SMC 2008 - The IEEE International Conference
 

 

 

 
 
Hardware review

Hiper SF-350TS ATX PSU

"What?", you might ask, "is a CoolerMaster logo doing on a review for a Hiper power supply?". Simple, CoolerMaster recommend them for use with their aluminium cases. In fact CoolerMaster sent me this one to review. The 350TS model to be precise.

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Testing Hiper SF-350TS ATX PSU

Using the Hiper resulted in a CPU temperature about 2°C higher than when using the Enermax. This is obviously due to the Enermax's second fan exhausting the hot air coming off the CPU HSF. Here the trade off is noise against cooling. As usual the voltages were measured at idle and under load. The load tests consisted of running 3DMark2001 and Stability test V6 , (apparently no longer available). Also a directory containing 2.5GB of files was copied between HDDs to see the effects of 12V loading.

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Gainward Ultra/650XP Golden Sample

When it comes to consumer performance graphics cards Nvidia pretty much lead the way with their GeForce4 range of cards. Gainward not content to just churn out cutting edge graphics cards have taken the Nvidia design a step further and turned it into bleeding edge. How they do that is simple, they use GPU's and memory chips which have been tested to clock faster than the Nvidia specification.

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SeaSonic SS-400FS 400W PSU

Personally I've always found it hard to justify setting aside much of my computer budget on power supplies, and you can probably understand why too; they're almost always boring grey boxes which live out of eyesight and just get on with their jobs. As long as the £30 supply works you're not going to notice any difference if you pay £100 are you? And that £70 you've saved will certainly let you buy a graphics card or processor that's closer to the bleeding edge.

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Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250

Television has become a very large part of the entertainment sector and now almost every household in the UK and US has at least one Television set. Putting TV on your computer seems like a natural step to take, by doing this you can eliminate the need for another bulky, heavy item on your desk and allow you to integrate your PC with the TV.

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WD1200JB Hard Drive Review

Not long ago, Western Digital decided to hit the IDE market with quite an impact upon the introduction of its Caviar BB-SE IDE range of HDDs. The first drive to be released with this new, 'special' BB-SE tag was the Caviar 1000BB-SE. This was an ATA100, 7200RPM drive - but 'so what?' I hear you cry...

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WD1200JB Hard Drive Review. Part 2

On average, the JB (BB-SE) series is quite a bit more expensive than any other competing models from Maxtor / Seagate. The 80GB Model will cost you around £110 at the time of writing this, which is around £40 more than a 80GB from Maxtor / Seagate who only ship drives with 2MB buffers. The 120GB model will cost around £160-180 depending on where you shop.

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