The Future World

Heat as you all know is one of the main enemies of the PC and its many components.  Just visit any PC Hardware-related site out there today and you will find whole sections devoted to heatsinks, coolers, etc., the sole goal of which is to cool down the ever growing number of heat producing components in a typical PC.  Motherboard manufacturers have also jumped into the fray, providing their own customized cooling solutions, ranging from passive heatsinks linking the CPU, NorthBridge, and SouthBridge to the oversized Turbo coolers than we found on the Gigabyte G1-Turbo a few months back. 

However, all of these cooling tools are put to work within the chassis.  Airflow within the unit pretty much dictates how well the heat is dissipated; even the best heatsinks are rendered pretty much usless if there isn’t adequate airflow within the system to cool them down.  And although modern cases typically have more options for installing fans and increasing ventilation, they are typically still steel and/or plastic contraptions of heat-trapping death.

So, what’s the alternative?  How about a case that’s almost completely open, providing better cooling by allowing air to freely enter and leave the system.  How about fans placed seemingly everywhere – front, back, side, and even on top?  That’s what Antec has introduced with the Antec Nine Hundred Gaming Chassis. Although the naming convention might initially turn away anybody not interested in gaming (all 5 of you), they would be missing out, as this case offers premium cooling and looks, without the hefty price tag that one might associate with a unit like this.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Model: Nine Hundred

Cooling System:
- 1 rear (standard) 120mm TriCool Fan with 3-speed switch control
- 1 top (standard) 200mm TriCool Fan
- 2 front (standard) 120mm Blue LED TriCool Fans
- 1 (optional) 120mm case fan on the side panel

Special Features: 200mm "Big Boy" Fan, windowed side panel, top USB/FireWire ports 

The Antec Nine Hundres’s box is all black, just like the chassis itself, and yet it only gives the buyer a glimpse at the upper most corner with the words "NINE HUNDRED" written in orange.  The side and back offer much better views of the entire unit, glowing blue behind the black mesh from LEDs integrated into the fans.  Inside, there is the Antec 900 itself and a small group of items, some of which initially it might be hard to decipher.  The manual and screws are self-explanatory.  The mesh opening is used in conjunction with the tray to convert a 5 1/4" opening to fit a 3 1/2" drive, such as a floppy drive, if one desires.  The last piece, a rubber mat, fits into the same-shaped indentation on top of the Nine Hundred.  That’s all there is at this point; all the fans and other cables come pre-installed, so we’ll move on to looking at the chassis itself.

http://www.hothardware.com 

Power—It’s one of the most important factors for peak system performance and stability. Yet, the PSU is still an often overlooked PC component. While not as sexy as a high-end motherboard, video card or RAM, the power supplying these components is just as important as the components themselves.  With the heightened demands of the latest computing hardware, ample power is an increasingly important consideration for performance and stability. Dual GPU configurations are now commonplace and CPUs are sporting multiple cores, all of which place greater demand on the PSU.  Throw some overclocking into the mix and a common 550w PSU will crack under the stress, which can end up causing some stress of its own.

Today, we are going to take a look at two Power Supply Units that cater to the enthusiast community. First up is the Toughpower 750W Cable management from Thermaltake. Equipped with a 14cm fan for quiet cooling, this 750 watt PSU offers a clean, modular cabling solution, with support for SLI, Crossfire, and multi-core processors.

The second PSU we’ll be evaluating is the Tagan Turbojet TG1100-U95.  This behemoth of a PSU offers 1100 Watts (1.1 kilowatts) of peak power output, which should be more than enough power to drive the most demanding collection of computer components including quad-core CPUs and quad-SLI configurations.

In the pages ahead we’ll spotlight each PSU’s feature set, then we’ll perform some real world stress testing to see how these two PSUs compare when under heavy power demands.  We’ll also throw in results from an UltraX2-Connect 550 Watt PSU to demonstrate how these two high power PSUs compare to a more mainstream PSU, as well as see which is the most efficient at doing its job.

 
 
For reasons unknown, a good portion of the enthusiast market still thinks that memory cooling is a fruitless effort. Many high-end users still believe that memory chips run plenty cool, and that putting heat spreaders and heatsinks on them is a superficial effort at best, and that they don’t provide any major benefits. The fact that nearly all high-end memory module and graphics card memory manufacturers use some sort of additional cooling doesn’t seem to matter.

For a long time, I was a member of this camp as well. The first memory modules with heat-spreaders showed themselves in 2000-2001, right about the time that the industry was shifting from SDRAM to DDR SDRAM, and Rambus RDRAM modules were hitting the market, all of which needed to be equipped with heat-spreaders due to their implementations. It was right about the time when DDR-400 modules were hitting the market that DDR heat spreaders became all the rage. As clock speeds increased, heat spreaders became more and more prevalent, even though proof that they actually helped was questionable at best. Nowadays, they are more or less standard on high-end memory modules.

At first, memory chip heat spreaders were more for show and less for actual functionality, but once clock speeds of 800MHz+ hit, DDR and DDR2 modules start putting out some serious heat. Not only do modules have to dissipate self-created heat, but they also are (in most cases) sandwiched next to hot-running processors, chipsets, and graphics cards, all of which are outputting tremendous amounts of heat nearby. I’ve personally burned the ends of my fingers while touching un-cooled memory chips in cramped multi-core, multi-GPU systems running benchmarks. From that point on, we’ve come to realize that cooling one’s memory modules may not be absolutely necessary all the time, but anytime you’re dealing with that kind of heat, moving it away from the PCB and memory chips can only be a good thing, both for short term stability and long-term module reliability.

Now, with heat-spreaders and heatsinks both widely used, OCZ is taking the next step in terms of memory module cooling, a step which some might questions and others will be impressed by. Water cooling. Once it’s mentioned, some enthusiasts will chuckle or raise an eyebrow at the thought. However, OCZ has gone about adding water-cooling to their memory modules in an intelligent fashion, by making it optional. This is the core design element of their new Flex XLC Edition memory modules. 

This latest edition to the highly-awarded OCZ Flex XLC product family is engineered to produce significant performance gains on the latest Nvidia nForce SLI platforms by implementing Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) and allowing the memory to operate at a stable 800MHz at CL3 upon start up. The PC2-6400 CL 3 Flex modules are integrated with an EPP programmed SPD to immediately boot at the correct settings to produce 3-4-4 timings on nForce 680i motherboards. This feature provides a true "Plug and Play" overclocking feature that eliminates the need for manual configuration and makes memory optimizations a household item for the complete range of consumers looking to maximize system performance through overclocking.

Looking over the specifications, OCZ has concocted a very potent mix of features with the Flex XLC product lineup. While OCZ does produce similar modules using this same cooling system at ultra high clock speeds (up to 1150 MHz at the time of writing), these particular modules which we got our hands on are designed for efficiency at lower clock speeds rather than high clock speeds at higher latencies.

These modules run at low CAS 3-4-4 timings. The majority of enthusiast class DDR2-800 modules run at CAS 4-4-4, whereas mainstream modules run at CAS 5-5-5. Even better, these modules support EPP (or are "SLI-Ready", if you prefer), and will automatically clock themselves to CAS 3-4-4 timings if you have an EPP-ready motherboard.

http://www.hothardware.com