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.

OCZ Technology is on a roll. While most consumer SSD manufacturers are content to just slap the latest controller and some NAND into a 2.5-inch enclosure and call it a day, OCZ has been pumping out innovative products, from top-of-the-heap SATA SSDs to the blistering-fast (and stylish) USB 3.0 Enyo drive. Now it has introduced the RevoDrive, a PCI-E SSD in capacities from 50GB to 480GB. Though it’s not the first PCI Express SSD (Fusion-io’s been making enterprise-level PCI-E SLC devices for years), it is the first bootable consumer PCI-E SSD. OCZ claims the RevoDrive can hit up to 540MB/s reads and 450MB/s writes, which sounds like nonsense. But is it?

Continue reading after the jump.

As one of the few players in the all-in-one liquid-cooling market—which marks the midpoint between air-coolers and custom water-cooling loops—CoolIT’s coolers have to compete with Corsair’s Asetek collaborations as well as both other categories of coolers. CoolIT’s Eco A.L.C. cooler (reviewed June 2010) performed to within a few degrees Celsius of our champion air- and liquid-coolers, but its single fan was noisy and it didn’t significantly outpace our category leaders. The CoolIT Vantage A.L.C. has all the features of the Eco but adds an LED screen and a wireless receiver that will tie in with CoolIT’s upcoming Maestro control software. Can it match the performance of our category leader, the Corsair H70 (reviewed October 2010)?

The Vantage A.L.C. uses the same mounting system as the Eco—a three-position Intel Socket 775/1156/1366 bracket with backplates for each, plus an AMD bracket. The radiator is the same, though CoolIT uses a spacer to add a fan’s-width of space between the radiator and rear of the case, allowing for less turbulent airflow. The spacer is easily replaced with another 12cm fan if you want a two-fan configuration.

Continue reading after the jump.