Acer Aspire One, extra large edition

ACER THREW caution to the wind and upsized it’s Aspire One to 11.6-inches with the 751h model. This offers 1366x768 of screen real-estate, quite a bit more than the usual 1024x600… makes for good reading, over at Anandtech. Consumers will thank them, but Intel might find this hard to swallow.

Storage serves a variety of purposes, one of which is securing data. Having a backup on site subjects it to the risk fire and flood. There’s something called the ioSafe Solo for that. Big Bruin has it.

Guru 3D has an unsual review - at least on subject it normally doesn’t cover - that is NAS storage. The Patriot Corza is a two-bay system with hot-swappable drives gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, RAID 0 and 1. The software console seems to be top notch.

Sonos made a debut a few years ago with a rather pricey modular wireless music streaming concept. They’ve just added another unit to the line-up, the BU250 Digital Music System, again quite expensive but Riyad at Thrusted Reviews gave it a huge thumbs-up.

Legit Reviews has a very interesting beast on test today, the Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4890 2GB. Good for your GTA IV misadventures, this card beats its reference brethren with higher clocks and lower noise.

Gigabyte – in its crusade to become Asus – has launched a 785G motherboard, the GA-MA785G-UD3H. Using nothing but the integrated graphics, Bjorn3d benchmarks, overclocks and otherwise squeezes every ounce of performance out of this one. Not expensive either.

Overclockers Club has the Asus ROG Maximus III Formula motherboard there. In black’n’red trappings, the Maximus III Formula is expected to be Asus’ stronger participant in the P55 rat race.

Xbit Labs has three new coolers in the lab. The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus, N620 and Cogage TRUE Spirit coolers show their mettle – or lack thereof – to the budget-minded crowds.

Mionix is a rather unknown accessory brand, but TweakTown wasn’t disappointed when they tested the company’s Saiph 3200 gaming mouse and Alioth 400 surface. Comfortable and accurate, Andrews says it’s good for just about any game genre.

That most unofficial of graphics cards, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 is being tested at motherboards.org. The card performs almost as well as its dual-GPU big brother, yet costs much less. Pity it’ll be obsolete by October.

Sanjin at Fudzilla has one of those liquid-cooled PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 LCS, you know the kind that don’t make noise but chug along at 900MHz (or 1GHz if you o’clock). There is a slight downside. It doesn’t seem the card and Catalyst work well on the power management side – a problem we’ve seen before.

Aftermarket cooling for VGA cards is a tricky business. You know your stock cooler is rubbish, but want something better. Void the warranty and stick a ZeroTherm CoolMaxx 2000, just like George did at Hillbilly Hardware. µ