new concept. My first experience with flash-based storage was the then revolutionary Hewlett-Packard Ominbook 300. The Omnibook used a combination of ROM cards and an optional 10MB PCMCIA flash card for storage almost 14 years ago. That 10MB optional flash drive set you back $1,200 and performance wasn’t exactly stunning.

Click Read More for more. 

Make no bones about it, the MSI P6N SLI Platinum is a budget Core 2 board that gets you SLI for a song and a dance. It features the cheapest chipset available with SLI: the Nforce 650i SLI.

Click Read More for more. 

If you’ve seen one Nvidia 680i reference board, you’ve seen them all. Not so with Abit’s IN9 32X-MAX board, which thumbs its nose at the me-too crowd. The IN9 32X-MAX features Nvidia’s top 680i chipset, which gets you two x16 PCI-E slots for SLI, a third full-length x8 PCI-E slot for graphics, and support for unannounced, unofficial 1,333MHz FSB processors.

Click Read More for more. 

Ain’t technology wonderful? Just a few years ago our mouths were agape at 1GB USB thumb drives that cost $500. Yet here we have Corsair pushing the 16GB mark for $140—a mere $8.75 per GB.

Click Read More for more. 

It’s no secret that we’ve had nothing but headaches with overclocked quad-core Intel systems this year. The cause of the problems—be it heat, over-overclocking, or other—doesn’t really matter. Frankly, we don’t care. These systems are being sold to consumers who don’t want to know the shape of the piston heads in their engines—they just want to be slapped back into the seat when they step on the gas.

Click Read More for more. 

Team Flash can’t compete with Team Magnetic on desktop computers, but the flash guys may have finally found a competitor it can conquer.

Unfortunately for Verbatim, its new 12GB micro-drive USB thumb drive is the victim. The Store ’n’ Go USB HD Drive uses Cornice’s Dragon-2 12GB miniature hard drive. This sixth-gen drive features lower power consumption, a 40 percent smaller size, and a 300 percent capacity increase. It also features a motion sensor, so it won’t die if you drop it while it’s running.

Click Read More for more. 

You should have known it was a bad static-electricity day when balloons stuck to your clothes and your socks clung together as if they were made of Velcro. But you decided to pull the memory card out of your digital camera anyway, didn’t you?

Click Read More for more. 

On occasion, we’ve clicked a link we knew we shouldn’t have. And before we could say “virtualization,” the latest browser exploit was downloading some spyware onto our PC.

Click Read More for more. 

It has always bothered us that in the 23rd century Starfleet couldn’t do more for poor Captain Pike than that blinking light. Heck, he couldn’t even Morse code “Help me… Spock!” with that blasted chair.

Click Read More for more. 

If the InfoSafe is original Star Trek, all papier-mâché and paint, Transcend’s StoreJet OTG is the first Star Trek movie. It’s got better graphics but still has some issues.

Click Read More for more.