It used to be that counterfeit CD and DVD media originated from overseas and found its way onto popular auction websites. But in a wake of widespread technology developments, anyone is capable of creating completely indistinguishable copies of their favorite audio CD or movie DVD. Do most people still purchase the original content, or is everyone stealing from the artists? In this article, Benchmark Reviews offers a candid look into Consumer Home Piracy as we present the Research Findings for July 2008 as provided to us by Futuresource Consulting in partnership with Macrovision.

NVIDIA usually pleases the enthusiast community with their product launches, and no launch has been more memorable lately than the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphic card launch more than eighteen months ago. So when the 9800 GTX product line launched on April 1st, 2008 there was a lot of commotion surrounding the new crown prince. With such a successful debut of the 8800 GTX back in 2006, the level of enthusiast skepticism surrounding the new 9800 GTX was unquestionably high. First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level GeForce 9800 GX2 which utilized two G92 GPU cores. Yet title of fastest single-GPU video card remains the honor of NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX. Benchmark Reviews has already helped launch this product, and now we're back to test the performance of Foxconn's new GeForce 9800 GTX Standard OC Edition 512MB video card 9800GTX-512N.

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 DDR3 is the key to extreme overclocking.

Do you need a better GPU cooler? It wasn't long ago, that this question only referenced CPU coolers. Aftermarket cooling for your CPU used to be confined to the overclocking toolkit. If you were going to crank up the clock rates, over-volt everything, and then play hi-res 3D games on it for 6 hours straight, you didn't have a choice. The stock HSF that came bundled with your CPU wasn't going to keep it from having a nervous meltdown. All that's changed, though. Benchmark Reviews has tested a number of cooling solutions and we've found that not everyone buys an aftermarket cooler to max out their top-line processor. Some are building value systems for friends: start with an OEM E21x0 chip from Intel, put a decent cooler on it, heat-pipes and 120mm fan, and crank it up to 3.0 GHz without breaking a sweat or breaking the bank. It's a lot quieter, too...! Now we are seeing the same sort of awakening in the GPU world. The competition between ATI and NVIDIA is fierce; it's definitely a buyers market in video cards these days. New chips are coming out every six months and they're almost always running more transistors, faster. There's a fair chance that the hottest and noisiest component inside your PC is the video card. Fortunately, the PC cooling industry has responded with some excellent products to keep the GPU heat and noise down. Join Benchmark Reviews as we look at how the Zalman VF900-Cu Ultra Quiet Heat-pipe VGA Cooler saved the day for one system builder.

For the longest time, computer cases were neglected. So it's about time that some thought went into the design of these historically overlooked PC components. Now it seems computer case designs are changing faster than ever. Of course now you have literally hundreds of products to choose from. The problem comes when trying to select the best one for you. There are of course some big names and not so big names in the industry. I've always thought of Silverstone as a manufacturer of very expensive high end computer cases. Well, that all changed when I first learned of the Kublai series cases from Silverstone, I was excited because I knew that finally I could afford to own a true Silverstone computer case. I had always admired them but knew I could never afford their steep price tags. Now that has all changed with the Kublai series. This is actually the third installment of the Kublai series cases, also known as the KL03 series of which also comes in several different flavors too.

Silverstone's third Kublai mid tower chassis is made for aficionados and serious computer enthusiasts that require a high level component with no trade-offs for cooling and quietness. Following the designing concept of previous chassis from Kublai series, the KL03 also possess many features borrowed from the Temjin series. Constructed using steel and aluminum, this chassis strikes a great balance between external aesthetics and excellent structural rigidity. Benchmark Reviews tests the Silverstone Kublai KL03B-W mid-tower ATX computer case in this article.

Windows Vista has given the hardware industry a good reason to feed Microsoft's pig of an Operating System nothing but the finest high-performance hardware. The very first thing I noticed during testing was the incredibly sluggish performance compared to Windows XP. Windows Vista caches startup programs so boot times are decent, and it indexes every single file for faster searches, but if you want a genuinely fast Operating System, you had better be prepared to change your idea of what "sufficient hardware" is. Programs and games alike suffered from poor performance, and at the end my testing I was very much convinced that the 2 GB of system memory used in Windows XP was simply not enough to enjoy (or cope with) Windows Vista. It was time to step it up, and the first thing that needed to be done was to upgrade the RAM. Installing 4 GB worth of Aeneon DDR3-1600 XMP RAM worked like magic, and would end yet another great era: the usefulness of 2 GB RAM kits in a modern Operating System.

Perhaps Benchmark Reviews likes to ride the edge of technology just a little too close, since we've tested more DDR3 and SSD's than almost everyone else on the web. The bleeding edge is where most enthusiasts like to live, but most avoid the price tag. OCZ allowed us to test their first Solid State Drive product, the OCZSSD64GB, and while the pricing very affordable the performance wasn't so impressive. Now just a short three months later, OCZ has returned with one of the industries very first SATA-II SSD products, the OCZSSD2. It would be a shame to give away the details, but it appears that the extra time at the design table was very well spent. OCZ's new Solid State Drive offers industry leading performance matched by ultra-affordable pricing, and sets a new record.