PC Components , coolers , cpu , video board , ram , reviews and buy

DRIVER San Francisco

2011-04-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

DRIVER San Francisco will be released on September 2

See entire news at www.upperplace.com/released

Eizo FORIS FS2331

2010-09-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

Eizo announced the FORIS FS2331, a 23-inch full high-definition (1920 x 1080 native resolution) monitor for home entertainment. “The FORIS FS2331 is designed to do many things very well at a competitive price,” said Minoru Kontani, senior manager of EIZO’s Overseas Sales & Marketing Department. “We expect it to appeal to a wide range of consumers who are looking for a stylish monitor on which they can enjoy gaming, watching movies, photo editing, and reading ebooks.”

The FORIS FS2331’s versatile connections include dual HDMI inputs to connect with devices such as Blu-ray disc players, HD game consoles, and computers. Up to four PCs can be connected at once using DVI-D (digital) and D-Sub (analog) PC inputs along with the HDMI inputs.
For home cinema viewing, the FORIS FS2331 offers several features for realistic moving image playback. EIZO’s ContrastEnhancer corrects gamma levels in both dark and light images to the ideal levels and raises the LCD panel’s dynamic contrast ratio from 3,000:1 to 10,000:1 yielding deep blacks and fine details in dark movie scenes. The monitor also features a VA (vertical alignment) panel with horizontal and vertical viewing angles of 178° and brightness of 300 cd/m².
Six preset modes are included to ensure the color settings are ideal for any application: Cinema, Paper, sRGB, Game, and two modes for user adjustable settings. Paper mode simulates printed paper and helps prevent eyestrain when reading ebooks or documents by adjusting the black level and reducing the contrast ratio.
Game mode activates two EIZO features called “Power Resolution” and “Power Gamma.” Power Resolution makes the details in both low and high resolution games look clearer and sharper. Power Gamma applies a special gamma curve to games and other animated images that amplifies the feeling of contrast to make them look more three dimensional. Other features that optimize the monitor’s performance for gaming are a gray-to-gray response time of just 7 ms and an input lag of less than one frame.
With the bundled ScreenManager Pro for LCD utility software1, any preset mode can be assigned to an application so that when the application is opened, the screen automatically changes to its assigned mode. This software can also be used for adjusting the monitor’s color settings with the mouse or keyboard instead of the OSD menu.

The FORIS FS2331 debuts a new cabinet design that features a long, narrow imprint that runs from side to side across the lower front bezel. The imprint is for affixing a red, gray, or blue color stripe so users can personalize the appearance of their monitor. The color stripes are included.
For amateur digital photography enthusiasts, this monitor is compatible with EIZO EasyPIX, an optional color matching tool for simple color matching between the monitor and photo prints.
EIZO EasyPIX measures and saves the monitor’s settings and creates a color profile. It consists of color matching software and EIZO’s EX1 color sensor. For photo editing, gaming, and other tasks where color display is critical, the FORIS FS2331 includes 10-bit gamma correction. This function uses a 10-bit look-up table with a palette of more than one billion colors to select the most appropriate 16.7 million colors for smooth display of color gradations without banding.
Additional Features

Remote control for access to the OSD, selecting the active input signal, adjusting volume, etc.

Dual 0.5 watt internal speakers and a headphone jack.

Auto EcoView brightness sensor that reads the ambient lighting and adjusts the screen’s brightness to the ideal level.

EcoView Index gauge that encourages environmental consciousness by indicating power savings from using Auto EcoView.

Energy Star 5.0 and TCO Displays 5.1 compliance.

Five-year manufacturer’s limited warranty.

CoolIT C240 ALC ECO

2010-09-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

CoolIT C240 ALC ECO

Earlier this year CoolIT introduced their ALC ECO. The ideas were based off the CoolIT Domino kit, a Standalone liquid CPU cooling kit. The ECO series however was improved and simplified on many levels. That product was quite a success, tagged with a launch price of 75 USD, and these days it can be found at 50 USD it certainly rocked the cooling arena a little.

The kits look nice and perform quite adequately as well. Liquid cooling is extremely efficient as it's a very quick way to transport heat away from the processor. That by itself has several advantages, the biggest one being the overall the temperature of your processor will go down much faster than say a traditional air cooler. Another good reason for water-cooling is the noise level. When done right you can keep the volume of the fan on a radiator really quiet creating a pretty inaudible experience. Last and most certainly not least is the most simple reason of them all .. it can look freakishly cool.

Though these standalone kits are pretty darn good, some of you would prefer to see a product based on not just that 120mm radiator/fan size, but a dual-radiator 240mm product. CoolIT listened, learned and adapted. As such a couple of weeks ago they started selling a dual-radiator (ALC ECO 240) liquid cooling kit. The products are all based on the ECO series, yet with that bigger radiator and two fans. This should help shave off another 5 to 10 degrees C of the processor temperature.

Over the next pages we'll dive into the A.L.C ECO 240, a new model located in that self contained water-cooling based segment targeted at an audience that like style and gimmicks. But don't let the looks confuse you, the performance and features of this little product are really good.

Cooler Master V6 GT

2010-09-13T22:52:00.000-07:00

Cooler Master V6 GT

The masters of cooling decided to freshen up their CPU cooling line and turn it up a notch. As such these rascals released a new CPU cooler that follows in the footsteps of the V8 and V10 CPU coolers from Cooler Master.

The all new model comes with two fans and an advanced heatpipe design. Next to that, Cooler Master implemented a V-shaped heatpipe array, asymmetrical aluminum fins (which are densely stacked for optimal cooling).

The V6 GT design provides 200W of cooling power, which should be enough for even the most enthusiastic PC lovahs, and definitely interesting to the Guru3D crowd -- we hear ya ;)
Branded with a V6 name, you can smell the automotive theme and design already. And somehow when you look at the cooler that definitely shows. To give it a little more of a niche feeling, the fans are covered by hoods, clip-on plastic covers. And when you press the Cooler Master logo slash button on top, you get nice LED lighting with three colors of your preference to choose from.

The copper pipes and heat spreader are nickel-plated and the cooler will fit all the latest processor standards: Intel LGA775, 1156 and 1366 as well as AMD's AM2, 2+ and 3.

GeForce GTS 450 1024 mb

2010-09-13T22:42:00.000-07:00

GeForce GTS 450

Based on Fermi architecture, the 3rd chip derived from the Fermi family of GPUs is now born. The GeForce GTS 450 series is to be based on a new chip. Initially the Fermi architecture that you have all seen on the GTX 465, 470 and 480 is based on the GF100 chip. Then the upper mid-range and very successful GeForce GTX 460 was based on the GF104, a smaller chip with less transistors (2.1 Billion to be precise), called the GF104.

The GeForce GTS 450 is based on the GF106, this is a less complicated chip to manufacture with smaller transistor count directly relates to better yields, better heat levels, better voltages and thus a better TDP as well. The GF106 has a transistor count of 1.17 billion, based on a 40nm fabrication process.
In the initial release this GF106 GPU will be used solely for one SKU, a GeForce GTX 460 with 768MB of graphics memory and the GeForce GTS 450 that is armed with 1024MB of memory. That memory is quad data-rate, gDDR5 memory that runs over a 128-bit wide bus.

The GeForce GTS 450 comes with 192 shader processors spread out over four Streaming Multi-processor clusters (SM). That translates into a Texture Memory Unit count of 32, and thus 16 ROPs.
The reference core clock frequency of this product is 783 MHz, the shader processors are clocked at a tact frequency of 1566 MHz, and the 128-bit gDDR5 memory has an effective data rate of 3600 MHz.
This package is intended to create a product that replaces the GeForce GTS 250 and will compete with the Radeon HD 5750 series.
The GeForce GTS 450 cards will be fully fledged DirectX 11 class cards with nice tessellation performance and the full DX11 API feature set. Though only a handful of games really show significant DX11 class quality, we really feel that if you are in the market for a new graphics card, DX11 is obviously the path to follow.

LED monitor Acer S243HL 24 inch 2 ms wide black

2010-09-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

Type LED display24 inches diagonalColor BlackResolution 1920 x 1080 pixels2ms Response Time170/160 degrees viewing angleBrightness 300 cd / m²TCO 03 standardsHorizontal Refresh Rate 30-80 kHzVertical Refresh Rate 55-75 HzIntegrated Speakers Yes15 pin D-sub interface2x HDMIWall mounting 100 x 100 mm

Acer corporation presented the new Acer S243HL – the first on the market LCD- monitor with dynamic contrast 8 000 000:1.

Acer S243HL is a 24 inch wide-screen monitor, hyperfine profile (less than 15 mm). Dynamic loudspeaker is built in the monitor, which adds special style and Acer S243HL use technology white light-emitting diode (WLED), which reproduce wider color s-band at the higher saturation level . In comparison with the traditional monitors with the illumination CFFL, the monitors S243HL allows to reduce the energy consumption level to 63%.

The monitor screen with full HD resolution (1920x1080) and 16:9 ensures the cinema effect with GHHD video.

Gigabyte X58A-UD9

2010-09-10T23:36:00.000-07:00

Gigabyte recently released one hot dish of a X58 motherboard. It is the performance oriented GA-X58A-UD9 motherboard, based on the X58 chipset and boasting features like a 24 phase (!) unlocked power design, 4-way graphics support including NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFireX, as well as a host of distinctive other features.

See, to date one of the most reputable processor series has to be the Core i7 based on socket LGA 1366. When that puppy was released merely two years ago (November 3, 2008) nobody knew that the first ever wave of Nehalem processors would be that strong and powerful. When Lynnfield (Core i7 on the 1156 socket) was released we certainly all loved the new processors, but leading by a significant amount in overall performance was still the high-end Core i7 965 and 975 processors.

PC COMPONENTS

2010-08-23T02:23:00.000-07:00

Scythe Ninja 3 CPU cooler
Scythe has been a name in the CPU cooler industry that is known for reputable but also unconventional cooling design. We've seen the weirdest forms, shapes and performance levels coming from these coolers. But overall, they have always been able to push out really interesting coolers, often to be positioned in the upper level of heatpipe coolers in terms of performance versus low noise levels

The all new Ninja 3 we test today is compatible with all current CPU and modern; AMD and Intel, Socket AM2 and AM3 in addition to Intel LGA775, 1156 - and 1366. The new cooler has a bit of an extra ordinary design, with four separate fin / heatpipe segments and a total of eight heatpipes.

The new setup of the aluminum fins, in cooperation with the eight U-shaped copper heatpipes marketed as M.A.P.S. (Multiple Airflow pass-through structure) guarantees high performance. This will get more clear in the photo-shoot though. According to Scythe, that translates into 7 per cent more heat removal compared to a cooler like the previous Ninja. The cooler is equipped with a 120mm-ventilator that can be regulated with the help of an included fan-controller in RPM from 470 to 1900 RPM with noise levels varying from 7 to 37dBA depending on your preference.

An improvement over the previous series is the new mounting system, Scythe marketed that up a little and calls it Super Flip Mount Back-Plate 2). The revised design of the back-plate offers increased compatibility.

The Ninja 3 is a big cooler at 120x120x160mm.

MSI GeForce GTX 460 HAWK

MSI is pre-overclocking this 1024MB HAWK model towards 780 MHz.

And then there's the overclock potential ... a new voltage regulation circuitry was embedded, allowing not only to play and tweak around with GPU voltages, nope ... they added voltage control for the memory and Auxilary/PLL voltage as well. As a result this board can get easily overclocked to 900 ~ 950 MHz, and if you are lucky maybe even 1 GHz.

OCZ RevoDrive 120GB

The SSD market has been explosively expanding ever since the past year or two. New technologies, new features and high capacity drives are key features in the evolving trend.

Anno 2010 we have however reached a bit of a bottleneck, fact is that while SATA 6G has been launched, the adoption rate is going slow. And that's next to the fact that all SSDs are still equipped with the lazy ass SATA 2 3G connector. Peak performance of the SSDs however is roughly the maximum of SATA 2, and as such we reach the upper limit in terms of speed and performance with the current NAND FLASH based SSD drives.

Sure in the future the SSD drives will become even faster with higher channel controller configurations and faster NAND flash, but meanwhile for the real freaks there are options. If 270 MB/sec is just not fast enough for you, then you can setup say two SSDs in RAID0, and nearly double up performance. Not a lot of people like that though, as RAID still is a dirty word somehow.
So the next best thing to lookout are PCIe based storage cards with NAND Flash memory. Pretty much two SSDs slapped onto a PCB, armed with a RAID controller. Pop it in, install the new storage unit and you'll have tremendous performance right off the shelves without the need to configure anything.

PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 Single Slot in 4-way CrossfireX

Look Powercolor HD5770 1GB GDDR5 Single Slot graphics card. Each Radeon HD5770 is clocked at 850MHz, has a 1GB memory partition running at 1,2GHz (x4 Quad data rate gDDR5) over a 128 bit memory bus. Each card comes with a Display Port, DVI-I and HDMI allowing much flexibility monitor wise.

Thermalright HR-02 CPU cooler

Thermalright is one of the bigger names in the CPU/GPU cooling industry, their products are reputable and often their reputation preceeds them. It was with much pleasure when we received a mail from them asking us if we were interested in checking out their latest and greatest of the Summer 2010 line-up.

Given the time we have available we opted to look at the all new HR-02 CPU cooler. Thermalright actually introduces this product as a passive CPU Cooler. The HR-02 is the second revision of the legacy Thermalright HR-01 cooler.

A newly designed heatpipe based cooler with six heatpipes and an amount of cooling performance that seriously caught us off guard. I think it's safe to say that the product we test today is easily one of the best products they have ever made, and armed with the right cooler you'll gain maximum performance while creating a near in-audible solution.

The cooler has a patented multiple support pressure vault bracket system, allow users to add pressure to the bracket system (40~70 lbs.), and have a more efficient and secure mounting (compatible with socket 1366/1156/775). You'll notice that the heatsink is all nickel plated to ensure the best quality and performance.