Turn your Barracuda into a Velociraptor

HDD TWEAKING isn’t a common affair. Techware Labs has come up with a clever bit of editorial that explains how to turn your Seagate drive into something like a Velociraptor... for free and without any firmware flashing.

German site Technic 3D tested Seventeam’s ST 750Z-AF PSU. Rolf says the PSU is close to godlike (we’re paraphrasing here) when it comes to performance.

George, from Hillbilly Hardware, sets his sights on a couple of HD 4890s in crossfire. The MSI couple does the dastardly deed on a Phenom II X4 940-based system and comes up with some good improvements.

Asus’ Eee PC line just moved into that weird territory of tablet PCs with the T91 Swivel Screen Netbook. Hot Hardware has the review.

OCaholic reviewed Asrock’s budget X58B-A motherboard. No special tricks, just a no-frills X58 motherboard that will get you good performance at defaults. Cheap.

Xtrem Computing in the UK tests OCZ’s, sorry, PC Power & Cooling’s 910W Quad Silencer PSU. Steady clean power and overall great performance, but it sports a small-ish 80mm fan.

Anandtech gives AMD’s 785G chipset a spin. AMD is calling the IGP an HD 4200, although you can trace the features back to the 780G chipset but with some added DX10.1 support. It’s actually a mix of both generations of silicon.

Inside HW crossfires two HD 4730 graphics cards. Each card draws a lot of power, about as much as a 4870 (!), but sometimes there were linear gains to be made. On the other hand you can buy a single 4870 for the price of two of these, and still get better performance.

The Phenom II X2 550 BE is tested at Club OC, and Joe is as happy as he can be with it. Overclocking, backward compatibility and a price Intel will find hard to beat.

XS Reviews has been testing the Sapphire HD 4770 512MB graphics card. Joe thinks it might be a worthy crossfire board, considering the price point. The GPU does get quiet hot, so you’ll need a good fan that won’t exhaust out the back, tho’.

Overclock 3D is also looking into graphics. An MSI N285GTX Superpipe 2GB, factory-overclocked, graphics card to be precise. The price is a bit over the top and you won’t even be able to SLI the card with a twin. Lots of caveats, it seems.

Dell’s portable M409WX projector gets a showing at Laptop Mag. The $1,000 DLP projector  projects a native 1280x800 resolution (ie: widescreen), with very good brightness and weighing just 4 pounds... Rich raved about it.

Legit Reviews gives the Super Talent SATA II Mini 2 PCIe MLC card the once-over. This is not your standard 2.5-inch SSD, it’s a mini-PCIe card for your notebook, that will upgrade your aging netbook. Drive performance, compared to the “stock” 4GB SSD on a Eee PC 900, trebled.

PC Perps wades into a Corsair Hydro H50 liquid cooling system. The fact that it costs just $80 is impressive, but getting a Core i7 920 24-celsius cooler than the stock intel (at next to no noise) is even more so, in our book.

Scythe has built up a reputation for powerful, silent cooling in the CPU cooling arena. Their Scythe Mugen 2, on review at Silent PC Review, seems to hold up to expectations. It’s good on one fan, even better with two. µ