Yesterday's News, Today!

There are a few things that one can do to a PC to make it faster. Upgrading GPU, CPU adding RAM are all viable options but upgrading your mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive gives a vary noticable increase. There are only a few ways to make mechanical hard drives faster; one is to increase the rotational speed and we've seen this done. At one time most standard hard drive platters rotated at 5400 RPM, now most rotate at 7200 RPM and server drives can rotate up to 15,000 RPM. Other ways are to increase the cache sizes, upgrade the controllers on the hard drives, but it is still a mechanical rotating assembly that stores bits and pieces of information here and there as the drive writes to the platters. When the drive reads from the platters it grabs a bit here and a bit there but inbetween it has to seek for the next bit of information, and if the drive has to wait for the information, so do you.

Providing clean power to all the components is a crucial function of the power supply. Clean power doesn't mean just proving the voltage and amperage needed to power up the components; it also means providing a very little variation of DC output also called ripple. Just as much as heat kills components, so does "dirty" power. Ripple is caused by the conversion of AC or Alternating Current to DC, or Direct Current, ripple is due to the incomplete conversion process. All components that make up the PC are powered from DC. Some voltages for the major componenets range from as small as .086 volts all the way up to 12 volts.

Back in 2009 Thermatake and BMW Group Designworks teamed up and rocked the PC case industry with the Level 10 Gaming Station case. The $800.00 case featured compartmentalized design for each of the components of a gaming PC, the hard drives each had a separate compartment as well as the power supply and the motherboard and GPUs. The design and aesthetics of that case has inspired a whole line of Level 10 cases from Thermaltake. The Level 10 series of cases convey and elegance in their designs as well. Today we will be taking a look at the not so little brother of the Level 10 Gaming Station; The Level 10 GT. The Level 10 GT comes in two flavors; black and snow. Today we have the black Level 10 on the test bench.

Fresh on the heels of the 3rd Generation of Intel's i series processor is the z77 chipset. The z77 chipset is compatible with both the Sandy Bridge line of processors and the Ivy Bridge series. The major features that this new chipset brings to the table is native USB 3.0, PCI Express 3.0 and official support for DDR3 1600MHz. Today we are taking a look at one of the z77 as well as one of their "Ultra Durable" offerings from Gigabyte: The Z77X-UD3H.

There was a time when most computer cases looked alike and there was no discerning difference between them. While they were functional, in the aspect that they housed the components that made up a computer, they weren't very pleasing aesthetically. A group of enthusiasts started modding these plain-jane cases into functional works of art. Expressing their creative side and screaming that they wanted more from the manufactures than just a beige case. Lexan windows, LED modded fans, water cooling features were all hand built at the time. Flash forward about a decade and the landscape for computer cases has vastly changed. The aforementioned features now come standard on most, if not all computer cases and they still perform the same basic function: house the components that make up a PC.