New Reviews

First a little plug for ModAsylum in general. They got hit by hackers and just recently came back up:

"Welcome back to Modasylum.Com. It's been a long road rebuilding what was left of Modasylum. As most of you know, Createspace fell victem to hackers. The server was hit pretty hard causing alot of things to go wrong. Among these failures was a kernel panic that whiped out the backup drive. The other drive was formatted by Peer1 network support before it was known that the backup drive was empty. This caused all information to be lost including the entire directory structure, and all databases."


With some PCMCIA cards literally being given away by some, they may be cheaper to use on your PC with this device:

"Overall, this device is top notch. Installation is a breeze, and the support for the new Cardbus specification allows for the latest in PCMCIA technology to be used in your home PC. The fact that the device supports hot-swapping of cards is also note-worthy, as this will prevent down-time when installing a new card, as powering down the system is not required."
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A pretty good FX5900 Review:

"The FX5900PV comes in a nifty carry case which through us for a loop as I thought Albatron had sent a notebook by accident! The Albatron GeForceFX 5900PV is packed securely in a block of antistatic closed-cell foam inside the nylon notebook style bag, which also includes a full version of Duke Nukem: MP, a five game demo/lite CD, Power Director and Power DVD among other items. Because the card supports VIVO, Albatron also a VIVO break out box a S-Video to S-Video, and a composite to composite cable. An analog to DVI converter is also bundled in with the package as well.Unlike 99% of the GeForceFX 5900PV Ultra's which are built by Flextronics (nVIDIA's board partner), I'm pretty positive that the Albatron GeForceFX 5900PV is actually built by Albatron. Albatron have always used a blue PCB for their videocards and the GeForceFX 5900PV is no different. As you can see Albatron uses a rather large copper plated aluminum heatsink that has three 'wise' fans (we'll get a bit more into that a bit later)."
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A case review:

"The rear fans come installed along with the door fan. The 3.5 inch drive bays are removable using a lever action lock which locks firmly. The lower 3.5 inch bracket has an 80 mm fan bracket in the front to ease the task of cooling those hard drives. The rear 80 mm fans connect with a standard 4 pin molex. I wish they had been 3 pin, but they do the job. The included hardware was more than enough to get everything screwed down."
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Extra harddrive cooling:

"This heatpipe cooler is simply four anodised aluminium bars that clamp onto ten pieces of heatpipes. These aluminium bars are suppose to touch both sides of the hard disk, so that heat can transfer to the aluminium bars and then to the heatpipe quickly. The surface area created by the heatpipe is as big as 400cm square according to the specification. The large surface area ensures that heat can dissipate to the surrounding easily."
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A motherboard review:

"The IC7-G is the answer to overclockers and fans of ABIT motherboards - particularly those who wants the performance of the Intel 875P chipset and ABIT's famous overclocking track record. The IC7-G is a well designed board (except for badly positioned IDE connectors) that should appeal both power users and beginners with its well-balanced range of features."
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Yet another motherboard review:

"Albatron has some onboard features that make them special compared to others. Their Bios Mirror makes flashing bios almost fail proof, since with a bad update you can go into the second bios and then re-flash the man bios. Their second feature is the Voice Genie. It's a diagnostic program that tells the user what problem has been encountered when something goes wrong. A Pretty cool feature compared to the plain old LED diagnostic found on some boards. The dipswitches control AGP protection, Bios Mirror, and the Voice Genie language selection. The AGP protection makes sure that the video card installed is either agp4x or agp8x. No older card could be used."

Trying to get the most out of your heatsink? Check this out:

"Ever heard about lapping? Well lapping is a process of making a heatsink flat. We want the metal-to-metal contact between the heatsink and CPU die and/or chip to become one..."