These are uncertain financial times we live in today, and the rise and fall of our economy has had direct affect on consumer spending.  It has already been one full year now that DDR3 has been patiently waiting for the enthusiast community to give it proper consideration, yet it's success is still undermined by misconceptions and high price.  Benchmark Reviews has been testing DDR3 more actively than anyone, which is why over fifteen different kits fill our System Memory section of reviews.  Sadly, it might take an article like this to open the eyes of my fellow hardware enthusiast and overclocker, because it seems like DDR3 is the technology nobody wants bad enough to learn about.  Pity, because overclocking is what it's all about.

The GeForce 9800 GX2 features 256 processor cores each independently operating at 1,500 MHz. Counting conservatively (2 flops per processor core), this amounts to an unprecedented 768 gigaflops of raw shading horsepower. In texturing performance, it can filter 76.8 billion pixels per second, or 190% more than the Radeon 3870 X2. In raw specifications across the board, it is vastly improved over its predecessor, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. But with a price of $599-$649, it launches at the same price as the GeForce 8800 GTX. With more than twice the shading power and a vastly improved PureVideo HD engine, the GeForce 9800 GX2 offers peerless 3D performance and great value for money.

We have spent a lot of time at Benchmark Reviews talking about video cards recently - and with good reason. The discrete graphics segment of the market is currently afire with many outstanding price-to-performance options. When we looked at the offerings from the two biggest players, the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX and ATI/AMD HD 3870, we saw that game performance even when scaled to high resolution was simply outstanding.  This begs the question; why with such low-cost entrance into owning cards capable of "high-rez" gaming, most users are still running a display of 19" or less? Monitors are arguably the most important component for users, getting more usage than any other component of a PC. The only reasonable answer would have to be cost, as until recently displays above the 19" mark have been prohibitively expensive. That's where the SAMSUNG SyncMaster 245BW enters the scene as very attractively priced 24" widescreen LCD monitor.

Motherboards are at the heart of every computer, and their importance is central to stable system operation. No matter if you are a low-demand office worker who plugs away on letters or spreadsheets or if you are a high-performance hardware enthusiast who demands extreme frame rates from your video games, one component alone will determine your ability: the motherboard. Because everything rides on the system mainboard, it must be based on a solid and dependable foundation. Gigabyte isn't a new name to the industry, and for years now they have offered some of the most reliable and stable motherboard sold. In fact, over the past year there really only seemed to be two realistic options for motherboard manufacturers when you shopped for new hardware; and Gigabyte was one of them. In this article Benchmark Reviews challenges our reigning champion against the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Ultra Durable 2 DES motherboard.

Times are a little tough right now for many small business owners, so any product that offers to save them money while still performing every function they require is sure to interest many of them.  The task of providing an affordable product, that cuts overhead yet still performs up to par is not any easy undertaking.  Most small businesses today have at least some level of data storage needs.  It may be as simple as storing bookkeeping records, emails and customer contact information, it may involve storing legal documents or patient records, it may involve storing work product such as digital artwork or CAD drawings, or it may even involve hosting the company's retail sales website.  The bottom line is that in today's business world it is hard to find a small business that doesn't have some need to store their digital data.  This is where the Network Attached Storage servers come in and today Benchmark Reviews will be taking a close look at one of these NAS Servers, the QNAP TurboStation TS-409 Pro.

Benchmark Reviews strives to offer the overclocker and hardware enthusiast community solid evidence reflecting the true performance of computer products through rigorous testing and evaluation.  We understand that many of our readers have been involved with other community websites for years, and take our test results personally; this was made clear to us when we released our 33-Way Thermal Interface Material Comparison article.  So then after months of planning and preparation, we have worked to achieve the most complete source of test results possible, offering irrefutable test results gathered in a controlled environment.  The purpose of this article is to document our findings and declare the best and top-rated CPU coolers available as of Q1 2008.

On April 1st, 2008 NVIDIA will officially launch the GeForce 9800 GTX. It's been over sixteen months since the GTX series was last launched, and with such a successful debut of the 8800 GTX back in 2006 there is a lot of skepticism surrounding the new 9800 GTX. Enthusiasts may recall that the last time around NVIDIA launched their new generation of graphic cards with the GTX and GTS models, and later followed up with some mid-range offerings and one slightly faster "Ultra". This time around though, the playbook looked a lot different. First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level though, the playbook looked a lot different.  First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level GeForce 9800 GX2 which utilized two G92 GPU cores.  Benchmark Reviews has been fortunate enough to test the performance of ZOTAC's new GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB video card in this article, model ZT-98XES2P-FSP.

Fortunately, since the PC Enclosure market is roughly organized into three segments; entry/OEM level, mid-range and performance/enthusiast, all you need to do to begin your case search, is to figure out which segment of the market fits your systems needs and zero your search down to that particular segment. Someone looking to spend between $25.00-$75.00 on their future system's enclosure need not waste their time exploring the expensive performance/enthusiast segment of the market, and so forth.  Well, if part of your criteria is that you are on a budget or a first time builder, then usually the place to start is at the entry and budget mid-range levels.

Once there, while parusing the current multitude of styles and designs, your eye would almost certainly be caught by the  entry-to-mid-range NZXT offering: the ALPHA. The first time you see it, you'll think, "I bet that's what Darth Vader's desktop looks like." Today at Benchmark Reviews, we're going to find out if NZXT's latest in their Classic series line is just another....pretty face?