Top hardware reviews for Valentine's day assessed

ST. VALENTINE's DAY is celebrated as a day when two (or more) people celebrate their love for each other. In the world of PCs, this means reviewing appropriate gifts for both sides - but today's hardware roundup is just filled with elite hardware components. Then again, what is a better way to show love than buying your bird a 60-inch plasma screen?

Feeding the hungry computers of today with stable current is a very demanding task, and Bjorn3D took two 850 Watt PSUs for a spin. BeQuiet! obviously tries to tell people that their products are silent, while Thermaltake goes for the "We're hard," Chuck Norris line.

Virtual Hideout joined the PSU-reviewing bunch with their look at Spire's 600W modular PSU. From the looks of it, this is a mirror-finished casing version of Tagan's PSUs, because the cabling and packaging are identical. This does not mean anything bad. Au contraire, since Tagan is known in the industry as a manufacturer of modular PSUs with some of the best-quality cabling out there. The PSU failed a test at 658W, but that means you have at least additional 10 per cent headroom - and that should be more than sufficient for today's power hungry components. For instance, on our four-core Opteron (2x280) workstation with 4GB of Corsair ECC DDR400 memory, Seagate 400GB drives in RAID1 and Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX, the a year-old Tagan 580W and PSU isn't yet breaking a sweat.

However, not a single one of these three aforementioned PSUs features the new 8-pin PCIe power connector (identical to server/workstation-class 2x4-pin connector) for the graphics cards of tomorrow, like upcoming R600 and Nvidia's G80 refresh. Silverstone aims to fix that, as Phoronix found out in its review of Silverstone Olympia 650W.

Silverstone does not make only power supplies, it also does one of the coolest HTPC cases out there, thereby placing a PC in your living room without a feel of inferior design. Ryan from PC Perspective reviewed such a case, SilverStone's CW01 Multimedia Server. Also in the high-end case segment, BIOSMagazine reviewed Zalman's Fatal1ty case. Both Silverstone and Zalman used same material for building, but ended up with a totally different result.

DriverHeaven on the other hand, reviewed an In Win case which features a mixture of plastic and metal for optimal ease-of-access. It's oval .

Bit-Tech reviewed something that you won't see every day, a Vadim Cepheus Q80. This is a custom-built computer system for those with deep pockets and offers interesting levels of customisation. It is interesting to see a factory system overclocked to more than check-box settings, with Kentsfield being clocked at 3.42GHz - a more than 750MHz boost.

Gamers with limitless pockets probably exist only in the dreams of executives and marketers, but it is nice to dream of having a nice 60-inch screen in front of you. I4U -reviewed such a screen, a 60-inch Pioneer plasma with a consumer-friendly name Elite PureVision HDTV PRO-1540</>.

IT-Review.Net posted the first part of its view on the GeForce 8800GTS 320MB, this time from Dutch company Point of View. At the same time, FiringSquad posted their detailed review of eVGA's Superclocked version of an 8800GTS 320MB board.

On a lighter note, XSReviews has posted its opinion of MSI's StarCam.

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