Thermaltake gets a handle on LAN boxes

NOW THAT Vista is officially allowed out on its own the reviews and performance benchmarks are starting to surface.

Tom's Hardware brings us its Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown and concludes that although Vista is better than XP in terms of look, feel and behaviour it definitely doesn't perform better than XP.

PC Perspective has focused on Windows Vista Gaming Performance - NVIDIA and ATI Compared. Most PC gamers know that that will have to upgrade to Vista to play DirectX 10 games when they eventually come out, but the question remains whether to upgrade now or hold off and whether ATI or Nvidia has the edge in the Vista environment.

If, like Charlie, you believe that Vista isn't very good and you're contemplating moving to Linux you may want to check out Phoronix's review of the Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance.

BIOS magazine has reviewed Acronis True Image 10 Home which is an easy to use disk imaging backup manager packed with features and aimed at home users, so if you have any data on your PC that you would hate to lose then this is definitely worth a look.

XSreviews has been putting the Ideazon FragMat Mouse mat through its paces and it looks like a pretty decent choice for gamers on a budget, or who think that paying more than a couple of bucks for a mouse mat is absurd.

From the installation diagrams it looks more like a transformer, but Madshrimps assures us that the Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 Evolution is a PC chassis, and pretty impressive one at that, albeit on the pricey side of PC cases.

ChileHardware has had A day in Kingston Technologies, so if you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes then be sure to check it out.

LegionHardware has reviewed the upcoming ATI Radeon X1950 GT and although not as impressive as the X1950Pro it should be significantly cheaper and performs substantially better than its main rival the GeForce 7600GT.

Until DAAMIT release their R600 range of graphics cards to rival Nvidia's G80 chipset, the pick of the red team's litter comes in the X1950XTX GPU. Bjorn3d has reviewed the ASUS X1950XTX Crossfire 512 MB DDR4 and although its performance is very impressive, its price makes it worth considering an 8800GTS instead. Winning Virtual-Hideout's Design and Gamers Awards is the Thermaltake LANBOX Case Review which is a great case if you lug your PC around a lot between LAN sessions and the like.

If you're bored with all the current PC cases out there and are thinking about pimping out your chassis then you may to check out Madshrimps' Oxidious - Extreme Thermaltake Kandalf Casemod for some inspiration. µ