Processor Benchmark

f high efficiency and silent operation are1 important to you. PC Power & Cooling’s Silencer Mk II 750W is worth consideration for your next rig. PC Power & Cooling rates it as 88% efficient under typical load,and the Silencer Mk IT 750W also boasts regulation within 2% for the 3.3V, 5V, and12V DC outputs. The aptly named Silen cerfeatures a 135mm, hall-hearing, therm ally controlled fan that sits on the bottom of the unit, and we found it nearly noiseless during the entire resting process.
We installed the Silencer Mk 11 750Winto our test unit with a 3GHz Intel Core 2Quad, two BEG GeForce GTX 275s inSL[, and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue. The cables, which are not
modular, were long enough(between 19 and 23.6 incheslong) to reach all the components inside our 1AI-size Han
I PC-A7010 case. Power user swill appreciate the availability of lour PCI-F. (two 6-pin, two 6t 2-pin)
connectors and support for both ATX12Vand FPS 12V motherboard power.

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We thought we would dislike Antec’s choice of plastic over metal in its new performance tower’s exterior. Wyeth ought the omission of some tool less assembly would chafe. We were wrong.The DF-R5′s bars-and-mesh design is very solid vet lightweight, having something of a SWAT aesthetic. All of that black hotness is punctuated by five 1 20in ni red LED case fans: two in the hack and three fronting ihehard drive hays.

The additional two black140mm fans mounted in the top and an option for another 120min fan above the graphics cards and set into the clear side paneling-not to mention the case’s pee cut and nitikrimi holes for water cooling-almost seems overkill. Almost.
Antec includes rubber grommets to dampen drive vibration. and there are too lless rails for 5.25-inchdrive installation.

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Can two SSDs offer better value than four? We pitted OCZ’s Revo Drive,
featuring a discrete 60GB bank of NAND memory on each side of a PCI-E x4 card,against our recently reviewed Apricom PCI Drive Array with four attached Western Digital SSDs. Each 60GB bank runs under a Sand Force SF-1200 controller, and both joined together as a RAID 0 yield a 111 GB volume. You could accomplish this with apair of Sand Force-based SSDs and Windows based RAID, hut, pricing aside, this route would put more load on the CPU.
Unlike some other PCI-F.-based SSDproducts, the RevoDrive is bootable,making it an excellent alternative to adual-drive boor volume.

We tested withpre-release Silicon Image drivers, but finaldrivers should he available for download bythe time you read this.
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At the top of the MHz heap is Palit’s GTX 460 Sonic Platinum. This card features an impressive 800MHz core clock,which is a fill I25MHz above the stock model. The memory clock Comes in at 2,000MHz, which is 200MHz above thestock setting. One thing to note: The card we receivedis an engineering sample that was shippedwith a heatsink on the VRM. Retail modelswon’t include the VRM heatsink. To gercloser to the real-world results you’ll experi-ence, we removed the VRM heatsink andbenchmarkcd the card to see if the stabilitywould be adversely affected. it was not. Like other curds in this roundup.

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Evga’s take on the GTX 460 is less flashy than Galaxy’s, but that doesn’t mean design was an afterthought. The “Er inthis card’s model name refers to External Exhaust, which means that the heat sink
shroud is fully enclosed to expel GPI I-generated halt right out the back of your case. Under the hood, Evga tweaked thecore and memory clocks to763MHz and I,900MHz,respectively. That’s very nearly a100MHz boost fel” core and mem-ory docks, which gives you a clue as towhy Evra, is charging an extra S20 over theprice for the stock I GB GTX 460.
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As wr went to press, Galaxy offered four varieties of Cc Force GTX 460, and the one the company sent its is the slightly over-clocked GC version with a 256-hit bus and1GB GDDR5. For a $5 premium, Galaxy bumped the core clock by 25MHz and memory clock by 48MHz. All four cardssport identical fansinks.

which Galaxy claims feature the world’s first detachable fan. The tangible upshot of this design is that you can easily access the card’s aluminum copper hent sink for fuss-free cleaning. A lxnential downside is that thecard features a rather porous shroud, andit’ll vent its heat all over the rest of your PC components. Read the rest of this entry »