ECS motherboard gets thumbs from HardOCP

STORAGE Review checks the first hard disk drive from Western Digital to feature native SATA implementation rather than a PATA-to-SATA bridge. The Caviar WD2500KS disappoints with its lack of capacity and the fact that WD stubbornly refused to acknowledge the efficiency of NCQ, which is absent here. On a positive tone, the drvive is very quiet, sports 16MB cache and pulls out some impressive performance.

Digital Daily reviews the Albatron K8SLI motherboard. A nForce 4 SLI model from a tier-2 motherboard maker should provide with some special stuff to attract buyers. Albatron decided to go for the strict minimum - 5.1 channel audio, single GbE controller and no firewire. The package bundle is awful, it is expensive and the competition is going to eat it alive.

Fancy a giant hard disk drive for less than you would think of? ARP checks the Seagate 400GB Barracuda 7200.8 SATA HDD. Seagate's latest unit trouces its previous model by up to 30%. Five years limited warranty and a near-silent operation makes it a perfect match for those looking for storage capacity without too much concessions.

ECS gets a review from HardOCP. For the motherboad maker which is behind the PC Chips/Amptron/Alton/PCUSA brand to get a product tested from one of the most respected hardware website, there must be something special. This "special" thing is the KN1 Extreme motherboard. A nForce 4 Ultra chipset, six SATA ports, GbE LAN added to a 100Mbps plus a nice setup, this is what sums up the board. There are some issues to be resolved and if history repeats itself - remember the K7S5A? - the version 2 of the KN1 should be much better.

GamePC tests RAID-5 SATA2 PCIe Solutions from Areca, a relatively unknown company - at least to me. The PCI-X ARC-1100 has an Intel RAID processor with 128MB onboard memory and NCQ support while the second card, the ARC-1210 uses, PCIe bus. They pair the cards with four WDSE16 400GB HDD in a benchmark fest.

Lostcircuits lays its eyes on the Alpha Cool NexXxos XP cooling system. Made in Germany, it oozes with quality right out of the packaging. MS, the reviewer, overclocked a P640 to 4.19GHz and still maintain a temperature of 50 degrees. Not bad at all. MS got to test it over one month so that any issue that was time related would probably pop out. Seems that watercooling has matured into a viable solution to air cooling. µ