You can trace back the high end of the cooling market to precious few companies, most notably Thermalright, who went all-out in their pursuit for performance and well a bit of the design flair what with all of that fancy nickel plating they indulge in.

The Thermalright Venomous X CPU Cooler is another attempt at taking the high-end air-cooling crown for the company and it puts up some impressive numbers along the way. VortezHardware has the review:

The Venomous X can only be described by one word, and that’s “Beastly”. It is quite distinctive in design from the Ultra Extreme in that the Venomous X uses a different fin design and the arrangement of the heat pipes is more linear at the top rather than in a circular pattern. As mentioned earlier, it is a few mms narrower than the Thermolab Baram but the extra heat pipe should give it the advantage. The whole heatsink is nickel plated to protect against corrosion, enabling a much longer life span. The construction is a combination of copper for the base and aluminium for the fins, ensuring the best heat conductivity without adding on too much weight.

If you’re looking for a high end cooler for that new CPU of yours you can’t do much better.

The constant swapping of USB memory sticks and optical drives is one way to totally frustrate users, of course sharing PC drives over a network isn’t exactly energy friendly either. There is of course the simple solution.

Synology’s DiskStation DS210j Network Attached Storage allows you to serve up files on your network and should be at a low enough price point where most anyone can jump into the NAS game. Testseek Labs has the review:

There are also the options to make updates of the software, reset to factory defaults, install external modules like an e-mail server, web statistics server and there’s even a small phpMyAdmin module which means you can install MySql and run this unit as a small web server with a database.

Extending it beyond mere file serving is sure to excite the tweakers out there.

Enthusiast level motherboards tend to go all out with their component quality and feature sets which, consequently, pushes up the price tag on the very central piece to a PC. Thankfully one company manages to keep costs under control.

The ECS A890GXM-A 890GX Motherboard sports AMD’s latest graphics infused 890GX northbridge and SATA 6G toting SB850 southbridge for a tasty combination. Overclockers Club has the review:

The ECS A890GXM-A arrived with a lot of potential and in many ways it did not disappoint. The new Qooltech III heatpipe cooler worked very well, keeping the Northbridge efficiently cooled, which also helped decrease the CPU temperature due to there being no rising heat coming from the chipset. The new implementation of the 890GX/SB850 was great, with the USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 connectors working perfectly, as well as adding support for AMD’s upcoming six core processors.

A nice offering but here’s hoping they square away any overclocking issues.

Netbooks have had a nice effect on portable computer manufacturers. They’re putting out newer designs up and down their product lines which sport energy efficient hardware and slimmer form factors which people that have to lug their machines around are quite happy about.

Gateway’s EC14D07u ultraportable notebook takes the trend towards small to heart by using a low-voltage processor and 11.6″ display yet, somehow, manages to slot in an optical drive. TweakTown has the review:

The Gateway EC14D07u is a rarity in the ultraportable world today in that Gateway crams an optical drive into the machine. The drive is a DVD player and can burn both CDs and DVDs if needed as well. Typically, you don’t get an optical drive in this class and this is what makes the Gateway EC14D07u really stand out in a crowded market.

Of course its wireless N connection could transfer files over a network faster than you can read from a DVD but it’s still a nice feature to have.

While the trend towards even smaller computers continues there are some situations when ample amounts of room will make your build a simple task and, well, being able to mount a ton of fans helps on the cooling front.

The Corsair Obsidian 800D PC Case is by no means small, in fact it borders on the size of older full-tower cases and it will dwarf most of the hardware installed in it. Bjorn3D has the review:

If you are after a small case you might as well stop reading now as the Obsidian 800D is a full tower-case which means that it is huge. With its 609mm x 609mm x 229 mm dimensions, it certainly is a case that is intended to be placed on the floor.

Well we warned you didn’t we?

System chipsets aren’t updated as much as you probably want them to be so motherboard manufacturers tend to rely on add-on chips to do most of the work on newer connectivity standards. Thank goodness for updated chipsets.

AMD’s upcoming 890GX system chipset sports a speed bumped graphics core and, most importantly, SATA 6G support. AnandTech tests out an early motherboard which features its shiny goodness:

AMD’s 890GX chipset does support two PCIe x8 slots for running cards in CrossFire mode, but you do have one more option for flexibility. If you have a Radeon HD 5450 and happen to be running one of the following games: Battleforge, BioShock, Company of Heroes, HAWX, World in Conflict or 3DMark Vantage then the 890GX’s IGP will work in tandem with the 5450.

The CrossFire like setup could be interesting for those with a home theater PC setup needing a little gaming performance boost.

Intel’s LGA1156 lineup is good, a little too good in fact, easily encroaching on their high-end LGA1366 lineup of processors especially at the low end. So in order to keep the halo on their top tier they’ve got to bump the entry chip up a notch.

The Intel Core i7 930 replaces the company’s 920 chip as its lowest priced CPU for the X58 platform and improves on the amount of performance you get for the cost of entry. Hexus.net has a look:

Clocking up to 4GHz with minor voltage adjustments and a few tweaks in the BIOS, the Core i7 930 becomes a superlative-inducing CPU and easily faster than any stock-clocked desktop processor shipping today. But the same can be said for current D0-stepping ‘920s, as well, so we’d only recommend the newer model if contemplating a platform upgrade as a whole.

A nice option for first time buyers but for those with existing systems it’s not much of an improvement over the old.

The ever-shrinking motherboard poses a bit of a problem. Sure the improved performance and small dimensions are a huge benefit but you’ll be hard pressed to find a suitable case to contain all of the power…but that’s a problem for another time.

The Zotac H55-ITX Motherboard can accept any Intel LGA 1156 CPU and sports a shiny PCIe X16 slot for your high-end graphics needs. AnandTech has the review of this pint-sized beast:

There are a couple of possible directions you can take with the H55-ITX. First, you could choose to turn this into a low-watt HTPC by utilizing a Core i3 and relying on Intel’s HD graphics for your video needs. On the other hand, you could install an i5 or i7 and populate the PCIe slot with a dedicated graphics card for a nice mid-range gaming system. Cases such as the Silverstone SG-06 and the upcoming Lian-Li PC-Q08 would complement a system such as this perfectly.

A dual-GPU graphics card paired with this board would make for a powerful gaming system indeed.

With all of the attention being given to the entry level Intel Core i7 and i5 processors it’s easy to overlook the insanely powerful set of features found on the LGA 1366 platform, thankfully some companies jolt us awake from time to time.

The Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Motherboard tacks on USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support to the general awesomeness that is the Intel X58 chipset suite of features. Benchmark Reviews has the details:

Performance is further enhanced by utilizing SLI/Triple-SLI and CrossFireX/TriFire video card sets for high-performance graphics. Overclockers can use either quick or expert settings to reach their optimal clock speeds, and BIOS options are superior to others we’ve tested lately. Only socket LGA1366 X58-Express motherboards support Intel’s Extreme Edition (EE) Core-i7 processors, and according to Intel’s roadmap the future code-named “Gulftown” six-core Westmere chip will be included with support on the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard. At the time of this writing firmware version F5 already includes Gulftown processor support, along with numerous system memory enhancements.

Impressive performance and ready for the 6-core CPUs of the future…yep that’s difficult to ignore.

Technologies tend to incorporate certain safety mechanisms in order to keep things working properly but as time goes on those early additions tend to spiral out of control and may require tweaking from time to time.

Western Digital Advanced Format Technology, found in the WD10EARS, attempts to improve on drive performance while removing a good chunk of the overhead required to keep a hard drive in tip-top shape. HotHardware has the review:

Western Digital isn’t lying about the efficiency benefits of a 4K sector drive, but the company can use that space in a number of ways. Smaller platters are one option, larger storage capacity is another, and removing the innermost tracks of the platter is a third. This last contains an extra bonus—because read and write speeds are typically reported as an average, knocking off the slowest tracks would make the hard drive look  faster in a benchmark without actually changing performance at all. For now, WD isn’t claiming that Advanced Format delivers any particular advantage and AF drives aren’t carrying much of a premium, if any.

They may not claim any performance benefit but a “green” drive keeping up with the company’s performance model is impressive indeed.