Legit Reviews

Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis @ Legit Reviews

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:56:00 GMT

Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis Thermaltake introduced the SD100 to target the Mini-ITX home theater HTPC market. With a sleek, glossy black exterior and well ventilated interior, the SD100 is designed to be functional while blending into the rest of a high tech home theater setup. Read on to see what we think of this budget friendly $85 case! Quote: "Thermaltake's SD100 small home theater chassis stands out as a case that blends in extremely well. Think about that for a moment. The glossy black finish, the small footprint, and the silver buttons make for a computer case that would make any home theater setup look better without drawing much attention. For installation, Thermaltake did an excellent job designing the interior to maximize cooling while giving users enough room to fit components easily. With solid construction, a great air filter, and quiet fans, the SD100 serves as a great entry level HTPC case..." Article Title: Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1133/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1133/1/</a>

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Patriot Box Office HD Media Player Review @ Legit Reviews

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:55:00 GMT

Patriot Box Office HD Media Player Review The Patriot Box Office is a media player that frees your digital media library from the constraints of a PC and bridges digital media to your home entertainment system. Box Office also the most popular media formats (H.264, ISO, VOB, DivX, xVid, MKV, MOV, MPEG and more) so you can play what you want, where you want to! Read on to see how this recently released media player does! Quote: "The performance of the Patriot Box Office HD Media Player was incredible. High definition movies and lossless music played quickly and stutter-free. Even large-format images that we captured in JPG or TFF looked great on our TVs. Overall, we were really pleased with this device and would recommend it over others in this price range mainly because we can use a local hard drive. Unlike the Western Digital where the WDTV Live can partner with a USB connected drive externally, the Patriot Box Office solution is sleeker and more functional..." Article Title: Patriot Box Office HD Media Player Review @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1136/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1136/1/</a>

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ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

The Radeon HD 5970 is the latest dual-GPU flagship video card by AMD. This card has 3200 stream processors clocked at 725MHz and 2GB of GDDR5 memory at 1GHz! Will this be enough to destroy the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295? Read on to find out how this card does and to see if AMD has what it takes to be the fastest video card on the planet again! Quote: "The Radeon HD 5970 fully supports DX11 and ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, which are two features that NVIDIA can't offer on any of their graphics cards. Those are two key features that have been driving video card sales for months and with more and more DirectX 11 title games coming out it would be safe to assume that more gamers will be making the move to AMD based graphics cards. Radeon HD 5970 is also very overclockable. This is partly due to the Overvolt tool as you can get even more performance out of this card. The ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card is in a league of its own and is clearly king of the hill. O Fermi, Fermi, wherefore art thou Fermi? NVIDIA better hope that their GT300 Fermi series of video cards pack a mean punch because they are going to need all the help they can get..." Article Title: ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1141/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1141/1/</a>

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Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0 @ Legit Reviews

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:52:00 GMT

Today, we will be taking a look at the performance of two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs. Two of these drives can be bought today for $115 each, which at $230. You can put them into RAID 0 and have a nice little 80GB data array. This is also slightly less expensive than a Kingston SSDNow M Series SNM225-S2/80GB drive as they cost $245. Quote: "One of the negatives of the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive is the fact that it doesn't support TRIM functions in Windows 7. That really isn't a big deal as we don't know of any RAID drivers that do support TRIM. If you plan on running SSDs in RAID, you have already accepted that you want to give up TRIM support anyway. Other than that one negative, running a pair of Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drives in RAID 0 seemed like a solid setup. We found that the SATA 6Gbps controller isn't RAID bootable, but for someone with an Intel ICH10R chipset, this setup would be ideal and fun to play around with. The next time we try to play with a RAID setup we'll stick to the ICH10R or just spend the extra money and pick up a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Being able to hit 370MB/s read speeds in the ATTO benchmark pretty much sums up our experience with the Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drives in RAID!" Article Title: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0 @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1139/10/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1139/10/</a>

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NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 Video Card Preview @ Legit Reviews

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:50:00 GMT

The GeForce GT 240 is NVIDIAs latest performance-class GPU that can be picked up for under $99. With 96 processor cores and with a frame buffer of either 512MB or 1024MB these little budget cards should perform pretty well, but obviously still lack support for DirectX 11. Read on to see what one of these cards will get you in our preview. Quote: "The GeForce GT 240 is NVIDIAs latest performance-class GPU that enables the mainstream PC to become vastly more functional and enjoyable. Compared to PCs using integrated graphics that struggle with todays increasingly graphical and GPU-computing workloads, systems outfitted with GT 240 offer great general gaming performance, Power Gaming (PhysX acceleration + 3D Vision), and GPU Computing at under $99. With the addition of a GeForce GT240, a PC can also provide smooth HD video playback from Bluray, DivX, and Flash 10.1 sources, while also facilitating seamless HD video creation and editing. The concept of Power Gaming is more than just high performance graphics. Gamers using a GeForce GT 240 can enjoy the latest games with PhysX and 3D Vision for a truly immersive gaming experience..." Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 Video Card Preview @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1138/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1138/1/</a>

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Thecus N0204 miniNAS Pocket RAID Storage Review @ Legit Reviews

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:54:00 GMT

Don't let its small size fool you - the Thecus N0204 miniNAS comes with RAID 0, 1, and JBOD support, which means that you can optimize your storage for speed or security. Never before has there been a NAS storage device this small that can be purchased for under $150. Read on to see how it does with a pair of Kingston SSDNow 40GB V Series 2.5" drives in RAID 0! Quote: "The Thecus N0204 miniNAS is said to be the worlds smallest fully-featured NAS device. Measuring in at just 132 x 88 x 63 mm exterior, one could easily mistake the N0204 as a regular external hard drive. However, look closer and you will see a very capable two-bay NAS device that fits right in the palm of your hand. Thecus manages to make this work by using two 2.5 SATA hard disks, providing up to 1TB of storage. That means that this device uses laptop SATA hard drives or 2.5" Solid-State Drives (SSDs), which has some pros and cons as you could imagine. At just $149.99 plus shipping, the Thecus N0204 miniNAS also just happens to be the least expensive 2-bay network attached device sold at e-tailers like Newegg.com among others..." Article Title: Thecus N0204 miniNAS Pocket RAID Storage Review @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1135/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1135/1/</a>

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EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:35:00 GMT

EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 Video Card Review Last month NVIDIA silently launched the GeForce 210 and GT 220 graphics cards, which are aimed at the entry level discrete graphics card market. Today, we take a look at the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 video card, which features a 7% overclock right out of the box. Read on to if this card has what it takes to upgrade your desktop PC with integrated graphics! Quote: "Today, we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 edition graphics card. This card has a factory overclocked core and shader clock speeds, which should help boost performance over the standard clock speeds of 625MHz and 1360MHz. The EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 has a core clock speed of 671MHz and a shader clock of 1458MHz. This is just over a 7% clock frequency boost on the GPU, so that should help out performance on the card's 48 stream processors..." Article Title: EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC DDR3 Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1121/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1121/1/</a>

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Leadtek PxVC1100 MPEG-2/H.264 Transcoding Card @ Legit Reviews

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:55:00 GMT

The WinFast PxVC1100 is an MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card developed by Leadtek and features the Toshiba high-performance stream processor SpursEngine. The WinFast PxVC1100 has four Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores based on the "Cell Broadband Engine. Read on to see how this single slot PCI-Express based low profile card does on our Intel Core i7 system! Quote: "Compared to even the latest CPU and Graphics hardware, the Spurs Engine held its own. Though testing different encoding/transcoding types and programs can be quite a headache, its easy to see that the Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 is an MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card can benefit those who do large amounts of this type of work. While there are only a couple of different formats to be used, they process very quickly and have outstanding quality. I have seen a lot of questions about taking SD quality video and converting to an HD format and most are answered with dont waste your time because it will be the same quality. Well with the Spurs Engine, that answer can be thrown out. While taking SD quality video and reaching the quality of an original HD source would be impossible, the content was very clearly much higher quality than the source. Best of all was that this process was quick, encoding at about 20% faster than real time playback..." Article Title: Leadtek PxVC1100 MPEG-2/H.264 Transcoding Card @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1134/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1134/1/</a>

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Cooler Master Storm Sniper Black Edition Case @ Legit Reviews

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:59:00 GMT

Cooler Master Storm Sniper Black Edition Case Today we will be looking at the Black Edition Sniper from Cooler Master. The new and improved Sniper Black Edition includes all the features and functionality of the original Sniper, and raises the bar by including an all-black interior coating, full 2.5 SSD support and three huge Storm Force 200mm 142CFM fans! Quote: "I have very little (if anything) bad to say about the Cooler Master Sniper Black Edition (SGC-6000-KXN1-GP). This is one very nice case. It has loads of room and is relatively light. It gives the end user the ability to remove unwanted items, add in needed items, and reconfigure fan locations. As open as the case is it is very quiet; on low you dont even know the system is running. I turned it off once by accident by hitting the power button because I had the LEDs off and I thought the system was off. With the case on high it will be noticeable, but I dont see you having to turn up the TV due to it..." Article Title: Cooler Master Storm Sniper Black Edition Case @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1131/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1131/1/</a>

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New Need For Speed: Shift Patch Boosts AMD GPU Performance @ Legit Reviews

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:16:00 GMT

New Need For Speed: Shift Patch Boosts AMD GPU Performance Legit Reviews got their hands on the upcoming Need For Speed: Shift game update as well as some upcoming ATI CATALYST drivers. The game patch is said to offer improved ATI graphics card support and multi-GPU performance for those that are lucky enough to be running SLI or CrossFire. Read on to see what you can expect when the patch and drivers become public. Quote: "This Need For Speed: Shift Patch isn't out yet, but we managed to work our magic and get both the latest beta drivers from AMD and the game patch from EA to see how much smoother and better the game play will be for AMD video card users. We also toss in some NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 graphics cards into the mix to check out the SLI scaling since the patch is optimized for multi-GPUs. The results we are about to see will be interesting because if we see a huge jump we know that the game wasn't properly optimized for AMD graphics cards from the start. Could that have been because of NVIDIA marketing dollars like AMD implies or the fact that AMD didn't work closely enough with the game developer like NVIDIA suggests? We'll leave that question alone and just focus on the game title..." Article Title: New Need For Speed: Shift Patch Boosts AMD GPU Performance @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1130/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1130/1/</a>

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Tritton AX 720 Dolby Digital Surround Gaming Headset @ Legit Reviews

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:28:00 GMT

Specifically designed for the XBox and PS3 systems, the AX 720 delivers precision audio and superior voice communication. Utilizing Dolby Digital and Dolby Headphone technology, the AX720 sets a new benchmark for 2-Channel surround sound headsets. The included Dolby Digital decoder will take games to new levels creating an impressive 3D audio environment. Quote: The Tritton AX 720 is an excellent headset for taking advantage of your PC, Mac, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3 digital audio while having chat for multiplayer network gaming. While the headset is very versatile and comes with an adapter to allow you to use it in analog mode with any audio source and microphone input, if you dont have optical audio out youll not get your moneys worth our of the AX 720. Article Title: Tritton AX 720 Dolby Digital Surround Gaming Headset @ Legit Reviews Article URL: <a href="http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1123/1/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1123/1/</a>

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