Raidmax unleashes your inner Geekette

ARE YOU A GIRL? Seriously… are you? Well, Hardware Secrets has something just for you - or your imaginary girlfriend. It’s called the Raidmax Aura and it’s available in Seashell Pink, Emerald Green, Polar Blue and “Really Black”, whatever that is…

Anime-loving geekettes would kill for one. Hardware Secrets gave it a post and they liked it enough. Now you might think it’s a bit misogynistic, but the case is highlighted as having a tool-less setup (girls aren’t handy with tools?) and no sharp edges (because girls can’t avoid slicing their hands when sticking components in the case?)… Pricing might be a bit steep, but then again, when *misogynistic comment of the day* has price been a deterrent to a female? Read about it here.

Small Net Builder has one of the more interesting reviews we’ve put our eyes on lately. Essentially, Tim is trying to discover which of the following networking technologies – Draft N or Powerline – is most suited for HD playback. We’re sure you’ve thought about this before, or maybe tried it out with 802.11g or older networking technologies, but since both promise a great deal, why not put them to the test? We’ve got to confess, we weren’t expecting Powerline to be the steaming pile of you-know-what that it’s proven to be. Take a wiff.

The Zol.com.cn forum has posted some info on AMD’s soon-to-be-released 45nm Phenom. No die-shots, but there are pin layout shots and lots of synthetic benchmarking going on. Performance doesn’t look too shabby for this as-of-yet unnamed processor. CPU-Z is there too, but it doesn’t recognise the processor correctly… pity. It’s in Chinese, but Googlenglish makes some snese of things.

Asrock is notorious for its upgrade-class motherboards, and by 'upgrade' we mean that it usually offers a mixed bag of support for different generations of hardware that will allow you to just slot in new components as soon as you wish and get an instant boost from your PC. The (deep breath) Asrock P45R2000-WiFi P45 DDR2/DDR3 motherboard is another practical example. This specimen in particular is on exhibition at Think Computers, so you can move along, move along, there’s a lot to see here.

Of the bunch of sub-$500 UMPCs that are making it to market the Acer Aspire One has to be one of the coolest looking. Forgive us Asus and MSI, but white, gray and black won’t cut it for people who want a cool gadget like that. How about 'Seashell White', 'Sapphire Blue' or 'Golden Brown'… now we’re talking! Trusted Reviews got their Sapphire Blue One and posted it on the site. It’s the cheapest of the available configs and it costs just £229.99 retail.

Madbox PC took a factory tour of the MSI Wind production line a while back. They've now compiled this into a photo gallery/article that shows just how such a being comes into existence. Is it just us or is no one smiling for the camera? Óscar's got it right here (Spanish) or Googlenglished here.

We’ve got another roundup for you. Today it’s the '600W-800W PSU roundup' at Tech Report. Geoff’s been on the case and figures that selecting a PSU can be just as hard (or harder) than selecting your next GPU. He gets round to measuring efficiency at several loads, noise, system temps on the CPU, GPU and mobo – idle and load – it’s all there. Very thorough. Zalman kicked the competition round the block. Read it here. µ