November 11, 2007 -- Whether you are using Windows or Linux, you are never free of running into hardware problems. It could be a bad power supply or a faulty motherboard, but an incorrect diagnosis can be costly and timely in production environments. PC-Doctor Inc, a company serving the computing community since 1993, recently sent out their PC Doctor Service Center 6 for review. This PC diagnostic test kit includes a variety of hardware and software for helping to diagnose computer problems. While this kit can help in solving computer problems, is it worth $400 USD?

November 07, 2007 -- For enthusiasts, stock coolers just never cut it. Period. It doesn't matter whether it's a video card, a CPU, a motherboard chipset, or anything that puts out a decent amount of heat. After-market heatsinks and other cooling solutions have become a huge market. One of the bigger cooling issues these days is graphics cards. Even the big beefy coolers you see on the GeForce 8800 series rarely perform as well as they look. Many times the performance can be radically improved simply by removing all of the thermal paste and using a compound like Arctic Silver 5 and ensuring good contact with the GPU, but sometimes not. This is where Thermaltake steps up to the plate. Their newest incarnation of GPU cooler is the DuOrb CL-G0102, but does it perform well?

November 03, 2007 -- The technology world is becoming increasingly mobile-oriented these days. The Internet is present in everyone's lives. However, it's not about choosing between life and Internet anymore, it's about the integration of the web and life, and leveraging its power. Thus notebooks are growing more powerful and more mobile than ever before. Even though the days of scalding-hot laptops are gone, laptops still need cooling in order to increase its lifespan. Passive coolers have only been marginally effective. Active coolers tend to be noisy or as bulky as a second laptop. Most people try them for a while and religiously lug around a clunky plastic stand with their other laptop gear. Eventually the coolers just are stuffed in a corner to collect dust. So what does one do? Is there an effective passive cooler that doesn't take up a second laptop's space? Thermaltake seems to think it has the answer with the iXoft Notebook Cooling Pad.

October 27, 2007 -- Since breaking open bottles of beer with heatpipes and other hardware last month at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, we have been cutting open a number of different heatpipes. In this article we have some new details to shed on heatpipes from a numbers of manufactures, including Thermalright, Thermaltake, OCZ, and Abit. These cooling mechanisms are supposed to keep our beloved PCs from overheating, but how does their manufacturing quality differ? With this article, we have plenty of pictures and videos showing you the differing qualities in heatpipes.

August 27, 2007 -- We don't review many disk controllers or hard drives at Phoronix but we decided to take a quick look at the Promise Technology SATA300 TX4 PCI controller card, which promises to be a cost-effective 4-port Serial ATA 2.0 controller. Two of the features include Native Command Queuing and Tagged Command Queuing support, but how does its performance compare to solutions integrated on the motherboard? In this review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 we tested it with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn using an nForce 430 chipset.

July 16, 2007 -- We don't look at many cooling fans at Phoronix, but after being impressed by a variety of SilverStone products over the years -- such as the Sugo SG03, Temjin TJ09, and Zeus ST75ZF -- when SilverStone told us about some new variable speed fans they had released, we decided to take a look at them. The fans we are looking at in this review include the SilverStone FM83 and FM123.

June 22, 2007 -- Rexus, ever hear of them? Neither had we until an ambitious representative had contacted us and sent out three of their Rexflo fans. Rexus does sell a number of different fans manufactured by Panaflo, Delta, Sunon, Evercool, and Nidec, but they also maintain the Rexflo series for fans that run very quiet and use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) for reducing noise and managing the fan speed. The fans at hand today are the Rexflo 80mm, 92mm, and 120mm models.

May 20, 2007 -- We don't normally publish reviews on networking hardware and other peripherals unless we have thoroughly tested the product internally for some time and find it to be truly great or a product that is simply a disaster. Today we have the SMC SMC2870W 802.11g Wireless Ethernet Bridge. This wireless bridge is capable of turning any wired networking device into a wireless node and can also act as an Internet Access Point along with a built-in 802.11b/g repeater. What category of righteousness does this product fall into? Well, for Linux users, the SMC bridge is falling down.

February 10, 2007 -- The Razer DeathAdder is an exceptionally well-designed mouse with an 1800DPI 3G infrared sensor, five buttons, 16-bit data channel, and a variety of other features. In this review, we have our thoughts on this new Razer mouse after having experimented with it for several weeks.

January 21, 2007 -- Nocuta is a newcomer to Phoronix, so when they had first asked us to look at a couple fans we were a bit hesitant. In the past year, the only cooling fans we had reviewed were the Sytrin KuFormula SFFD120 and the Enermax Marathon Enlobal Fan, which were both unique products compared to a traditional computer case fan. Ultimately, we decided to accept Noctua's invitation to try out the NF-S12 and NF-R8 fans, and in this review you will find out why.