CoolIT’s latch-on liquid CPU cooler

Motherboards.org is reviewing CoolIT’s Eliminator Liquid CPU cooler and it’sso easy even your granny could hook it up. This piece of kit has everythingbuilt-in and you needn’t stick stuff outside the case. The whole unit justlatches onto your CPU socket (and weighs less than most high-end coolers) andall you need to do is screw it in and connect a power molex. Self-contained andeasy to setup – we weren’t expecting that. Downside? Don’t expect to daisychain stuff into the water cooler - it’s for the CPU and that’s about it.Coolit here.
German website Notebook Journal has managed to capture a Puma in the wild andput it to the test in the lab. It’s a pre-sample sample based on the Pumaplatform, with a ZM-84 (2.3GHz Turion X2 Ultra) and it uses an HD3400 part with256MB of DDR2. While specs aren’t final, the performance numbers do give us anidea of what to expect. In this case, the new Puma does outperform the previousTurions, but it still has a lot of catching up to do with Intel’s Core 2s. PowerXpress seems to be going well, tho’.Here forthe original, orherefor Googlenglish
Benchmark Reviews is poking around inside a Silverstone Kublai KL03B-W midtower case. Silverstone is usually known for its outrageously expensive HTPCcases, but now they seem to have taken the battle to the desktop PC’s arena.It’s spacious enough to handle even the freakiest of cooling setups, and you caneven stick a redundant PSU inside. It’s also very quiet, we hear... or not. Readabout the casehere.
Samsung is moving forward in its HD storage business with a couple of unitsbased on the F1_3D design. The company has sent off a 750GB and 1TB unit toSilent PC Review where Mike the Chin. They are both 32MB cache units and offeridentical read/write speeds – which pretty much sums up the review – identicalperformance through and through. Good performance, that is, and some pretty goodacoustics. The price is right, too...readit here.
OCC is testing the ZEROTherm Zen FZ120 CPU cooler; that’s a really tallheatpipe+cooler, but with a smaller fin surface to which they hook up a 120mmfan. It’s got a 4pin header, meaning you get PWM (a bit more control over thefan) and copper base and heatpipes. For $39.99 this seems pretty affordabletoo. The temps are pretty hot if you don’t plug in the fan, though. Catch thecoolerhere.
After Gigabyte’s slight mishap with Asus, the Gigaboys gave TweakTown a tourof the Nan Ping factory while they were attending Computex 2008. Now, it isn’tusual for manufacturers to let hacks like us take photos and vids of theirfactory’s entrails, but that was the case. So now you too can get an inkling onhow a P45 mobo comes into existence. It seems Gigabyte has put the Asus incidentbehind it.Catchthe tour here.
If you’re relatively new to the rat race and are trying to set up your owngaming rig on a budget, you might want to take a look at this articlehere.Bit-Tech, together with Scan, compiled an article on the subject. The secret isto find the right components, put them all together and then tweak them abit... that’s value for money. Cheap CPU... check. Cheap mobo... check. Cheapgraphics card... check. OC all round... check. Yes, that’s an E2160 running at2.9GHz with a 9600GT running at 775MHz (75MHz above spec) – the whole systemracked up a sub £400 bill at Scan. Not bad.
What do you get when your marketing department gets behind productdevelopment and forgets to talk to the engineers? An Intel DX48BT2. Why? Becauseit is the upper high-end of single-CPU desktop mobos, warranting the “Extreme”branding and it won’t let you overclock decently. That’s what XBit found out, atleast, and we can’t say it’s surprising. Despite Intel’s claims of being thegreatest chip show on Earth, they haven’t (or won’t) had the will the let youtake their CPUs to outrageously high OC values. Xbit considered it might be thecrappy BIOS (1521) but after a quickie update (1523) the OC problems were stillthere. No fun.Readabout the hole.