There certainly haven’t been many exciting video cards released in the last couple of months, but today we are looking at the new Sapphire HD 6950 Toxic Edition 2GB which is supplied in a pre-overclocked state with a custom design. Is this an ideal upgrade for your next system?
As promised a few weeks back today we start the first out of our two August Contests together with our friends over at Antec. This is our 9th contest/giveaway inside 2011 and as always we did our best to secure 3 amazing prizes and make it open WORLDWIDE so anyone can participate.
As revealed in our review of the OCZ Revo 3×2 480GB SSD, there is something different on the all Revo 3×2's as can be seen in the picture below. It seems that some may have noticed that OCZ's Superscale Storage Accelerator got a bit warm in testing and OCZ followed suit to fix that right up with a heatsink as seen here.
Case and Cooling
USB 3.0 is here to stay folks. It leapfrogged eSATA and is reay to hold off SATA 3 for a little while at least. However, unless you want to fork out for a brand new motherboard, you're out of luck if you want to take advantage of this new speedy platform. However one way to go is to grab yourself an add-in card like this one from Silverstone, the EC03 which also comes with a front panel 3.5? connector.
The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 professional motherboard looks to be in a class of its own both in design as well as performance. Join me while I put this enthusiast class motherboard through its paces.
The Patriot Box Office Core or PBO offers maximum compatibility with various audio and video formats, the ability to play back full HD content and a very open firmware, allowing for custom and alternative operating systems to be used. We whip out a bag of popcorn to see if Patriot manages to bring to box office to our home theater.
You can see my own review here, and whilst I remain a stalwart HTPC user, I was very tempted by the Patriot Box Office.
The ASUS F1A75-M Pro is an mATX motherboard that harnesses AMD's new A-series Fusion processors. The ASUS F1A75-M Pro has multiple VGA output support and is capable of dual independent displays through the HDMI/DVI and D-Sub port. Powered by the new Hudson D3 chipset, the ASUS F1A75-M Pro natively supports six SATA3 6 GB/s ports, ten USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. Improving upon this design, ASUS has added a pair of USB 3.0 ports powered by an Asmedia USB3 controller and has equipped the F1A75-M Pro with 4 + 2 power phase DIGI+ VRM for excellent overclockability. Much like the new AMD Llano APUs, the ASUS F1A75-M Pro combines advanced and flexible DirectX11 performance with a smaller profile and energy efficient design, pushing the boundaries of mainstream computing beyond expectations.
