Written By:
Date Posted: July 29, 2002
Introduction
AKASA is a name that's probably familiar to all of you. They are noted for there cooling products, being both good from a performance standpoint as well as being easy on the wallet. HSF's and hard drive coolers all help to lower temperatures but when it comes to case cooling one thing that is often overlooked is the cabling. Having round cables can help to increase the airflow in a case, which is why AKASA have saw fit to market there own. Now AKASA also go one step further here in that these ones glow in the dark. AKASA has sent us 2 cables here for review today, their Floppy cable and their 45cm ATA133 IDE cable. Different and unique, lets take a closer look shall we?
First Looks
First looks of the cables were slightly confusing to me. Glow in the dark materials are not something I go looking for everyday but last time I checked I thought they were green? These cables are not. Naturally of course, upon inspecting them for the first time it was daylight, so I didn't expect them to arrive glowing, but like I said I did expect to see some sort of green cabling.
What I actually saw was some very cool silver effect braided cables. Yep that's right, when there not glowing they look just as cool. The outer rubber casing is the luminous part and in clear daylight its translucent showing off all of the braiding inside. If you look at them in a shadowy area then there is a green tint to the translucent rubber, but I expected the green shade to be more prominent than it was. The next thing I noticed was at each end of the cables at the plugs was a "tag" notifying you of what the plug is.
In the case of the IDE cable, this displayed respectively Master, Slave and System Board. On the Floppy cable it shows FDD on both ends. On both cables, the tag markings also feature the AKASA logo and website address too. Another bonus here with these tags is that if you needed to remove the cables just a quick pull on the tags will unseat them. Certainly not a big deal, but it is easier and feels safer than pulling the cables out. I always personally feel with generic cables that one day I'm going to pull and leave the plug in the socket whilst having the rest of the wiring in my hand. So I like these tags for that purpose. After this I just had to see the glow in the dark aspect so like any kid with a new toy it was into the darkest room in the house to get a look. Well they certainly glow! I wasn't able to get a decent image of them glowing, so my apologies for that, but I can assure you they do glow and I shall try to describe it.
At first they were not all that bright, but after leaving them in direct sunlight for a few days the glow intensified noticeably. The green glow they give off is a kind of eerie green glow and looks pretty cool. It's also not so bright as to be totally distracting as obviously, it's not like you can turn the glow off. Another thing I'd like to point out here is that these cables are labelled as being ATA133 compatible. All in all, good first looks with nothing bad to report and even some extra's I wasn't counting on.
Next Page - Testing
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