Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced Review

Be Quiet! are perhaps not the biggest and most reputable company when it comes to high performance air coolers, people tend to think of the likes of Noctua and Thermalright for that kind of title. However, Be Quiet! aren’t trying to be that kind of company. Be Quiet! as the name would suggest are a company dedicated to creating products that are able to combine high performance with low noise.

The Dark Rock Advanced is a very good example of this. You may have heard of the Dark Rock series before, it has certainly been a well received product line. It comes in two forms, the Dark Rock Pro which costs around £55 and contains dual 120mm Silent Wings PWM fans in a push-pull configuration. The second form is the Dark Rock Advanced, the one we have here today, which features a single 120mm Silent Wings PWM fan which is intended for processors that will produce ‘less heat’ and therefore not warrant two fans. The Dark Rock Advanced costs around £40. Although, don’t be mistaken as this Dark Rock Advanced is still capable of taking on 180W of thermal output from a processor.

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Intel to debut HD P3000 workstation graphics series

While it is obvious from all forms of testing that Intel's graphics royally fail at gaming, it is also just as apparent that their graphics cores are quite capable in a workstation environment being particularly strong at encoding and rendering. Currently Nvidia's Quadro series and AMD's FirePro series dominant the workstation environment. Using Nvidia's FX 580 as a baseline (which costs rougly £160/$180) Intel claims the HD P3000 graphics it has integrated onto its newest Xeon CPUs offer the same if not better performance resulting in no need to have an FX 580 and therefore a $150-$200 saving.

Cougar preparing the Evolution BO PC case

German company Cougar is planning the launch of its Evolution BO case in the near future. This 'Super Midi-Tower' variant is a spin off from the currently available Evolution model and features a black and orange color scheme, a steel structure, support for micro ATX and ATX motherboards, and a top-mounted 3.5-inch/2.5-inch SATA drive dock.

Intel preparing two new mobile CPUs

There is just three months until Ivy Bridge hits the shelves and more details of Ivy Bridge processors emerge. This time they are in the realm of the mobile processors. Fitted for Intel's BGA socket, which is for mobile and embedded devices, the two new CPUs we have been informed of are the Core i3-3120ME and Core i3-3217UE both of which offer impressive performance for low TDPs of just 35W and 17W respectively. Both processors will share some common features:

Antec announce Three Hundred Two Case

The Three Hundred Two enclosure is perfect for gamers, system integrators and casual builders alike because of its extensive cooling advantages and expandability.

High Performance Cooling Advantages - The Three Hundred Two is built for maximum cooling thanks to its perforated front bezel, included dual TwoCool fans, and four optional fans, including a 120 mm CPU exhaust fan behind the motherboard, to ensure gamers can play beyond the long hours of the night.

AIDA64 v2.20 is released

The company FinalWire has announced:

the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 2.20 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 2.20 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises.

Full HD 7950 Specifications Revealed

We have already seen a bit on the way of the HD 7950's performance which shows us that it places itself between a GTX 580 and HD 7970, but what are the actual specifications of the HD 7950? Well in the way of transistors and the chip we can see that the HD 7950 is identical to the HD 7970 containing 4.313 billion transistors on a 365mm squared die. With regards to memory the HD 7950 packs 3GBs of GDDR5 running at 240GB/s. The card also has 32 ROPs much like the HD 7970 does, the only real difference we can see is 1792 Radeon Cores or shaders compared to the 2048 which the HD 7970 has.

HD 7950 gets benched

The HD 7970 has been with us for quite a while now and its performance is impressive to say the least. Now the HD 7950 is nearly upon us and early indications of performance show that the card slots nicely in between the 7970 and GTX 580. When running on stock settings the HD 7970 falls roughly in between Nvidia's GTX 580 and AMD's $500 HD 7970. Whilst with overclocking a performance leap from P6139 to P7056 can be achieved. This means that when overclocking the 7950 you can almost reach stock performance of the 7970 graphics card. Considering the 7950 is likely to be much cheaper than the 7970 this could work out to be a really well priced sweet spot graphics card from AMD. Watch this space.

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New OCZ SSD Firmware improves Octane performance

OCZ's performance level solid state drive line, known as Octane, has been delivered a rather welcomed firmware fix. The fix which takes the firmware version from 1.12 to 1.13 brings with it a substantial performance increase in the IOPs that the Octane drives can now sustain. All of the Octane drives are SATA III so run of the latest NAND flash which is still relatively young. Much like we see the performance of graphics mature as drivers do solid state drives work in the same way. The new firmware increases the efficiency of the Indilinx controller and NAND flash memory chips allowing the following improvements in the IOPs: