500GB, 250GB hard drives mass tested

HKEPC has a rapid view at the Magic Pro Magic TV Box 3000 which is an external standalone TV Tuner for your LCD monitor. It supports resolutions of up to 1280x1024, comes with a nice remote control and has quite a few ports. If that was not enough, quality seems to be superb enough and the product sleek enough for it to earn a recommended award.

Firingsquad laid their hands on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB hard disk drive. It shares the crown of the largest hard disk drives with IBM and Maxtor. Comes with 16MB cache, four 125GB platters and a five year warranty. Does not generate that much noise and heat and is the fastest monster after the Raptor. This is why Seagate seems to be the preferred game when building HTPC is concerned or hacking your PVR.

With the IBM desktop division firmly in the hands of red China, Lenovo launches the new range of post Big Blue PC, the 3000 J100 and J105 series. They are based both on AMD and Intel models and start at very affordable prices. Zdnet has a small preview and you might appreciate the consumer like finish of the casings - yellow push buttons on a grey faced casings as well as yellow thumb wheels on their mice.

Storage review has a 250GB HDD roundup on their websites. Five dries from Hitachi, Seagate, WD, Maxtor and Samsung are tested, their prices lie between a $7 range - $93 to 100. Some have 8MB and others 16MB cache. At the end of the story though, there are as many winners as contenders. Even the three platter, non NCQ Western Digital can be considered to be a relatively good choice. I'll stick with with Samsuiing because it is relatively silent.

Pureoverclock checks the Gainward BLISS 6800GS 512MB PCI-e video card. It is the Goes Like Hell board with a redesigned PCB layout, a heavily overclocked core and specially selected memories. You have to pay £40 extra though for these niceties - and you can overclock it even more. At the end of the day, that's a 30% increase over the initial memory bandwidth. However, if you look wekk, you could get a nice 7800GT for not much more.

Yet another review of an ECS KN1 SLI Extreme motherboard out there. This is a the Hi-Techreviews this time around. Supports Port Multiplier, Smart Lan, Auto Resume, SATA2, Dual core, NVRAID and many more nice goodies features. Not only that it is a good overclockers and comes with loads of accessories. Not very much to complaint around and apparently as stable as the review's grand parents marriage. µ