EBay has become the number 1 online international selling and buying website, for people on the net. It was first started in 1995 by a 28-year-old software developer Pierre Omidyar, who had previously worked with Claris developing software for Apple computers, sat down to write the code that would eventually evolve into what we know as eBay today. When it first started it was known as Auction Web. It was only a experiment which Pierre Omidyar made, but when something so small was sold, he noticed that he had actually discovered something BIG!
Later on he called it eBay. Now the site has millions of users which buy and sell. It doesn’t matter what or why you want eBay for. But one thing for sure is that you should definitely join this thing. For selling there is a big chance of extra income, you might not make millions, even though there are some people who make millions from the site. But some people make a full time living by having a eBay shop and selling items. Maybe if selling isn’t your kind of thing then, for sure you can make good bargains and saving $$$; because with eBay you can surely find a good deal.
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It features three 80mm fans all of which have three speed options which are selectable via a small switch that protrudes from each one - we found all but the slowest setting unacceptably noisy for a home theatre case and even the slowest setting wasn’t what we’d call silent.
Two fans are situated in the main chamber of the case and are fitted in an exhaust configuration. This leaves the task of intake to the third fan and your CPU cooler which, depending on your motherboard, should line up at least partially with the ventilation holes atop the case. The MicroFusion is equipped with a 350W 80-Plus certified power supply fitted with an 80mm fan which exhausts hot air directly out the side of the case and provides plenty of connectivity for a fully fitted system inside the chassis. Our test kit comprised of one SATA hard disk, one SATA optical drive, a micro-ATX motherboard and a graphics card and there were still two Molex connectors and a 5V connector spare.
Because of the MicroFusion’s small dimensions, the expansion slots are half-height so you will need a half-height graphics card to build a complete system inside this case. Most of you will likely stick with an integrated graphics chipset, but if you have a half-height card but the bracket is full-height, removing the bracket is as easy as unscrewing the bolts either side of the outputs and you’re in business.
To give us a little room for comparison, we used the same cooler but unfortunately the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 graphics card we used in the Sugo was too way too big. As a result, we opted for a half-height ATI Radeon HD 3450 with a passive cooler, as it is more likely to appear in most people’s HTPC systems anyway.
Firing up the small FFT test in Prime95 to put the CPU under full load our Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 maxed out at a very respectable 60 degrees centigrade. This is an especially good score considering the SilverStone Sugo, for all its charm, was unable to provide sufficient air for the cooler to do its job and the CPU reached a roasting 82°C.
Our passively cooled Radeon HD 3450 peaked at a very reasonable 52°C while running continuous loops of 3DMark 06’s GPU tests, which is also an impressive showing with all things considered. The set up wasn’t about the break any benchmarking records but the MicroFusion did a great job of keeping the components inside cool.
Many HTPC cases on the market, despite their good looks, are actually very big due to their full ATX nature. The fact that the Antec MicroFusion 350 is a micro ATX case allows your home theatre system to be considerably more discrete will appeal many potential owners. With media PCs, aesthetics are always very important as it’s likely to be on full view when the Jones’ come over to watch Free Willy and we were particularly fond of the retro style fascia of the MicroFusion so it scored well here too.
Jetway comes as one of the many companies that comes with some new and unique features to really look at in any motherboard or other products that you would look at. Like the example of the USB market which they target the stylish market with people who like the bling and the fashion scene, but the Jetway NC92-330 a dual atom processor is the new small budget type platform form Intel to come up with the other part of the market to fill them with products for them to buy in relative budget cost rather than having to take up the processor and the motherboard separately, but the atom series comes an embedded CPU in the motherboard.
But the new NC92-330 motherboard and processor suite has a pair of atom processors clocked into the average 1.6GHz frequency and also a support of DDR2 800MHz memory which in this board has only one single channel port, so only a limit of about 2GB of memory stick in the system plus also the board can only accommodate a single PCI slot, not the graphics slot but an old one. Plus also the design layout of the board, an original green colour and also the bulk of the slot colour are just a yellow but most of the stuff the board looks more of the usual Mini ITX board small enough to fit any media case or just hide it in any place possible.
While the boards limited leverage on both of the expansion slots in the memory and the PCI slot, but the Atom dual core 330 series comes in more of a looking result of a hybrid look of the dual core 2 in the mainstream series placed into a say , in this $300 motherboard suite. We recommend plugging in the SATA ports first since they’re a little difficult to get to behind the PCI slot and memory. That single memory slot is a bit limiting too, but a 2GB module doesn’t cost much on its own and it’s not like you’ll need 4GB of RAM with an Atom anyway, otherwise you’re probably expecting it to do far too much.
Jetway doesn’t include Firewire and the audio is limited to the basic Realtek ALC662, so without S/PDIF there’s no way to get good sound out of it without investing in extra hardware. It does have Gigabit Ethernet however, which is at least an upgrade from the “standard” 10/100 on many Atom products. The performance of the Jetway board is generally better than the Shuttle X27-D but it’s all relative - for a “fast enough” CPU a few seconds here and there aren’t going to set the world on fire and for similar money a cheap AMD board and CPU can be bought and they will be a hell of a lot faster.
Having said that, Jetway appears to have made some nice improvements to the way it handles the memory controller on the 945GC northbridge, affording a more rounded memory performance with a much lower latency, given the limited memory bandwidth available. The low power side is particularly attractive, but again a few watts difference is not that much and easily dwarfed if an inappropriate or inefficient PSU is used.
Now in the graphics sector we are going to looks and surely enough the mid-range from Both ATI and NVIDIA show that performance can be sometimes bought, with the asking price of about 300 to 400 dollars, give or take. As much as we know gaming performance nowadays, we find that the two big brands ATI and NVIDIA are almost par to par in the offering in high performance GPU’s, but there is still some hits and misses, like NVIDIA’s problems on providing SLI configuration without sort of problem and also some hardware operation annoyances in ATI with so much power and generates a lot of heat as the example of the 4870X2.
But most guys are now toying with the 4870X2 now because of financial uncertainty in the world, people are looking for are affordable prices and still powerful enough to say, play Crysis in mid detail and resolutions. So in NVIDIA they have the refurbished GTX216/260 graphics with a smaller fabrication process and also the increase in clock frequencies in the memory and core, with some specs in individual manufacturers varied, but with the test in some games like Crysis and Supreme Commander, it manages to beat the GTX280 by a mixed high and low differences and in just the fraction of the cost that the GTX280 is asking. But for most of the games against the ATI 4870 it just comes close in stopping the reign in ATI for mid-ranged cards but the !GB version says that the bigger the memory the better you are to score higher frames in high-res. To put it basically, the resolutions sometimes need a lot of page memory to run such a high demand in colour reproduction so in order to let the core do its jobs in producing bright frames and the memory will handle the size of the files and the res that you acquire in your gaming settings.
So most of the time we would recommend you to have the ATI 4870 1GB version, but with some mixed results in gaming, most of the games show that neither GTX216/260 and the 4870 we good or worse than the other, as for the same as the NVIDIA 9 series and the ATI’s 3-series there is now real big difference between them, until you look even closer in the results then you can see a real winner in the battle, but for the most part it really depends on what games you play or if they are endorsed by ATI or NVIDIA for the mean time the GTX216 is a good favourite for the time with some games also bundled into it makes it more appealing to users.
Gone are the days, it seems, where you paid a pretty penny for a ridiculously small and lightweight piece of hardware. The Wind’s wallet is also bigger and bulkier than you might like. With just the Wind inside it the wallet swells to 290×220x50mm (HxWxD). That size sure isn’t going to leave your tote-bag busting at the seams, but if you plan to carry a portable mouse, MP3 player and so on with you as well then you might want to be just a tiny bit wary.
The good news though is that the faux leather finish on the Wind’s wallet, plus the zip and extra padding, mean that it’ll be a lot safer than it would be in a thin neoprene envelope. While it might be a more snug fit inside your bag, at least it will be better protected.
With that in mind, check the full hardware specification below:
Intel Atom 1.6GHz with Hyper threading
• 10″ Widescreen with 10.1″ 1024×600 LED backlit screen
• Intel 945GMS Northbridge (GMA950) and ICH7-M Southbridge
• 1GB DDR2-667 Memory
• 80GB SATA hard drive
• 3-Cell Li-ion battery
• 802.11b/g Wireless and Bluetooth
• 1.3MP Webcam and Stereo Speakers
• Windows XP Home
The size though has caused some arguments in the office. Joe, now used to his original 7″ Eee PC prefers the 9″ 901 as it’s a little more portable. Richard however has used a 13″ notebook for a while now and much prefers the 10″ Wind over the Eee because it’s far easier to type on.
There were yet more arguments over the definition about portability too and how that extra inch might or might not make all the difference, but we’ll not go into the intricacies of the name-calling here. You can look at the facts and make up your own damn mind.
On the other hand MSI should be praised for innovations in a few other areas. It isn’t everyday someone manages to make a 10″ notebook weigh the same as a 9″er - especially when using a mechanical hard drive instead of an SSD. This SSD versus hard drive leads to some strong debate though: the SSD allows for a better battery life, drop protection and completely silent operation, however it’s potentially limited in capacity, performance or by cost if you want both.
On the other hand MSI should be praised for innovations in a few other areas. It isn’t everyday someone manages to make a 10″ notebook weigh the same as a 9″er - especially when using a mechanical hard drive instead of an SSD. This SSD versus hard drive leads to some strong debate though: the SSD allows for a better battery life, drop protection and completely silent operation, however it’s potentially limited in capacity, performance or by cost if you want both.
Still, MSI has shot itself in the foot a bit by essentially making the Wind a rebadged version of the Advent 4211. If there had been some sort of upgrade in terms of the wireless connectivity and storage capacity, or if a swanky new add-on like a touch-screen had been wired in then we’d be all over the Wind as the first real Eee-killer.
X58 chipset boards, we all like and love it, it is the only new chipset to accommodate the new core 7i processor from Intel. But with the upcoming processor chipsets the P55 is a good send for the people who have little money but want to have another of those tasty silicone chips for the process of about $150 acceptable for most in the budget. But the P55 chipset and the mainstream variants like the upcoming 800 series dual core Intel core 5i processors that have a new smaller socket LGA 1166 pin array which makes another platform for the modder and also incompatible for both of the mainstream variants the P55 and the Intel core 5i processor to the more high powered variants the core 7i and the X58 chipset.
But it is going to be another long and annoying few months for the P55 chipset and the 32nm variant mainstream dual core and also integrated graphics chipset also for more embedded GPU and also CPU power house into a smaller redefined chipset of a silicone product. But Jetway as too slow to cope up with the market brought up a X58 chipset of their own liking, meet the BI-600 chipset. An ATX form factor board with the same LGA 1366 socket type processor and the support of triple memory interface with three DDR3 memory modules with a power rating of standard 1.57V and also over 1800MHz frequency speed, makes it possible for a 32-bit OS system to keep up the upgrading potential of these board in a total of 32GB.
But the board as the looks of it comes in the hybrid design of MSI P45 platinum and also come of the colour schematics of any gigabyte motherboard, as respects of the pink colour memory slots in the board. But the features placed in the board come just shy of the shelf features and highlights, but the overall design is just for the norm and love of circular objects. With the usual four of the PCI ex graphics slots present for any SLI or crossfire configuration of multiple graphics support, but having to rely only in single slot form factor cards in the third and the second slots.
The others are just a normal six internal SATA ports and two in the external ports, but one IDE port to mix in the storage connection; while the Debug Led screen is present, but also blocked by any long graphics card but most of the placements of the ports the eight pin and the twenty four pin are placed well away from any intrusions in both any other featured items or itself.
So the BI-600 is a good board go with most of the new modo for the time for the Intel core 7i. But the performance of the BI-600 is a good board to look at is the raw performance and also timings being given when running high demanding app, because we can and can do to any board we like as oppose to other manufacturers this board looks promising in the encoding multimedia apps and also in some gaming apps but to the most crazy in detail. But overall the Bi-600 looks and sounds okay for the X58 fans with enough cash to buy this board.
The explosion in popularity of net books over the last 12 months should be proof enough of our love for all things tech and tiny, but the Mini-ITX form factor is also enjoying continued growth as people look to build their own mini media PCs or workstations.
Mini ITX doesn’t even mean compromising on components any more either, with fully featured boards like the socket AM2-based J&W MINIX 780G and LGA775 Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX (review soon!) offering big board performance and features in an ultra compact form factor. However, Intel’s Atom platform remains the more popular Mini-ITX choice thanks to its tiny cooling and power requirements combined with “good enough” performance and an exceptionally affordable price.
With this increasing interest in the Mini-ITX form factor, there has been a surprisingly small amount of new dedicated Mini-ITX chassis to house all those little motherboards. This is where case and cooling manufacturer Akasa is looking to step in with its Enigma Mini-ITX enclosure.
Mini ITX doesn’t even mean compromising on components any more either, with fully featured boards like the socket AM2-based J&W MINIX 780G and LGA775 Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX (review soon!) offering big board performance and features in an ultra compact form factor. However, Intel’s Atom platform remains the more popular Mini-ITX choice thanks to its tiny cooling and power requirements combined with “good enough” performance and an exceptionally affordable price. With this increasing interest in the Mini-ITX form factor, there has been a surprisingly small amount of new dedicated Mini-ITX chassis to house all those little motherboards. This is where case and cooling manufacturer Akasa is looking to step in with its Enigma Mini-ITX enclosure.
The case’s small size also means that there’s no option to fit expansion cards like sound cards or TV tuners. Even if you have a half height card and compatible board there’s simply no opening cut into the rear panel for it to fit into, leaving you only with the feature set that your Mini-ITX motherboard offers. Although Mini-ITX boards are becoming more and more impressive the omission of any space for expansion cards is something of a restrictive policy, but one that is mutually exclusive to the smallest of form factors. Akasa has been extremely ambitious with the Enigma’s tiny dimensions and there’s a whole lot to squeeze inside. To help accomplish this, there’s a three tiered system with the motherboard mounted directly onto the case’s panelling via pre-fitted motherboard risers and then the 2.5” HDD and slim optical drive mounted above them.
And it doesn’t really work too well we’re sad to report, with plenty of little niggles and annoyances helping to make the Enigma one of the most horrid cases we’ve ever fitted even a basic system into. Removing the drive mounting trays is easy enough, and so is angling in your Mini-ITX motherboard (we’re using a Gigabyte GA-GC23OD with a single core 1.6GHz Atom CPU), but problems soon arise when it comes to fitting the drives and their respective mounting systems.
In short, the Akasa Enigma is a huge disappointment. Not only is it extraordinarily cramped inside, making building even an Atom based system into it a difficult job, but it is poorly designed to the point that it merrily cooked our 1.6GHz 8W Atom CPU to within an inch of its life before we finally pulled the plug. While it might look the part with its miniature dimensions, numerous compromises have been made to keep the case as small as possible and these are obviously apparent.
It is a bit old now the HD -3000 card now, being the card that propelled the ATI brand to go dual and beat the 9-series from its DX10 graphics’ card domination, and gave also the life of the new HD4000 and the basis of the new 4870X2 card with the same RV770 chipset configuration form the single card 4870.
But the Jetway company is a bit slow or just being hit hard by the financial crisis that they cannot have the more advance of dual card graphics from ATI or even the NVIDIA corporation. But the only thing that makes this not a pretty bad card is just availability of the thing is much better than any card, but now being that slow of a card and also having the previous problem of having a bug in some of the ATI catalyst drivers, but can be resolved by monthly driver updates.
But the Jetway 4870X2 card is not a problem to look at and also the specs are all the same with all of the 3870X2 cards, with 775MHz in the core frequency of each of the cores and also 900MHx of each of the clock cycle of the card with 2000MHz effective frequency memory bandwidth but still having only 1GB of video memory buffer. The card in the physical form is the same of the form factors being 26cm in length and also the size of about two standard PCI slot size so also the cooling fan has a single fans placed in the back of the card and blows all of the heat in the back of the card but having a problem to push effectively the heat produced in the dual GPU’s and also some help of the hybrid copper and also aluminium fins and cooler blocks. So it can be the same as the reference 4870X2 but without the problem of having a crash stress in standard settings because of the heat produced; of about 90 degrees in the worst case scenario, a lossy prepared case and also limited or no air circulation.
The performance gauge of the old 3870X2 card form Jetway is lower than usual for a 6 month old graphics card, only going as much as 30fps in Crysis game in high detail with the DX10 enabled and also AAF settings are turned on. But while you can play a bit more in the far cry 2 game with some of the settings in high, but no really going much higher from 50fps.
So, the jetway have made a good card out of a old card, but the 3870X2 was never going to be a good thing now because of the arrival of the 4870X2 and the newer GTX 295 which now beats the competition, while we should say going out of the old in with the new, when you have this card lying around, you can get another one and do quad crossfire to boost up some scores.
When you celebrate an anniversary you might go out for a few drinks, perhaps a meal, pop open a bottle of champagne and make a toast to the occasion. Not Lian Li though, who has a history of celebrating its anniversaries by producing chassis that take the humble PC case and turn it into something unique and memorable.
Limited to a production run of just 500 units, it’s certainly bound to become an extremely exclusive purchase thanks to its unique appearance and design, but is the PC-888 actually a good case underneath the crazy design? Let’s find out.There’s just no way to confuse the PC-888 with any other chassis currently available – its styling and look are totally unique. Inspired by the shape of a sail (and probably this hotel in Dubai we’d care to venture) the PC-888 breaks the boxy mould of modern PC chassis with a deliciously curved front fascia that’s like nothing we’ve seen before. It’s great to see a finally finally doing something different with case design and while we’re not too sure if it’ll catch on, it’s certainly innovative.
The entire case, inside and out, has been built from high quality blue anodised aluminium, and is a also welcome change from the sea of black, silver and gun metal chassis we see on a day to day basis. While these plain colours are fine, we can’t help but think that they’re becoming the new beige to some degree – what’s wrong with a bit of colour here and there after all?
The front panel housing atop the PC-888 is also where you’ll find the case’s power and reset buttons, along with a precision cut Lian Li logo. The power button and Lian Li logo are both subtly backlit with blue LEDs, and when powered look great, although the “spike” and accompanying housing atop the case are purely decorative (and shouldn’t be used as a carry handle).
Taking a look inside the PC-888 though reveals the gorgeous blue anodised aluminium interior, with absolutely every internal surface getting the funky blue treatment and it looks fantastic. All too often chassis manufacturers (Lian Li included) produce a chassis that looks great from the outside, but within are all grey and poorly finished – it’s great to see that Lian Li hasn’t skimped.
Idle performance is absolutely fine with the fans set at either low or full speed, but CPU load temperatures were admittedly very poor – the PC-888 is one of the hottest PC chassis we’ve tested with its fans set to low, with the CPU running a full 9°C hotter under load than in the CPU champ, the Silverstone FT01. Setting the fans to full speed does improve things a little, resulting in a drop in CPU temperature of 2°C.
We’ve seen in the past that the best cases for CPU cooling effectively surround the CPU with intakes and exhaust fans, but here the cooling is a very conventional front to back setup and the CPU temperatures, while perfectly safe, just aren’t able to compete.
Jetway, comes in the great time for AMD to unveil their new AM3 socket processor with also the inclusion of the new DDr3 memory interface for better bandwidth headroom, form under 1066MHz to the mark of 2000MHz frequency bus plus the inclusion of dual channel onboard memory controller for better transfer to the CPU and the dual channel DDR3 modules and also support of no more than 16GB.
But the onboard graphics with the support of the 79GX chipset form AMD is the most functional motherboard and obviously boast an onboard dedicated memory of 512MB HD-3300 graphics chipset. With the same 55nm fabrication process to fit both the Northbridge chipset controller of the rest of the PCIex slots and expansions cards and HD onboard card, which can support hybrid crossfire one half of the graphics equation the external discrete graphics will do most of the hard calculations in games and demand apps, while the onboard card will do more of the light load or just play HD movies and work on word, to save up the power hungry graphics on more simple apps.
While the board looks more of the norm for most heat-pied boards in the usual ATX form factor with the eye sore on the PWM’s heat sink with the black aluminum fins raising the heat out of the power regulators to the CPU and the Northbridge chipset, but also a small horse trademark in the middle of the two main graphics slot, probably the I/O chipset or the Southbridge in its respect.
The board has the overall black PCB color with enough space and also some of the features for an enthusiast to keep up the demand from the platform rival form Intel, this board has the usual eight and 24-pin power connectors with four dual channel DDR2 modules but having to resort a smaller low profile kits for this: while the only problem is the space given in the module slots, the board still gave the dual PCIex space for dual slot 4870’s for any crossfire configuration or quad crossfire with the monster 4870X2’s, and still usable with two PCI peripheral slots and two PCIex 1x electrical slots for low profile cards. While the storage and the I/O ports are not in the great abundance the SATA ports are facing up and only have a total of six standards and also a serious limit of USB ports in the back I/O, but may compensate with another three eSATA ports and also the three display options HDMI, DVI and SVGA.
While the performance of the 790GX is great all round for gaming and also the multimedia applications, and even in some raw performance in the CPU. But when you hit it with a new Phenom II processor probably the 920 with 3.0GHz standard frequency, you can come up with better performance marks with the higher clock frequency than the previous phenom you can get a 15% increase in the media video encoding ad also in some games more in the RTS games like command and conquer: red alert 3 and the supreme commander franchise. But some down turn in some compatibilities in fusion form AMD and also space in between the memory and the CPU, the thermalright cooler cannot fit that much space, but another 790GX board for any AMD fan.
