About Tehnology

Acer H235H

2009-12-15T12:58:00.005+08:00

The Acer H235H is typical of this class of displays: It’s based on a six-bit TN panel that uses frame-rate control to augment its color depth. The screen delivers 23 inches of viewable area at a native resolution of 1920x1080.

As with nearly all the monitors we tested, we found it necessary to make significant adjustments to the display’s brightness and contrast settings to make the monitor look its best with our DisplayMate benchmark software. But the five touch-sensitive buttons in the Acer’s glossy black bezel and the obtuse icons in its onscreen display make this process extremely frustrating; the onscreen icons don’t line up precisely with the physical buttons and it takes too many button presses to drill down into each menu choice. It takes five button presses, for instance, to make a single brightness adjustment.

H235 display looks as attractive in back as it does in front, with a removeable panel to hide the ports.

The H235H performed well in DisplayMate’s dark-screen test, with almost no backlight leakage around the perimeter of the display, but we noticed significant banding in the 128-step grayscale test. It also did a poor job of reproducing low-saturated colors against light-gray backgrounds.

The display had no problems with smearing or blurring in our Blu-ray movie and game tests, but poor contrast resulted in a significant loss of visual detail in the opening scene of Watchmen.

The Acer H235H’s features and performance put it in the middle of the pack, but its three-year warranty is unusual in that it does not cover the backlight.

HP w2338h

2009-12-15T12:54:00.005+08:00

Three-quarters of the way through our product-testing regimen, we saw HP’s unremarkable 23-inch display headed toward a verdict of 6 or 7. It has a couple of nice features—as well as a couple of odd omissions—but at that point we hadn’t encountered anything that would set it apart from the crowd either way. But then we came to the Extreme Grayscale phase of the DisplayMate benchmark and our eyes just about popped out of their sockets.

This test renders extremes in the grayscale, beginning with boxes of increasingly intense shades of gray displayed on black and then white backgrounds. The w2338h had no problems passing the first half of this test, and it performed as expected when we cycled through shades of blue, red, and magenta. But the monitor proved incapable of differentiating between any of the high-intensity shades of green displayed on a fully saturated green background. What should have been cyan boxes on a cyan background showed up as yellow, and what should have been yellow boxes on a yellow background were rendered green, instead.

The HP w2338h's stand is one of the features we do like. It tilts and swivels, or you can remove it entirely to mount the display on the wall.

We suppose we could attribute the w2338h’s poor performance to the fact that it’s based on an LCD panel that’s capable of delivering only six-bit color depth, and that it uses frame-rate control to simulate the production of 16-plus million colors; but we’ve seen a number of six-bit/FRC panels that didn’t exhibit the same problems we saw with this monitor. The monitor’s color gamut is limited to 72 percent of the NTSC color space, but that’s not unusual, either.

The rest of this monitor’s shortcomings seem minor by comparison, but we’re very critical of its mirror-like nature. We found ourselves perpetually distracted by specular reflections whenever there was a source of bright light behind our chair—including daylight passing through windows in an adjacent room. This was much less of an issue when we darkened the room and the only source of light was above the monitor, but those are restrictions we’re not willing to put up with. And while we welcome the presence of an HDMI port, we were surprised to discover that the monitor has a VGA port as well, but no DVI port. Adding insult to injury, HP doesn’t pack an HDMI cable in the box. VGA and analog audio cables are included, however, so you won’t be left completely high and dry when you bring the monitor home. Come on, HP, if you’re going to leave a cable out of the deal, why not omit the one that no one will use anyway?

The w2338h performed surprisingly well in our Blu-ray test, especially when it came to the many scenes in Watchmen that unfold in deep shadows. But the built-in speakers are so underpowered that we couldn’t hear much of the dialog even when we cranked the dinky 2-watt amp to its maximum output. We encountered the same problem while playing the dialog-rich Fallout 3. The audio issue wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there was a headphone jack that you could plug headphones or powered speakers into, but there isn’t one.

If you’re in the market for an inexpensive monitor, there are plenty to be had. Don’t settle for this one.

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus

2009-12-15T12:49:00.005+08:00

At first glance, the Hyper 212 Plus seems like Cooler Master’s original Hyper 212 with a different fan mounting system and support for sockets 1156 and 1366. But while the original had two sets of heat dissipation fins, one set for each end of the heat pipes, the 212 Plus adopts a more straightforward tower design, with the heatsink fins connected to both ends of each heat pipe. It’s the same basic and effective design seen in all of today’s top-performing air coolers. And unlike most coolers, the 212 Plus’s heat pipes contact the CPU directly. So, how do the Hyper 212 Plus’s stacks stack up against the competition?

The Hyper 212 Plus is one of the smaller air coolers we’ve tested recently—a big relief after last month’s monstrous Scythe Mugen 2. At 4.7 inches wide, 3.1 inches deep, and 6.2 inches high, the Hyper 212 is shorter than our champion, Thermalright’s U120, though it’s about an inch deeper. It’s also about a pound lighter, at 1.4 pounds to the Thermalright’s 2-plus pounds. Despite its relative lack of bulk, though, it managed to bump right up against the north-bridge heat spreaders on our EVGA 680i SLI board—a problem that would be avoided if the cooler’s fins started a half-inch higher up the pipes. To install the 212 Plus, we had to insert four standoff pegs into the motherboard and tighten them by bolting them to the backplate. An x-shaped bracket with spring screws at the corners holds the cooler to the CPU. We like this approach because it makes the cooler easy to install without having to worry about the backplate falling off, and the standoffs allow the use of shorter screws for the mounting bracket. Once the cooler was secure, we mounted the included 12cm fan using common wire retention clips—a simple task made difficult by the close proximity of the cooler to the north bridge’s cooling fins.

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus's heat pipes contact the CPU directly, which helps it compete with larger coolers.

The direct-contact heat pipes make the cooler/CPU interface less uniform than we’re used to—there are definite ridges between the heat pipes and the rest of the heat exchanger. But after testing the Hyper 212 Plus, we wonder if Cooler Master knows something the rest of the industry doesn’t, because the 212 Plus’s cooling power is formidable. At 100 percent CPU utilization, the 212 Plus cooled our CPU to 43.5 C, nearly 30 percent lower than the stock cooler’s 61 C. Our previous favorite, the Thermalright U120 eXtreme, by comparison, cooled it to 46.75 C. Idle temps for both coolers were nearly identical—about 15 percent cooler than stock.

We’ve seen a spate of top-performing air coolers in the past few months, as nearly every manufacturer hops on the skyscraper-design bandwagon, and Cooler Master’s entry is right up there with the best we’ve tested. And at $30 from Cooler Master’s online store, it’s dirt cheap. For that price, you really can’t go wrong with this cooler.