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Videogame Myths Debunked

Novels, music, movies, comic books: they all maintain their own…

Motorola Droid 2 (and R2-D2 edition!) finally official: Android 2.2, Swype, $200 on contract

All together now: “Finally!” At long last, the leaks are…

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB

Slow secondary storage has been the biggest persistent gripe about PC gaming for quite a while now. While CPUs, RAM, graphics cards and system busses have all been improving at a steady rate; hard drives have stayed more or less stagnant for the past decade. Enter the solid state drive. At its most basic level, a SSD has the same basic structure as a USB flash drive: a bunch of NAND flash memory chips, a controller to tie them together, and an interface that talks to the outside world. Where a SSD pulls ahead is, naturally enough, in the performance of those three components. Today we'll be looking at the RealSSD C300 256GB SSD from Crucial. Taking advantage of the still-uncommon SATA 6.0 GBps interface, this drive promises to deliver blisteringly fast performance.

Sparkle GeForce GTX 465 Video Card

$500 is not much to pay for someone determined to have the best of the best video card, but this only describes a handful of well-off individuals. The rest of us have to make trade-offs; naturally, we want the biggest bang for our buck. Cards like the GeForce GTX 465 exist to fill that niche; they offer performance that's fairly close to their top-end brethren for a more reasonable price. Sparkle has sent us a card that looks to be gunning for that market of enthusiastic-gamer-who-isn't-filthy-rich, based on the GeForce GTX 465 using nVidia's reference design.

IN-WIN AMMO USB Hard Drive Enclosure

There are a lot of hard drive enclosures out there. No, really! Go punch "USB HDD enclosure" into Google or NewEgg some time, you'll be buried in them. This makes it rather hard for any one enclosure to have much success. Generally, the only way to stand out is to make it a funny shape, or offer some unusual feature. IN-WIN have decided to do both with the AMMO 2.5" HDD enclosure, shaping it like the magazine of an AR-15 and offering hardware-based encryption with RFID token-based access. Is this combination enough to make it worth your while? Let's find out.

GlacialTech Igloo 5760

CPU coolers are one segment of the DIY PC market where you're spoiled for choice. There are a hundred different companies marketing a thousand different coolers, all of them claiming to be the best solution for your needs. Today we'll take a look at the Igloo 5760, a multi-platform cooler from Glacialtech designed for the budget user who needs a bit more oomph than the stock AMD- or Intel-supplied units can provide.