OCZ delivers SSD oddity

LIKELY TO BE one of the greatest surprises (or letdowns) of 2008, Solid State Drives are gradually moving into the "value" (again, a word we use very loosely) segment. Take OCZ for example and its shiny, metal polish-finish 64GB SSD on review at Benchmark Reviews. Built by Samsung – this unit comes out with a better price/GB ratio than most SSDs but falls short of the performance you’d imagine an OCZ product carried. It seems like... gosh... an attempt to break into the retail market. Read it here.

Gigabyte has come out with a second round of X38 motherboards that OCC was happy to review today. This one is called an EX38-DS4 and Gigabyte is pitching its “green” factor under the Dynamic Energy Saver name. OCC liked the results on the power saving features, but regretted they only worked at stock power settings – a shame on an X38 board. Get green-ness here.

Guru3d is reviewing a new HTPC case from Zalman. Dubbed the HD160XT Plus (sounds like a graphics card, we know), it’s a big hunking piece of black aluminium that includes a 7-inch touchscreen and uses iMon as the frontend. They think the whole touchscreen is a tad unnecessary (although there are situations where you’ll use it) – not as expensive as some others, it still packs quite a bite to your wallet. Get your HTPC boxiness here.

Up in Canada, Hardware Canucks is trying to keep the office warm with a 1200W PSU from Silverstone. The Zeus does not throw lightning bolts around, but it gets you a ton of clean juice, modular setup, 6 (!) PCIe power connections and a $400 price tag. HC is pretty sure this is the uber-PSU on the block and that nothing comes close. Beaver away.

Presence-PC is having its way in rolling out multiple PC displays through the use of USB video cards. This USB thingie and companion software converts video data on the PC to a data stream on your USB connection and send it to the external module that puts it on the DVI bus. Like they say, in theory you could pump the stream through any data bus (FireWire, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc...) but these devices are strictly of the USB 2.0 gender. Forget about 3D gaming, though. Read all about the gadgetry here (or here if French is Chinese to you).

Coolsmartphone has captured an elusive Asus P526 smartphone (and then released it into the wild). However, they have an account of their fiddling with the thing and some detailed photos of a very wet candy-bar phone. It’s actually a GPS/Smartphone as the SirfStar III unit is housed inside the candy-bar, but the 200MHz CPU isn’t the fastest horse on the racetrack these days. The Windows Mobile 6.0 Pro comes with some useful apps too. Read about it. µ