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).

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The Psyko 5.1 takes the idea of 5.1 surround sound in a gaming headset to its logical extreme. Not content with using two drivers to simulate 5.1 surround sound, the Psyko 5.1 actually packs seven drivers into the headset; five for directional sound, and two for bass. The Psyko isn’t the first headset with that many drivers, but the way it uses them to achieve its surround-sound effect is truly unique.

It’s a bit complicated to explain, but we’ll try: When gaming on a traditional surround-sound system, when a sound is played on the front-right speaker, the sound from that speaker hits your right ear a millisecond before your left ear, from the front. With the Psyko 5.1 headset, the same bullet sound would also be played primarily on the front-right speaker, except that now it’s located on the right half of the headband. The sound then travels through an acoustic channel, and is piped into the front of both ear chambers. Because the sound originates on the right side of the band, it hits your right ear first, producing the same effect as a physical speaker. Sound from the rear speakers works the same way, but is piped into the back of the ear chambers.

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3D Vision is one ace up Nvidia’s GPU sleeve that AMD doesn’t have an answer for. And if you enjoy 3D Vision on the small screen, you’ll really dig it writ large with Acer’s H5360 DLP video projector—provided you can accept the shortcomings inherent to the projector, Nvidia’s GPUs, and 3D Vision in general.

When it comes to putting an Nvidia GPU in your home-theater PC, the biggest drawback is that none of the green team’s cards provide the protected audio path needed to route encrypted HD audio to the card’s HDMI output. So if you want to hear the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks on Blu-ray movies—and you do—you’ll need to invest in a specialized soundcard, such as Asus’s Xonar HDAV or Auzentech’s X-Fi Home Theater HD.

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For years, if you wanted the speediest consumer hard drive you could get your hands on, you went with a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor. Its first incarnation, released in 2003, was a 37GB single-platter drive using a PATA-to-SATA bridge. The next year brought a 74GB SATA 150 drive, and thereafter the drives roughly doubled in size (and went up a SATA spec) every couple of years. Last time WD refreshed the line, it bumped the capacity to 300GB, named the resulting 100MB/s-plus drive the VelociRaptor, and promptly won our Kick Ass award. But that was 2008—several hard drive generations ago. And though Western Digital’s latest VelociRaptor ups the ante with 600GB of space and a 6Gb/s SATA controller, the drive now has to compete with solid state drives and high-capacity, high-performance drives like WD’s own Caviar Black series.

Make no mistake: The new VelociRaptor, with its 32MB of cache and 6Gb/s transfer rates, is the fastest mechanical SATA drive we’ve ever tested. With average sustained read and write speeds greater than 130MB/s, it’s fully a third faster than the last-gen VelociRaptor, which averaged around 100MB/s for both. Random-access times hit around 7.1ms—about the same as the last-gen VelociRaptor, and about twice the speed of a fast 7,200rpm drive.

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