Ever dream of a mid tower case that had four hot swap internal SATA drive bays that you could access easily? Of course the case would have to have plenty of fans for cooling, and a pass thru ventilation design for the PSU to reduce heating the internal components. And of course, you would want your mechanical drives to be noise isolated. It might also help if the case had a cool look with a back lit LED fan to kind of show it all off. Hey let's throw in water cooling holes just in case, and what would be nice is if the price was affordable. Perhaps less than a hundred bucks?

Phison SSDs aren't as well-known to computer hardware enthusiasts as those controllers from SandForce or Indilinx. For many within the industry, SandForce dominated the 2010 market in much the same way that Indilinx did throughout 2009. But not everyone can afford the premium brand names, or desire the fastest solid state drive technology. Building on the name of their budget Torqx TRB product line that came in 32/64GB capacities, Patriot Memory issues the Torqx 2 series for high-performance power users with capacity up to 256GB. The Patriot Torqx 2 SSD is specified to offer 270 MB/s reads over the SATA 3Gb/s interface, with write speed reaching 230 MB/s. In this article, Benchmark Reviews confirms these results by testing the Patriot Torqx 2 on a B3-stepping Sandy Bridge platform with plenty of bandwidth headroom.

Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs and their accompanying Cougar Point chipsets brought a new level of price/performance to the enthusiast market. There was just one problem: you had to choose between a motherboard with the H67 chipset, which enabled the on-CPU graphics and Intel's new Quick Sync transcoding engine, or a motherboard based on the P67 chipset, which enabled the amazing overclocking ability of the "K"-series CPUs. You could have one, or the other, but not both...until now. Intel's new Z68 chipset gives the enthusiast both capabilities in a single platform, and ASUS throws in their own enhancements to create one of the most impressive motherboards Benchmark Reviews has ever seen.

In only three short years, the solid state drive industry exploded from a small handful of SSD controllers compared to nearly fifty different versions that have collectively appeared on the retail market. Of the most prolific designs, Intel continues to earn its reputation for reliable solid-state storage solutions. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the 20GB Intel 311 Series Larson Creek SSD model SSDSA2VP020G2E. Built upon 34nm SLC Compute NAND Technology, the Intel 311 is capable of sequential read speeds up to 200 MB/s and 40,000 combined IOPS. The Intel 311 SSD is optimized for Intel Smart Response Technology, which debuts with the Intel Z68-Express chipset and works with the entire Sandy Bridge series.

The Sandy Bridge B3 revision motherboards are out and ready to go. ASUS has already re-released all of their previous motherboards under the new revision. You've seen our reviews of other ASUS P67 motherboards, and Benchmark Reviews is now bringing you a look at the ASUS Sabertooth P67 B3 Rev 3.0 motherboard with its TUF Thermal Armor and military grade components. We have a good idea where the benchmark scores will fall, and we don't expect any surprises there. But every motherboard is a little different. In this article, Benchmark Reviews is focusing on the ASUS Sabertooth P67, what it brings to the table, and how that compares with other P67-Express motherboards.

Lucid (formerly LucidLogix) appeared on the enthusiast horizon with their "Hydra" technology, which purported to enable vendor-agnostic multi-GPU systems. Users would be able to combine the performance of different video cards from different vendors, rather than being constrained to the cards required by ATI CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI. Hydra didn't work as well as had been hoped, but the introduction of Intel's new Z68 chipset came with an announcement that Intel had licensed Lucid's "Virtu" GPU virtualization technology. This brings significant new features to Z68 motherboards, and Benchmark Reviews will examine them in this article.

Well, we're almost halfway through 2011, and guess what? Although SSDs have come down in price, they're still pretty darn expensive. If you're a regular Benchmark Reviews reader, you've seen our numerous SSD reviews and know that replacing your hard disk with an SSD is the single biggest performance improvement you can make to your system. But with 256G SSDs going for between $427 and $584 on Newegg, versus dozens of terabyte drives for less than $75.00, most people choose the latter. But Intel's new Smart Response Technology, available initially on Z68 Express motherboards, promises to bring much of that speedy SSD performance to users via a small SSD used as a cache for the main hard drive.

We've seen little innovation in laptop design in the last few years. Most companies seem to think that using a brushed aluminum finish or adding Intel's latest mobile CPU is all they need to do to freshen a product line. Still, Acer's not the first company to introduce a laptop with dual screens; the short-lived Toshiba Libretto W100 comes to mind, and gScreen Corporation's Spacebook has been touted since 2009, although it's still not available at the time of this writing. The Acer Iconia 6120, though, is a computer you can buy right now. Its dual screens offer new capabilities but come with some drawbacks as well. Benchmark Reviews takes a look at this unique laptop to see if it's worth your consideration.