NZXT Phantom Full Tower Chassis Review and more

Many of you will already be fairly familiar with the Phantom, no doubt many more of you have desired one of these chassis’ for quite some time now also. NZXT have had a string of success with their current Phantom and Switch ranges, their flagship Phantom 820 recently earned one of our eTeknix awards and their Switch 810 and 810 SE both walked away with top honours too.

“But the Phantom has been out ages now, so why review it so late in its life” I hear you asking me, well its as simple as can be, a quick look through the eTeknix database and we realized this one was missed out on. Although this chassis may have been around the block a few times, it’s still just as popular as ever and with the price now around £70 for this premium grade chassis, there has never been a better time to actually buy one.

The Phantom range has been built with one focus in mind, enthusiast gaming systems. Sure it can handle almost any kind of system you wish, but its extreme and unique style, as well as its component capabilities lend itself to high end gaming systems perfectly.

The increased demand for affordable storage has strengthened the NAS market and companies like QNAP plan on taking full advantage of it. QNAP has been building some of the best NAS available on the market today and the introduction of the QNAP TS-669PRO is their idea of the middle ground for the SMB or… folks like me.

The TS-669PRO is a 6 bay NAS designed to offer the flexibility and the speed small to medium sized businesses, or the storage hungry review writers, need. Each of the 6 drive bays is capable of supporting either 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA III hard drives up to 4TB in capacity. This NAS features the same hot swappable drive trays as many other QNAP models and are therefore interchangeable. The TS-669PRO is equipped with a 2.13GHz Dual Core Intel Atom Processor and paired with 1GB of DRAM (upgradeable to 3GB).

QNAP firmware provides support for a bevy of RAID configurations; RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 5+hot spare, 6, single, and JBOD. With the implementation of hot swappable drive bays, you can replace a failed drive without powering down your NAS. QNAP also builds in RAID migration allowing you to migrate from RAID 1 to RAID 5 or any other number of configurations and with the RAID migration, the TS-669PRO features RAID capacity expansion allowing you to switch out smaller capacity drives with larger capacity drives to increase the amount of storage space.

While still a ways from being comparable to the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and OpenGL performance, the open-source GPU drivers found by default in the forthcoming Ubuntu 13.04 release are a big improvement over the out-of-the-box graphics drivers found in earlier Ubuntu Linux releases. The Ubuntu desktop is also faster thanks to improvements to its Unity desktop environment and Compiz compositing window manager. In this article are Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and a preliminary Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot. In this first article, the OpenGL performance of Intel and Radeon graphics are being benchmarked.

The Radeon and Intel graphics benchmarking of the recent Fedora and Ubuntu releases were done on two distinctly different systems. First up are benchmarks of the Radeon graphics stack from Fedora 17, Fedora 18, Ubuntu 12.10, and an Ubuntu 12.03 snapshot from the 21st of January. The graphics card used for all of this testing was an ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card from the Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition test-bed.

Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Fremont, CA, Vantec is a leading manufacturer and brand of computer accessories that provides a complete line of Storage, Thermal, and Mobile solutions. Vantec is devoted to every computer user from mainstream to enthusiast. Their goal is to provide a complete and affordable line of products for all computing needs. External hard drive enclosures are a dime-a-dozen. They come in all shapes, sizes, capacities, and colors with interface connections ranging from USB 2.0 and the new USB 3.0 to eSATA. However, very few hard drive enclosures let you untether from the enclosure itself and take your information to the cloud. Vantec’s latest edition to their NexStar external hard drive enclosure allows you to do just that by giving you the ability to access your data over Wi-Fi. You can access your data with any Apple iOS device or Android device with the download of a simple, free app, and with smart TVs as well as Wi-Fi tethering and gaming consoles. With such a large selection of compatible devices, the Vantec NexStar Wi-Fi hard drive dock has wide application potential. So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the NexStar Wi-Fi hard drive dock and see if this is the Wi-Fi enabled hard drive dock for you.

Like many other manufacturers, MSI is building brands to aid the development of their product lines. Over the past few Intel chipsets MSI have developed their Big Bang family, such as the P55 Trinergy, P55 Fuzion, X58 XPower, P67 Marshal, X79 XPower-II and now the latest, whilst devoid of the Big Bang part from the official title, is the Z77 MPower. MSI have coined this as XPower-IIs little brother, designed as an overclocking board to be paired with the MSI Lightning range of GPUs. As a result, the Z77 MPower is designed with the MSI Lightning Twin Frozr IV scheme in mind. Weve tackled one Z77 overclocking board already, so how does the MSI fare? Read on for the full review.