Posted 11/20/2009 at 11:30:24am
They just keep getting bigger and bigger. Now that CPU air-cooling manufacturers have seemingly settled on the skyscraper school of heatsink design, there seems to be a competition over who can cram the most cooling fins into the largest area. Scythe’s Mugen 2 air cooler, the follow-up to its popular Mugen series, is one of the largest coolers of this type that we’ve ever tested. But can it match the cooling power of its slightly smaller cousins, such as Thermalright’s U-120 eXtreme?
The Mugen 2 is a hefty hunk of a cooler, at 5.1 inches wide, 5 inches deep (with the included 12cm fan), and 6.2 inches high; it weighs nearly two pounds. It’s not the heaviest cooler we’ve ever tested, nor the most unwieldy, but its girth could certainly prevent you from installing it in all orientations on all motherboards. We had trouble fitting it in some orientations on our EVGA 680i SLI board—our usual preference being to install the cooler fan parallel with the rear exhaust fan. On our board, though, there wasn’t room; we resorted to attaching the cooler fan perpendicular to the rear exhaust fan. Thankfully, this didn’t seem to impact performance, as the Mugen 2 performed slightly better in our tests than the Thermalright U120-eXtreme—about 2.25 C cooler at both idle and full CPU burn.
Continue reading this review after the jump.
Posted 11/17/2009 at 12:00:18pm
Toshiba waited a long time to enter the netbook market, but as the NB205 proves, taking some time to learn from your competitors can be a good thing. The NB205 offers everything we expect from a netbook, as well as some unexpected bonus features, and does so for less than $400. We liked the NB205 when we used it in our netbook upgrading feature (October); here we give it a full review.
The NB205 has a matte-silver plastic chassis and a textured matte lid, available in blue, pink, black, white, or brown. We appreciate that Toshiba has bucked the glossy fingerprint-magnet trend here. The netbook is solidly constructed, with a color-matched glossy bezel and hinge. The included six-cell battery protrudes about a half an inch beyond the back of the netbook, and is slightly wobbly to the touch, but given the 6:45 (hr:min) battery life, a little wobble doesn’t bother us.

Continue reading this review after the jump.
Posted 11/12/2009 at 08:30:00am
You might think GPU and CPU upgrades happen quickly, but they’re practically glacial compared to the SSD market, where a platform can go from Kick Ass Award–winning performance to merely good in a few months.
Witness Kingston’s SSDNow V+ 256GB, essentially a rebadge of Samsung’s 256GB drive, to which we gave a Kick Ass Award back in July. The Samsung and Kingston drives, as well as Corsair’s P256 rebadge, all use 256GB of Samsung NAND chips, with the Samsung S3C29RBB01 controller and 128MB of onboard DDR cache to prevent random-write stuttering.
The SSDNow’s sustained average read speeds clocked in at 193.8MB/s, slightly higher than the OEM Samsung version but not quite up to the 209MB/s established by the 160GB Intel X-25M we reviewed in November. Its average sustained writes of 153MB/s trailed behind Indilinx-controlled devices like the Patriot Torqx, with its 175MB/s sustained writes, while the X-25M’s mere 79MB/s seem positively prehistoric by comparison.

Continue reading this review after the jump.
Posted 11/02/2009 at 02:02:23pm
Organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, are often touted as the next big thing in display technology, offering brighter colors, true black, lower power consumption, and better off-axis viewing than traditional LCD screens. They’ve popped up in gadgets from high-concept to mundane: The infamous Optimus Maximus keyboard, for example, utilizes many tiny OLED screens in its programmable and customizable keycaps, and both Sony’s new X-series Walkman and Microsoft’s new Zune HD have OLED screens. OLED technology has made great strides in the past 10 years, and cheaper and better manufacturing processes mean they’ve started appearing in everything from media players to phones to high-definition televisions—even keyboards. But what are OLEDs?

Continue reading after the jump.
Posted 10/30/2009 at 08:30:00pm
Everyone and their CPU-cooler-manufacturing mother are jumping aboard the skyscraper-formfactor bandwagon, hoping to match the performance of Thermalright’s Ultra-120 eXtreme and Noctua’s NH-U12P air coolers. Last month we tested Zalman’s attempt, and this month we have Thermaltake’s answer, the ISGC-300, one of a series of four ISGC-branded air coolers recently released into the wild. Thermaltake’s creative relationship with the English language is responsible for the ISGC moniker, which stands for “Inspiration of Silent Gaming Cooling.”
The ISGC-300 consists of a copper heat exchanger with four heat pipes running into a tower of 33 saw-toothed fins. At 6.24 inches high by five inches wide by 2.8 inches deep, it’s slightly shorter and narrower than Thermalright’s Ultra-120, but about a quarter-inch deeper. A 12cm white Thermaltake hydrodynamic-bearing fan is held onto the front using metal clips in a manner reminiscent of the Noctua NH-U12P. The nine-bladed fan is quiet and includes a variable-speed switch in lieu of a four-pin PVM connector. At its quietest, it’s nearly silent; at its loudest, it’s still damned quiet.

Continue reading this review after the jump.
Posted 10/28/2009 at 09:30:00pm
The guts of the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 are virtually identical to the IdeaPad S10 that we reviewed back in 2008—1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB HDD, and integrated Intel GMA950 graphics. The difference is the body. At 11.4 inches wide, this is one of the largest “netbooks” we’ve ever tested. The S12 has a 12.1-inch WXGA screen with a 1280x800 native resolution—far superior to the netbook-standard 1024x600, and much more usable. The glossy screen is impressively bright even at low LED-backlight levels.
The S12’s keyboard features large, comfortable keys and is a joy to type on, although as usual, Lenovo has mixed up where the Ctrl and Fn keys should be. The glossy black patterned lid and matte-black ABS frame make the S12 one of the best-looking and best-constructed netbooks we’ve ever tested, although the battery is a little wobbly and the lid is a fingerprint magnet. Both RAM and hard drive are easily accessible and upgradeable.

Continue reading this review after the jump.
Feature
Review
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Feature
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Twitter's Runaway Popularity Halts in US
Posted 11/13/2009 at 07:14:49pm
It's worth pointing out that these numbers are just the number of hits on Twitter.com, and don't include people who access Twitter via a desktop app (a la Seesmic or TweetDeck), phone, or even alternative web interface like Hahlo or Brizzly. As Twitter's userbase stabilizes a bit, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them move away from the vanilla access offered by Twitter.com and going for more of a feature-rich interface.
Lenovo IdeaPad S12
Posted 10/29/2009 at 04:09:38pm
The latter. We always refer to the MSRP at the time of the review, unless otherwise noted.
Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB
Posted 10/07/2009 at 02:18:44pm
They were the wrong benchmark charts. The correct chart never made it onto the final proof from the print edition. We ran a correction in the November issue, and made a note to correct the chart when we published the web review, but that note must have gotten lost in the shuffle. Fixed now; thanks for pointing it out.
Trending Topics: The New Internet Chat
Posted 10/05/2009 at 01:52:06pm
Well, she has a boyfriend, but you can reach her at (985) 655 2500.
Just don't tell her I gave you the number.
Rocksteady Thwarts Pirates with Gimped Version of Arkham Asylum
Posted 09/16/2009 at 11:25:15am
He's both.
How-To: Install RockBox on your MP3 player
Posted 08/05/2009 at 12:21:49pm
I used Rockbox firmware on my iRiver H120, a 2003-era 20GB hard-drive based player, for years. I'd still use it if I didn't have my iPhone.
So Long "Radio" -- Radio Shack to Rebrand Itself
Posted 08/03/2009 at 11:04:21am
"You've got questions. We've got batteries."
Comic-Con 2009: 10 Kick-Ass Sights from the Show Floor, Day 2
Posted 07/24/2009 at 06:27:00pm
Video: How to Build a PC - Every Step Explained
Posted 07/23/2009 at 06:40:53pm
The beard is power.
Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro
Posted 07/14/2009 at 06:29:05pm
Thanks for your insights into other cooler manufacturers. Believe it or not, we do listen to our readers - we have tested Thermalright and Noctua coolers in the past two issues, and they both performed very well.
As to the accusation that we are being paid or in ANY WAY compensated for reviews or opinions on coolers by Zalman, Thermaltake, Cooler Master, or anybody else, that is simply not true. Maximum PC takes its editorial independence quite seriously, and has not, nor will ever give coverage or tint our reviews based on advertisement or any other consideration. We are wholly separate from the advertising department and neither they nor anybody else have any say in our editorial content or tone.
If our coverage in the past has leaned more heavily toward certain manufacturers, it is because they send us review samples more frequently, nothing more. Since I took over the cooler beat in October 2008 I have endeavored to include more manufacturers than have previously been covered in our pages, such as Thermalright and Noctua, and found - as you say - that there are more, and better, coolers out there. Going forward there will be more reviews of products from manufacturers such as Scythe and Xigmatech.
Again, thank you for your input, but your insinuations of advertiser-influenced coverage are simply false.
- Nathan Edwards