Gigabyte Mercury Pro

In our last big case roundup (April 2007), Gigabyte’s Aurora 570 earned top marks for its excellent design and convenience as a chassis. But Gigabyte certainly hasn’t rested on its laurels since then­­—the company’s designers have gone back to the drawing board and given us a case that rivals the coolness of its predecessor. Gigabyte calls it the Mercury Pro; we would have named it the Monstrosity Pro if we were in charge. That’s because this case isn’t just a run-of-the-mill chassis. It’s a fully functional (armed and operational?) water-cooling/case hybrid. Take a moment if you need to collect yourself.

Both the 5.25-inch bay and PCI locking mechanisms are screwless, and they do an excellent job of holding your stuff in check.

At least, that’s how we felt in the presence of this case’s greatness. Typically, when water cooling is involved, we expect high levels of frustration and/or fluid leaking all over our expensive gear. But to our extreme satisfaction, Gigabyte has turned an otherwise irritating process into utter simplicity. For example, the water block stays the same regardless of your computing platform. Just snap a bracket over the top of the block and you’re good to go. It took us about one minute to switch from an Intel to an AMD setup—we spent far more time looking for the mounting bracket amidst the Gigabyte’s many accessories than we spent clamping the block to our motherboard.

Splitter valves at the top and bottom of the case offer plenty of room for expansion.

The cooling mechanism itself is Gigabyte’s Galaxy II water-cooling system. Rather than slapping this system to the side of the chassis and calling it a day, Gigabyte went to great lengths to integrate the water-cooling kit into the chassis itself. Ugly tubing runs alongside the framework of the case as much as possible, and we can’t speak highly enough about the six additional splitter valves Gigabyte includes in the case. They make for a stylish and handy way to add more cooling to your rig without having to disassemble the entire kit or, for that matter, spill even a drop of fluid.

Watch your liquid churn through the Mercury Pro's front panel.

Performance-wise, the cooler rivals some of the top all-in-one kits we’ve reviewed. It runs on a variable fan-speed dial, and we saw excellent performance on both its low and “cover your ears” setting. The cooler dropped our CPU to 40.5 C and 35.5 C, respectively, during full-burn testing, and 18 C and 15 C, respectively, when idle. Filling the system with fluid is as easy as holding a bottle over the case’s blowhole—a front-panel flow meter and tiny reservoir window show you exactly what’s pumping (and how much is left!).

Believe us, if we could find something about the Mercury Pro to criticize, we would. The Galaxy II does emit a horrible shrieking noise if it’s underfilled, but really, that’s it. This case rocks.

As always, Gigabyte gives you a choice between a windowed or grilled side panel.

NZXT Alpha

There are apparently two versions of the English language going around the technological world: One is the version manufacturers use when they say things like, “The NZXT Alpha also enables the user to fit large expansion cards like the Nvidia 8800 GTX.” The other version is the kind we use, where the word “fit” doesn’t suggest a large bucket of grease, a hammer, and profanity that would make a longshoreman blush.

If you're looking to build a screaming SLI or CrossFire rig, you'll have better luck using the box this case came in.

The blue LED fan on the Alpha's window adds some lovely coloration to the chassis.

The smallish size of the NZXT midtower case was obvious the minute we cracked the box, but we figured that installing a decent-powered gaming rig into the chassis wouldn’t be a total bust. And it wasn’t; it was just a hassle. The PCI holders aren’t your average combination of a screw and a metal tab. No, these holders have multiple notches and tabs that are meant to lock into the slots—obviously designed so the holder doesn’t accidentally fall out of your case. You know, when it’s not attached with a screw.

In actuality, you’ll likely break one or more of the tabs when you try to remove the flimsy metal holders from the Alpha. It’s a small concern if you never plan to build a second machine in this case or switch any PCI cards around. But that’s just silly talk. Nobody likes a gaping hole in the rear of their case, but that’s what you’ll end up with if you start futzing around with your PCI-based devices.

Have fun wedging an Nvidia 800 next to this neighboring drive bay!

Of course, the Alpha has an ingenious solution for this problem: It just doesn’t make any room for large PCI devices like today’s high-end videocards. If you try to put an 8800 GTX into the case straight on, it’s not going to happen. The videocard slams right into the case’s hard drive bay. It’s possible to get the card in there if you hit on the perfect combination of patience, deft angling, and brute force, but why bother? Once the hellish task is complete, you’ve got your card wedged in so tight that there’s no more than a fraction of an inch between the end of the card and the drive bays, and you still have to attach cables!

A strange benefit of the case’s miniature size is that airflow, for all intents and purposes, is perfect. The fresh breeze produced by the case’s two 12cm fans covers your motherboard just as well as it covers your videocard and hard drives. So feel free to pack your rig full of hot equipment—but not large graphics cards. The NZXT Alpha is, at best, an above-average case with a deal-breaking flaw.

Next: The Ultra m998!

You can purchase an Alpha with or without the side window; we recommend the former.

David Murphy Cooler Master 690

In yet another example of a design that likely looked way better on paper than in practice, we find ourselves struggling to come to terms with the Cooler Master 690’s more unique features. We can’t fault the company for trying; in some ways, we applaud Cooler Master’s attempts at distinguishing the 690 from the rest of its cadre in the crowded case market.

For all the 690 chassis does to improve your rig's wiring, the end result is hardly helpful.

The exterior of the 690 not only looks cool, the mesh accents throughout the shell also serve as a handy means of moving air into and out of the case. Arguably, this semi-open design might diffuse air you want directed at certain key components, but the quasi see-through paneling—especially when illuminated by a few LED fans—looks slick enough to silence such concerns. Anyway, with room for up to seven 12cm fans, the 690 is hardly lacking when it comes to air-powered cooling potential.

Correction: six fans. When you mount a standard-size power supply to the bottom of the case, you lose one of the fan slots outright. We’re baffled as to how Cooler Master thought that power supply cables and a 12cm fan could somehow coexist in the same physical location, but there you have it.

One hole is for the power supply fan; the other (in theory) fits a standard 12cm fan.

Speaking of cables, the 690 uses an interesting scheme for managing them. A series of plastic clips attached to the motherboard tray encourages you to route all your cables along a single, uniform path. This is supposed to minimize cable clutter. And it does. But it also hampers your ability to connect devices to your motherboard; the clips and cables along the route blocked access to our floppy connector.

Whoops.

Storing screws in this manner is unique. Too bad it doubles our work.

Yes, right now it’s only a floppy connector, but the minute we encounter a motherboard whose side-mounted SATA ports are rendered useless by the 690’s design, well, that’s the minute we’re tossing this case into the garbage. And it’s not just the motherboard that presents an issue. We had a little trouble getting our optical drive to fit amidst the cords of the top-mounted USB, FireWire, and eSATA connectors.

While the case itself is screwless, you pay for this luxury with the hard drive holders. Rails on either side of hard drive holder let you scoot your drive right in—that is, after you’ve spent time wrestling your drive into the flimsy, plastic sheath.
Sweet ideas combined with subpar execution: Welcome to the Cooler Master 690.

Next: Thermaltake Xaser VI (VG4000)

The beautiful grilled exterior of the 690 is but a pretty cover-up for the interior's flaws.

David Murphy Thermaltake Xaser VI (VG4000)

For a change of pace, we’ll start with our biggest critique first—literally, the biggest. Thermaltake’s Xaser VI chassis (the air-cooling-specific VG4000 model) is the Godzilla of cases. It’s heavy enough to make carrying it an awkward, hernia-inducing experience, and that’s before you slap a system inside. Heaven forbid you make full use of the case’s eight (?!) hard drive bays and seven (?!?!) 5.25-inch expansion slots. Add water cooling and you might want to invest in some wheels and a dolly for transporting the beast.

The Xaser VI is huge. Absolutely huge. Remember: Lift from the knees.

The Xaser VI is a screwdriver’s worst enemy. Save for the motherboard standoffs and typical fastening screws, you shouldn’t have to touch any kind of tool to assemble a basic rig in this chassis. In this respect, some parts of the case function far better than others. For instance, we love the mounting setup for the Xaser VI’s 5.25-inch bays. Removing the front-panel coverings is a one-second process, and you simply shove your device in from there. It automatically locks into place, and that’s it. No screws to tighten, no fasteners to fuss with.

You can remove the drive bays on the bottom of the case and replace them with an included fan!

The PCI holders attempt to follow suit, but they’re a bit more delicate and frustrating than their peers. We broke the very first fastener when we gently tried to remove it from the side of the case. When you do this—and trust us, you will—you’ll be forced to default to the old screw for locking your PCI card into place. It’s an ugly solution that makes us wonder why Thermaltake didn’t include some extra connectors in the accessory bag that comes with the Xaser VI.

The goody bag also lacks any extra thumbscrews for the exterior of the case. But in many ways, we wish Thermaltake would have eschewed these tiny screws altogether. The design of the case is such that the narrow thumbscrews you use for the panels are absurdly close to the case’s decorative exterior elements. So something that should be removable with your fingers requires the use of a tool, thus defeating the entire point of their existence. It’s a minor detail, but when 95 percent of a case is perfectly screwless, there’s no reason you should have to find a tool kit to start (or finish) your work.

An obscene number of front-panel connectors are hidden beneath a stylish push-top covering.

A top-loading storage bin and ample air-cooler support help fill out the list of excellent eccentricities on this fairly innovative chassis. The senselessness of the minor flaws make us hesitant to recommend the Xaser VI for general use, but there’s no denying that this is one of the slickest full-tower cases we’ve tested. A few touch-ups on the drawing board would make this one rockin’ enclosure.

Next: Gigabyte Mercury Pro!

Gaudy or otherwise, Thermaltake knows how to run with a design theme.

Michael Brown Asus EAH 3870

AMD has pulled a rabbit out of its hat by transforming the near-debacle that was the R600 architecture into a serious mainstream contender: The Radeon HD 3870.

The new GPU delivers several important features left out of AMD’s previous best effort: the Radeon HD 2900 XT. The most important of these is the inclusion of AMD’s Unified Video Decoder, which offloads all high-definition video decoding chores from the host CPU. The new part supports HDCP on both DVI links, too, so Blu-ray and HD DVD movies can be displayed at the native resolution of a 30-inch panel. There’s also support for new technologies such as PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1, although it remains to be seen how important these features will be in the near future. (Nvidia’s new 8800 GT is also PCI Express 2.0 compliant, but it doesn’t support DirectX 10.1.)

Asus’s EAH3870 is the first retail board we’ve examined that uses the 3870 part, and we’re impressed: It’s been a while since we’ve been able to laud anything other than an Nvidia-based videocard with a Kick Ass award. This card is not only powerful, it’s also affordably priced at $260 (and includes the first-rate game Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts).

AMD promises we’ll see other cards based on this GPU selling for $220, but those will likely come with reference-design clocks. In this case, Asus bumped the 3870’s core clock speed to 851MHz and the card’s 512MB of GDDR4 memory to 1.143GHz (from AMD’s reference-design speeds of 775MHz and 1.125GHz, respectively). Asus had just begun shipping these cards and was able to provide us with only one, so check MaximumPC.com for an updated review with CrossFire numbers.

Great job, AMD! Now get back into the lab and build a new GPU that can compete at the high end of the market.

Consumers finally have a real choice in GPUs. The Radeon HD 3870 at the heart of Asus’s EAH3870 is a genuine contender.

Asus EAH 3870
www.asus.com

Aces

Unified Video Decoder; PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1support; affordable. AMD's first card in a while that can compete with Nvidia.

Deuces

Not as fast as the 8800 GT in DirectX 9.

Windows XP (DirectX 9)
	EVGA E-GeForce 8800 GT SSC	ASUS EAH3870 (Radeon HD 3870)
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	30.0	24.6
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	22.9	21.3
World in Conflict (FPS)	32.0	22.0
Lost Planet (FPS)	34.3	23.4

Windows Vista (DirectX 10)
	EVGA E-GeForce 8800 GT SSC	ASUS EAH3870 (Radeon HD 3870)
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	28.0	24.0
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	22.3	21.3
World in Conflict (FPS)	20.0	23.0
Lost Planet (FPS)	22.0	24.2
Best single-GPU score bolded. AMD-based cards tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs and 2GB of Corsair DDR RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks performed at 1920x1200 resolution on ViewSonic VP2330wb monitors.

Katherine Stevenson Asus BC 1205PT

So your DVD burner is getting a little long in the tooth and you’re ready for an upgrade, but you’re not all that keen on adopting next-gen tech. And who can blame you? Even the falling price of hardware doesn’t make up for the relatively slow burn times, costly media, and compatibility issues that plague Blu-ray burners (and the same would be true of HD DVD burners if you could even find them!). Trouble is, you’ve got a brand-new 27-inch LCD that’s just begging to display high-def movies. What’s a consumer to do? Well, you could buy a combo drive—one that lets you read next-gen discs and write data to fast, friendly CD and DVD, like the two models we review this month.

With Asus’s BC-1205PT you get to read high-def discs, but only if they’re of the Blu-ray variety, so you’ll want to have a strong affinity for that format (and its affiliated movie studios) to take the plunge. Because while you do save money by forgoing the ability to write to Blu-ray, the BC-1205PT still isn’t cheap. It’s a couple hundred dollars more than a high-performance standard DVD drive, and its DVD burn performance is far from top-notch.

The BC-1205PT is rated at 12x for DVD+/-R write speeds—a good deal slower than today’s top DVD burners, now at 20x, and not surprisingly, burn times take a hit. It took us 7:12 (min:sec) to fill a single-layer DVD+R with the BC-1205PT, compared to the 5 minutes flat it took our favorite drive, Samsung’s SH-S203B (reviewed October 2007). Burning to a double-layer DVD, the Asus drive maintained a 3.96x average speed and filled the disc in 27:09, more than twice the time it took our Samsung. Only when burning to DVD-RW media did the Asus and Samsung perform on par, writing 4.38GB to a single-layer disc at 15:07 and 14:31, respectively. When reading data from all of our test discs, Asus’s drive had notably slower seek times than both the Samsung and the LG GCC-H20L reviewed here.

Middling performance aside, the BC-1205PT offers a SATA interface, the CyberLink BD Solution suite for playback and burning chores, and a simple, black face plate.

You’ll get to watch high-def movies with Asus’s BC-1205PT, but only if they come on a Blu-ray disc.

Michael Brown EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC

Previous generations of Nvidia GPUs (AMD’s, too) presented buyers with a difficult choice: You could get great 3D performance for gaming or you could offload high-definition video decoding from the host CPU, but you couldn’t have both. Nvidia’s 8800 GT not only changes that situation, it does so at a competitive price.

The 8800 GT delivers stronger 3D performance than the industry’s previous sweet spot (the 8800 GTS with a 320MB frame buffer), it delivers more memory than that board, and it clubs AMD’s far-more expensive Radeon HD 2900 XT over the head for good measure (although AMD has responded with the Radeon HD 3870, see page 80). Nvidia managed to cram 754 million transistors into this beast thanks to a die shrink and a 65nm fabrication process (previous 8800-series GPUs were manufactured using a 90nm process).

The new part packs 112 stream processors, 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface into a GPU that requires a single-slot cooler (the fan howls like a banshee on startup but goes whisper-quiet as soon as Windows launches). Reference-design boards will run their cores at 600MHz and their memory at 900MHz; EVGA pumps these numbers to 700MHz and a cool 1GHz, respectively. The company also commands a premium price for the speed boost: While the average price for more typical boards was running around $270, this SSC Edition was fetching $330 at press time.

As mentioned above, the new GPU is capable of offloading the entire HD decode process from the host CPU, and it also provides HDCP decryption on both DVI links. This latter feature renders the chip capable of displaying Blu-ray and HD DVD movies at the native resolution of a 30-inch LCD. It’s also compliant with PCI Express 2.0 (see the White Paper on page 72 for more details). We didn’t test this card in that type of motherboard—no one’s shipping one in an SLI configuration just yet—but the new architecture offers double the bandwidth of PCI Express 1.1 (8GB/s in each direction).

AMD moved to GDDR4 memory several iterations back, but Nvidia continues to stick with GDDR3—and the decision doesn’t seem to be costing its cards anything in terms of performance. Interestingly, AMD has retreated from its 512-bit memory interface, building a 256-bit interface into the 3870 (same as the 8800 GT). But there are still two other features that could hold the 8800 GT back when it comes to competing with AMD’s Radeon 3870: First, these cards have only one SLI connector. Nvidia’s other cards, from the 8800 GTS on up, have two SLI connectors, even though only one of them is used in dual-card mode. Why worry about it? Nvidia will inevitably debut an SLI version that enables you to run more than two GPUs on one motherboard (remember quad SLI?), and that’s why the other cards have two SLI connectors. You’ll never be able to run more than two 8800 GTs in one box.

The other advantage AMD will soon offer is the ability to run more than one monitor in CrossFire mode, although that will likely require AMD’s new RD790 chipset (which hasn’t been released). Nvidia’s SLI system shuts off the second monitor when running in SLI mode (as does the current version of CrossFire).

While we’re looking at the future, we should also consider the fact that, unlike the Radeon HD 3870, the 8800 GT does not support Microsoft’s Direct3D 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. Given the tepid response that most developers have given Windows Vista, and Microsoft’s continued insistence on tying DX10’s fortunes to its new OS, we don’t think this shortcoming matters much at all.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to unabashedly recommend a videocard priced this low. We just couldn’t get excited about the anemic 8800 GTS; and until now, AMD has had nothing meaty to offer. But the 8800 GT is an absolutely fantastic value, delivering great gaming performance and features that can’t be found in Nvidia’s higher-end boards. If you can swing the price, you’ll get a better gaming experience from a GeForce 8800 GTX or an Ultra (although we don’t think the latter is worth its premium); but if you’re rolling with a lower budget, the 8800 GT is a slam-dunk winner.

EVGA pumped up the 8800 GT’s core and memory clocks, but it’s sticking with a reference-design cooler.

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC
www.evga.com

Old Potrero

Scorching gaming performance; complete solution for HD-video decoding; fabulous price.

Old Granddad

Only one SLI connector; no support for DX10.1.

Microsoft Sidewinder Gaming Mouse

We like fancy gaming mice. We like them for their super-accurate sensors, their adjustable resolutions, and the veritable cornucopia of buttons that grace their frames. But above all, a gaming mouse has to remain comfortable during marathon wrist-crippling gaming sessions, which is where the new Sidewinder really falls apart.

You see, this mouse is just too big. It’s not as though we have tiny, inadequate hands. Really, we don’t. We all have large, extremely manly hands. However, even with our giant meathooks, this mouse is too wide.

What makes it difficult to give this mouse a poor verdict is that we quite like its shape and many of its features. Its sensor is remarkably accurate—and includes the now-standard shift-on-the-fly sensitivity that we’ve come to love. Its button placement is quite good, too, and we really dig the vertically arrayed thumb buttons. Unlike mice that have horizontally mounted thumb buttons, the Sidewinder’s buttons are easy to distinguish from each other and painless to press. And we love the built-in screen, which shows you exactly what mouse sensitivity you’ve set. We even appreciate the macro software, which lets you perform instant 180-degree turns and other custom maneuvers with a single button-press.

The mouse also comes with a weighted box, which keeps the mouse cord from flopping all over your desk. It’s a little gimmicky, but a nice gimmick nonetheless. Without a doubt, the Sidewinder’s interchangeable mouse feet are our favorite feature. The mouse ships with three sets of feet, each with a different level of smoothness. We love this and hope to see it on more mice. There’s nothing worse than wearing out the Teflon pads on an $80 mouse.

While the buttons feel just right, the wheel leaves something to be desired. Its action is too stiff, and it’s difficult to click the mouse wheel without accidentally scrolling the mouse.

Unfortunately, the wonky scroll wheel combined with the monstrously oversized frame means this mouse won’t be living in our house.

It looks good, but the Sidewinder's oversized design isn't good for people who have normal-sized hands.

Coolink Silentator

We’re always suspicious of cooling devices that promote their silent functionality. Quiet devices tend to use less-powerful fans or run normal fans at painfully slow speeds. And while this can do wonders for one’s hearing and general peace of mind, our reasonably noisy stock AMD cooler performs much better than the quieter devices we’ve tested.

So when a cooler comes in with the word “silent” right in its name, you can understand our skepticism regarding the product’s potential for heat removal. But Coolink’s Silentator CPU cooler survived a thorough round of Maximum PC heat testing. Better still, it outperformed our low expectations to establish itself as a solid cooling option. The Zalman CNPS9700 still retains its title as our cooling champion, but we wouldn’t mind strapping the Silentator into one of our rigs as a second option.

Installing the Silentator isn’t the most challenging process, though it is rather involved. We had to remove the cooler’s fan just to mount the cooler onto our FX-60, which isn’t a huge problem, but it definitely adds time to the process. You can, however, adjust the cooler’s direction so that air flows either horizontally or vertically, a nice touch.

We were more willing to stomach the installation after seeing the Silentator’s performance. In fact, we even reran the benchmarks to ensure that there wasn’t anything funny going on with the test rig. But the Silentator’s score held true; the Zalman is still The Hulk of cooling power, but we’d let the Silentator into our secret superhero club any day. It cools nicely, with the added bonus of being far, far quieter than the “Rock You Like a Hurricane” Zalman cooler.

The Silentator will never be as awesome as its noisy neighbors, but it balances cacophony and cooling quite nicely.

The Silentator is big, but less bulky than the bigger-than-your-head models we're used to seeing.

Coolink Silentator
www.coolink-europe.com

Dave's Secret Superhero Club

Excellent performance. Quiet too!

No Homers Club

Not quite the cooling power of louder models.

Benchmarks
	Stock Cooler	Coolink Silentator	Zalman CNPS9700
Idle (C)	46.5	36.5	31.0
100% Load (C)	63.0	49.5	42.0
Best scores are bolded. Idle temperatures were measured after 30 minutes of inactivit, and full-load temps were measured after running CPU Burn-in for one hour.

Cooler Master Cosmos

Consider this month’s batch of case reviews to be a second chance of sorts, as both companies highlighted this month have previously built total clunkers. Cooler Master threw down the iTower 930 in February, which was the functional equivalent of bringing a wiffle bat to a gunfight. And NZXT troubled us with the Adamas—which sported a relatively mediocre design when stacked up against its competitors.

We tipped our reviewing hand when we chose this case to house last month’s Dream Machine. But that’s just how sweet the Cosmos is. This case looks as good as it functions, and there’s nary a blemish in either area. More important, the case retains enough of a unique look and feel to distance itself from the bevy of generic models we frequently see.

You don’t need to grab a screwdriver to make major changes to any parts in the Cosmos case (aside from the motherboard). The five front 5.25-inch bays use an awesome push-button locking mechanism that, to date, is the best we’ve come across. Tiny thumbscrews hold the six hard-drive trays in place—an elegant improvement over standard drive bays.

The Cosmos caters to the water-cooling crowd with its ready-for-a-radiator ceiling grills, but lovers of the air won’t be left out. A detachable 12cm fan bunker pulls in air from the bottom of the case, and a plastic bar running horizontally across the case draws cool air right into the videocard area. Strangely, there’s no airflow across the hard drives in this case, one of the very few oversights we were able to find with the Cosmos.

A lack of functioning drive-activity lights on the case’s front panel is another stinger, but it’s not enough to destroy the taste of this sweet, sweet chassis.

The Cosmos's smooth, foam-backed side panel is awesome, but we wish Cooler Master had included a side window as well.

Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX

It’s hard to look at Thermaltake’s Big Typhoon VX cooler and not think one of two things: the most horrific joke you can make about size mattering and the current market price of the Dremel you’ll need to cut a hole in your case to make room for this Godzilla of a cooler.

We kid, but only a little. The cooler’s 10.3 centimeters of bulky height already makes it quite a space-filler in your rig, but the Big Typhoon’s size is amplified by the chunky 12cm fan that rests on top of the device’s six heat pipes. Strapping this sucker to a CPU reminds us of those times in SimCity when we would flatten some poor Joe’s house to make way for the Eiffel Tower or something equally grand.

But there’s nothing to joke about when it comes to the Big Typhoon’s performance. It sucks a serious amount of heat from your processor, joining the ranks of our ever-favorite Zalman CNPS9700 as one of the best air coolers we’ve tested. While the baseline temperature of our stock cooler varied during the testing of the CNPS9700 and the Big Typhoon, both devices cooled our FX-60 by near-identical amounts during our burn test—about 12C. To its credit, the Big Typhoon also comes with a fan-speed adjuster. And even at its lowest setting, the device still does an amazing job. We don’t often see quiet-mode coolers beating our processor’s default stock cooler. Usually when we lower fan speeds to a silent setting, processor temperatures go up, not down.

But getting this cooler on the CPU is the real treat. Snapping the single clip across the device’s base takes all of 10 seconds, easily the fastest installation of any air cooler we’ve seen. Were it a bit less bulky, the Big Typhoon VX would be gusting its way to a Kick Ass for sure.

The Big Typhoon VX is big, but not necessarily beautiful. However, it sure gets the job done.

Thermaltake, Big Typhoon VX
www.thermaltake.com

Cool as Ice

One of the best air coolers we've ever tested. And it's pretty quiet.

Mr. Cool ICE

It's friggin' huge.

Benchmarks
	Stock Cooler	Big Typhoon VX (Low)	Big Typhoon VX (High)
Idle (C)	39.5	32	30
100% Load (C)	54.5	46	42
Best scores are bolded. Idle temperatures were measured after 30 minutes of inactivit, and full-load temps were measured after running CPU Burn-in for one hour.

XFX 8800 Ultra XXX Edition

ATI and Nvidia have long entertained us with their game of GPU one-upmanship. Each time ATI thought it had a part that could beat Nvidia, Nvidia moved the goalposts. But now that ATI has been reduced to an AMD brand, it seems its engineers no longer want to play.

Nvidia’s 8800 GTX was already the fastest consumer GPU on the planet, so what does the 8800 Ultra get you? Virtually the same hardware running at higher clock speeds—insanely higher clock speeds in the case of XFX’s XXX Edition. Although Nvidia tells us this is new silicon—and not merely hand-selected parts that proved capable of running at higher clock speeds—the Ultra has 128 stream-processing units and a 384-bit interface to 768MB of memory, just like the older part. It also has a much larger fan to handle the resulting heat.

The core on a stock GTX runs at 575MHz (with its actual shader units clocked at 1.2GHz), and its memory hums along at 900MHz. A stock Ultra is spec’d to run at 612MHz (with a 1.5GHz shader clock), and its memory runs at 1.08GHz. XFX has goosed those rates even higher, cranking its Ultra XXX Edition up to blistering speeds with a 675MHz core, a 1.67GHz shader unit, and 1.15GHz memory clock speeds.

But that awesome speed comes at a cost: Until now, we’ve been pleased with the relative quiet at which Nvidia’s GPUs run. The Ultra changes all that—the fan on a single XFX card is loud enough to wake the dead. Put two of them inside a box and you can stir an entire cemetery.

We rarely complain about a component’s price if it delivers impressive performance, but we have to draw the line somewhere. The Ultra is spectacular, but then, so is the GTX. And while the average GTX cost about $585 at press time, the price for this particular Ultra hovered around $875. Can you say “diminishing returns”?

Yes, the 8800 Ultra XXX is fast. It's also crazy expensive and stupid noisy.

XFX, 8800 Ultra XXX
www.xfxforce.com

Dawn of the Dead

Runs fast. Very very fast.

House of the Dead

Hella expensive, damn loud.

BENCHMARKS
	ASUS 8800 GTX (stock clocks)	Single XFX 8800 Ultra	XFX 8800 Ultra SLi
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	25.8	33.1	58.0
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	23.7	30.2	52.4
Quake 4 (FPS)	92.1	112.4	164
Fear (FPS)	69	95	145
Supreme Commander (FPS)	24.7	32.4	38.6
Best single-card performance scores are bolded. cards were installed in an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard with a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM.

MSI P35 Platinum

MSI’s new motherboard doesn’t have a mere heat pipe to wick heat from the chipset and voltage-regulator modules. It has a full-on loop de loop heat ride through the amusement park known as the P35 Platinum. Why include the crazy Circu-Pipe? We don’t really know, but it sure does look cool.

The board itself is based on Intel’s new P35 chipset (aka Bearlake), so it will work with the next generation of Intel processors. Although there are two x16 PCI-E slots, dual-graphics support is limited to AMD’s Radeon parts, as Nvidia still won’t unlock any SLI license for non-nForce desktop chipsets.

MSI goes beyond a simple power LED by integrating a multi-LED array that helps you diagnose POST issues. The company did make a few design gaffes though. MSI broke the usual front-panel header array into two rows that are somewhat confusing; they look almost like FireWire or USB headers. Another rookie move: One of the SATA ports will be blocked if you run a double-wide graphics card.

Board layout isn’t our major concern with the P35 Platinum though, performance is. Using the same RAM, drivers, and components we used in our last mobo shoot-out, we found the P35 Platinum lagging in RAM tests by a serious margin. We also saw problems crop up in our Valve Particle test, which is particularly sensitive to RAM latency. Though we suspect a simple BIOS update could fix our problems, we’d rather go with another P35 board for now.

MSI's P35 Platinum mobo is feature-packed, but a little cramped. Cool heat sink, though.

MSI, P35 Platinum
www.msicomputer.com

Space Mountain

Guaranteed to work with next-gen Intel CPUs.

The Grizzly

Some SATA connectors blocked by double-wide GPUs.

BENCHMARKS
Chipset	Intel P35
RAM Speed	DDR2/800
Sisoft Sandra XI (MB/s)	6,098
3DMark2001 SE Overall	6,689
3DMark2003 Overall	23,953
3DMark2005 CPU	8,670
PCMark05 CPU	5,997
PCMark05 RAM	5,394
PCMark05 GPU	8,618
PCMark05 HD	6,200
Valve Particle Test	35
Fear 1.07 (FPS)	207

We used a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to 2.33GHz on a 1,333MHz front-side bus, 2GB of Corsair DDR2 and 2GB of Corsair DDR3, a WD GD740 drive, a GeForce 7900GTX, a 1KW PC Power and Cooling PSU, and Windows P Professional. Intel boards were tested with AHCI modes enabled.

Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6

Gigabyte cranks up the specsmanship for its GA-N680SLI-DQ6, which offers no fewer than 10 SATA ports and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Yep. Four. What you’d ever need four Ethernet ports for, we don’t know.

The N680SLI-DQ6 also sports a honking heat pipe that actually wraps around to the back of the motherboard to a heatsink. Layout FUBARs are kept to a minimum, but some may squawk about the four SATA controllers on the bottom edge that could conflict with running SLI with double-wide cards.

One “feature” we will never understand, however, is Gigabyte’s insistence that it hide access to some critical system settings in the BIOS. You can’t set the RAM timing simply by going into the BIOS. You have to use the secret CTRL-F1 sequence that isn’t documented in the manual. Unless you’re Indiana Jones and you stumble on the secret you’ll never know it exists. Bah.

Using the same hardware setup we’ve utilized in our last five motherboard reviews, the Gigabyte was quite speedy in our benchmarks. In our synthetic memory tests, it squeaked past the MSI P6N SLI Platinum (reviewed in July) as well as the two other P35 boards we’ve tested (reviewed in August). The N680SLI-DQ6’s worst performance came in the hard drive section of PCMark05—it came in dead last in disk I/O. That’s odd since the 650i chipset in the MSI board sports pretty much the same SATA controller. The board also ran slower than the lesser nForce boards in our Valve Particle test. As we’ve noted, this test seems more sensitive to latency, which we didn’t expect to be a problem since the RAM was manually set for both of the boards. As with the MSI P35 board, a BIOS update may be needed, but overall, performance was quite good.

Who says a heat pipe has to be boring? Gigabyte's GA-N680SLI-DQ6 lets it all hang out with heat pipes lifted straight out of Wally World.

Gigabyte, GA-N680SLI-DQ6
www.gigabyte.com.tw

Giant Dipper

Craploads of SATA ports; pretty speedy.

The Matterhorn

Realtek audio still doesn't work with EAX.

BENCHMARKS
Chipset	Nvidia nForce 680i SLI
RAM Speed	DDR2/800
Sisoft Sandra XI (MB/s)	6,702
3DMark2001 SE Overall	36,781
3DMark2003 Overall	24,051
3DMark2005 CPU	8,547
PCMark05 CPU	5,983
PCMark05 RAM	5,654
PCMark05 GPU	8,824
PCMark05 HD	5,995
Valve Particle Test	35
Fear 1.07 (FPS)	199

We used a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to 2.33GHz on a 1,333MHz front-side bus, 2GB of Corsair DDR2 and 2GB of Corsair DDR3, a WD GD740 drive, a GeForce 7900GTX, a 1KW PC Power and Cooling PSU, and Windows P Professional. Intel boards were tested with AHCI modes enabled.

Dave Murphy Antec P190

If all the world’s computer cases were playing a game of Battlefield, then the Antec P190 would surely be one of the tanks. This thing is a monstrosity of a midtower, though functionally, it differs very little from everything else in Antec’s P-series of cases. However, this case does add improvements we’ve been dreaming of since we first laid our hands on the P180. The P190 comes with that extra bit of horizontal space that makes all the difference in the world if you rock extra-long videocards. Previous models were just too cramped—even if you weren’t using a water-cooling system.

We love how two in-tandem power supplies are included in this beast: a 650W device for your motherboard and cards, and a 550W one for everything else. That said, cable management is still an issue with the P190. To its credit, Antec continues to try to find better ways to route or otherwise minimize the impact of the snarl of cables shooting out of the southern chunk of the case. But the design still feels wrong, especially when you have to route your cables through a tiny rabbit hole, over a fan, and back through a hole just to get to the lower drive bay.

t least the case’s airflow is totally unrestricted, thanks to the whirling power of four 12cm fans and a beastly 20cm side-panel fan. They’re all tri-speed fans too; perfect for the air enthusiast who’s trying to keep his hearing intact.

It's big. It's black. And it's back. Antec's P190 case smoothes out some wrinkles but ever so slightly misses receiving a Kick Ass award.

Antec, P190
www.antec.com

White Rabbit

Tons of space, snake light inside the case, easy to manipulate.

Brown Bunny

Still no switch for the snake light; cable management could be better thought out, but it's improved.

PowerColor Radeon HD 2900 XT

Having designed the graphics architecture for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, ATI’s management had boasted for months ahead of its acquisition by AMD that its engineers were experts at designing the type of unified shader architecture envisioned by DirectX 10. Imagine our surprise when the R600 not only hit the market several months after Nvidia’s take on unified architecture but that the company’s best offering can’t compete with Nvidia’s top two GPUs.

AMD, for its part, says not competing with Nvidia at the high end is all part of its master plan, that it would rather focus on the “mainstream” graphics market, where most people are actually buying new videocards. And so it has positioned the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in this PowerColor card to compete with cards based on Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB frame buffers. If you believe that, we’ve got some prime real estate in Afghanistan you might be interested in. No, we’re convinced AMD ran into some design problems that it just could not resolve.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT is indeed faster than Nvidia’s 640MB 8800 GTS (but not the insanely fast 8800 Ultra or the only slightly tamer 8800 GTX). It’s also street-priced about $50 higher—but that’s about what we’d expect from the faster component. What we didn’t expect is a GPU that sucks down nearly as much electrical power as an 8800 Ultra while delivering benchmark results that are about 50 percent lower. (The HD 2900 XT requires both a six-pin and an eight-pin cable connection to your power supply.)

Power consumption isn’t something you think about every day, but with energy prices soaring, you should know that our test rig (see the footnote in our benchmark chart) draws 175 watts from the wall with a single Radeon HD 2900 XT at idle. That number jumped to a shocking 318 watts while benchmarking Quake 4 and increased to a staggering 515 watts when we dropped a second card in our Bad Axe II motherboard for CrossFire testing. A single 8800 Ultra, for the sake of comparison, sucked down 192 watts at idle and 320 watts under load in the same motherboard.

Another glaring problem with the 2900 XT is the absence of any driver support for AMD’s new Unified Video Decoder, which is designed to deliver hardware support for high-definition video decoding. Without UVD support, the 2900 XT must rely on the host CPU to handle much of this workload. To be fair, none of Nvidia’s 8800-series cards feature that company’s second-generation PureVideo HD engine either (you must step down to the GeForce 8600 to get it), but at least Nvidia has the excuse that its faster designs are several months older than the 8600.

It’s also interesting to observe that the 2900 XT is considerably slower than either the 8800 GTX or the 8800 Ultra, despite having 2.5 times as many stream-processors (320 compared to 128). This fact, combined with AMD’s FUBAR driver support for UVD and the card’s massive power footprint, strengthens our opinion that the 2900 XT is just not what AMD intended.

Those foibles aside, this card boasts some impressive architecture, including a true 512-bit memory interface (the best Nvidia can offer is a 384-bit interface, and that narrows to 320 bits for the 8800 GTS that this card competes with). The chip also has a built-in programmable tessellation unit—again, based on technology already present in the Xbox 360—but this feature won’t be of much real-world use until it’s exposed in DirectX 10 (or will that be DirectX 11… or 12?). But getting back to the real world, the fact that the stream processors in Nvidia’s part are clocked at more than twice the speed of its core didn’t help the 8800 GTS outrun the 2900 XT: PowerColor’s product delivered single- and dual-card benchmark numbers that were 15- and 25-percent higher than what equivalent 8800 GTS configurations could produce.

The 2900 XT, of course, supports CrossFire—AMD’s technology for operating two videocards in a single PC. And as with the latest spins of the X1000 series, the master/slave concept has been eliminated: All HD 2000 series GPUs have a compositing chip baked right into the silicon. AMD has also jettisoned the external cables that previous-gen CrossFire cards used for communication—replacing them with simple ribbon cables that fit inside the case. As with Nvidia’s SLI technology, however, you can operate only one display while in dual-videocard mode.

Two of PowerColor’s HD 2900 XT cards running in CrossFire are indeed faster than a single 8800 Ultra, but a pair of those cards will cost you slightly more than a single Ultra. And if you swing Nvidia’s way, you can always drop in a second Ultra for even more insane performance (click here for our review of the XFX 8800 Ultra XXX Edition).

It would be easy to dismiss this card as a whiff, but it’s really not a bad product, and it’ll be a whole lot better if AMD can unlock its UVD circuits.

Need to capture analog video? The HD 2900 XT is outfitted with VIVO (video-in/video-out), a feature Nvidia doesn't offer in its better cards.

PowerColor, Radeon HD 2900 XT
www.powercolor.com

Battle-axe (weapon)

There are some good bones in this architecture.

Battle-axe (wife)

The ratio between power draw and performance is way out of whack; no driver support for HD-video decode in hardware.

SPECS
	Radeon HD 2900 XT	GeForce 8800 GTS
No. of Shader Units	320	96
Core Clock Speed	743MHz	500MHz
Shader-Unit Clock Speed	743MHz	1.1GHz
Frame Buffer	512MB	640MB
Memory Speed	828MHz	800MHz
Memory Interface	512-bit	320-bit

BENCHMARKS
	GeForce 8800 GTS	Single PowerColor	PowerColor in CrossFire
3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)	20.8	21.5	41.9
3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)	19.6	20.6	41.9
Quake 4 (FPS)	65.6	75.7	127.8
Fear (FPS)	51.0	63.0	111
Supreme Commander (FPS)	24.3	28.8	38.9
Best single-card performance scores are bolded. cards were installed in an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard with a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM.