One look at the Big Bang-XPower’s row of six x16 physical PCI-E slots tells you the board is special. PCI? Feh, who the hell needs that in 2010?

MSI has now also adopted the one-clip DIMM slots that let you easily remove RAM without having to pull out the GPU first. The board also includes a somewhat nifty wired remote to monitor system vitals and perform an overclock. Unfortunately, we found the OC Dashboard a bit buggy. While trying to crank up the bclock using the small device, we had to manually refresh the display in order to see the correct frequency.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

There’s a lot of history behind the Phantom lapboard (and its ill-begotten console progenitor) but we don’t need to go into that. What you do need to know is that the Phantom lapboard is essentially a wireless keyboard on a hinge. You can (and must) lock it into an angled position to use the mouse on the surface below and to the side of the keyboard. Now, this raises a question: Do you like typing on a keyboard that’s locked at a significant angle to the natural plane of your hands? Of course you don’t.

Also, about that mousing surface. It’s really slippery, and so is the mouse. And it doesn’t have any sort of lip on it. So if you’re thinking about relaxing on the couch and using the Phantom in any sort of natural position, forget about it. The second you take your hand off the mouse to type something, that sucker’s clattering to the floor.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

The Dell Streak is born into a hardware environment that desperately needs an Android-based tablet—or any kick-ass tablet that doesn’t run Apple’s “stop it now before it borgs the free world” iOS. Our current tally shows no fewer than 30 touch-operated tablets that could be launching in the next six months, and the majority of this freshman class of iPad killers will probably be running Google’s mobile operating system.

Indeed, hardware manufacturers from here to the back aisle ways of Computex want a piece of the tablet action that the iPad has so successfully proven out. As of July 21, Apple was reporting 3.27 million iPads sold, and, hey, we like the iPad as well. We also think we might like the open, unfettered platform of an Android-based tablet even better.

But is the Dell Streak even a tablet? See, it might actually be a smartphone. And as a smartphone, it’s got a lot going for it. But as a tablet, though? Um, no. Not so much.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

You might recall seeing three of HP’s ZR30w 30-inch displays gracing the cover of our September “Dream Machine” issue. Considering our theme for that build was raw, wanton power, picking the ZR30w was an easy decision.

We haven’t been this wowed by a display since we laid eyes on NEC’s LCD3090 WQXi, which we reviewed in our March 2010 issue. But that 30-incher costs nearly twice as much as this one. Both monitors are based on S-IPS panels, as all the best LCD monitors are, and both deliver native resolution of 2560x1600 (a 16:10 aspect ratio). But the ZR30w’s real claim to fame is color resolution of 10 bits per color per pixel (HP defines this as 30 bits per pixel), which enables it to produce 1.07 billion displayable colors. That’s 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut and 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut.

Continue reading this review after the jump.