Benchmark Reviews has the pleasure of testing NZXT's newest fan control: the Sentry 2 Touchscreen Fan Controller. A step up from the Sentry 1 and a worthy stable mate for the Sentry LX. The Sentry 2 is a different approach to the same problem. A more elegant solution to a problem that has plagued computer enthusiasts since their earliest days; fan noise. With it's touchscreen controls it's a definite step in the right direction above and beyond it's predecessor the Sentry 1, the Sentry 2 is simplicity itself.

Taking up only half the space of the Sentry LX you might think the NZXT Sentry 2 has only half the features or capabilities but you'd be wrong. Gone are the buttons bells and whistles but what's left is the best of the LX with a touchscreen to make those core features even better and easier to use with some added benefits as well.

You don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate the enhanced surround sound effects from Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio found on most Blu-ray Disc movie discs over the standard Dolby Digital or DTS formats found on standard DVD movie discs. The lossless audio compression formats and/or the two extra channels of sound output really adds a significant amount of realism to the whole movie watching experience. The problem is most HTPC owners don't have the ability to experience these enhanced formats due to a lack of sound cards on the market that can support these formats. Benchmarkreviews has the ASUS Xonar HDAV 1.3 Slim sound card that does just that. Benchmark Reviews have put it through a series of tests and have determined whether HTPC owners can rejoice or not.

Historically most people couldn't justify the expense of a dual-monitor setup in spite of the productivity gains multiple screens afford. So most people were relegated to drooling over the possibility while watching movies like "Swordfish" (possibly the most eye popping multi-monitor setup ever) or the 2008 remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" which reflects not only the broad adoption of multi-display configurations, but also demonstrates currently available "next generation" display technologies like Microsoft's "Surface". Today, even entry level PC's as well as nearly all laptops have graphics cards capable of multi-monitor support - so at Benchmark Reviews we decided to address the most important questions: "Will you really be more Productive?", "What do you need to know?", and "What will it cost?". Benchmark Reviews will answer all of these questions in-depth in this article on Using Dual-Monitors to Optimize Productivity.

Until 2009, Solid State Drive (SSD) popularity was only growing in the elite enthusiast circles. Then along comes the Indilinx Barefoot chip, which quickly became the backbone SSD controller for over a dozen different products. Crucial, being The Memory Experts that they are, have returned to the market with their second SSD product. By most accounts, this isn't par for the course when you consider how often the competition reveals a new product line. Equipped with the test-proven Indilinx Barefoot controller and 64MB of DRAM buffer, Crucial is insured that the M225-series will deliver outstanding performance. Benchmark Reviews tests the bandwidth speed and IOPS performance for the Crucial M225 128GB SATA-II SSD CT128M225 against a large contingent of desktop storage products in this article.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems have found their way into homes just as they did with the office space years ago. Prices for NAS server products have dropped to the point where it's more expensive to buy the drive that goes in them than the actual storage device itself. Patriot, a company based around memory technologies, has recently began to sell the Patriot Corza Network Storage Server PCZ35SNAS2 to retailers for under $100. This dual-bay SATA NAS can accommodate either SSD or hard disk storage media, and offers RAID-0/1/JBOD configurations over a gigabit Ethernet network connection. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the transfer speeds for the Patriot Corza NAS against some of the biggest names in the industry, and determines just how much value you can get from this network storage appliance.

Overclockers and performance enthusiasts share the same desire to cool their processor with the best possible hardware solution. Benchmark Reviews first tested the cooling performance on the Intel Core i7 platform in the Best CPU Cooler Performance LGA1366 - Q1 2009 article, which discovered the now-famous Prolimatech Megahalems CPU Cooler. With such a dominant hold on cooling performance, the CPU cooler industry has been slow to respond with even better products. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests a new collection of products in the Best CPU Cooler Performance LGA1366 Q2 - 2009.

Those who want to watch over the air TV at all must either purchase a TV with an ATSC tuner installed or purchase one of the conversion boxes out there. For the HTPC crowd, it means that their tuner card must support ATSC just the same. Most cards out there are going to produce video results that are exactly the same, especially considering the signal and quality are more a factor of antenna reception than card quality. So, what's to make someone decide on one TV tuner over another? The ASUS My Cinema-EHD3-100 answers this question by going one step further than most cards out there to be your all-in-one media center card. It fully supports the ATSC and QAM digital TV specifications allowing you to access digital TV in high definition resolution. It also fully supports analog NTSC TV, analog video and radio. Plus, its on-board mpeg-2 encoder chip helps on-the-fly analog video recording. Is the My Cinema-EHD3-100 your HTPC answer? Benchmark Reviews will fill you in!

Prior to our 33-Way Thermal Compound Comparison article published back in March 2008, there had not been another project of its size available online. So when Benchmark Reviews revealed our test results, it was a surprise to find that many overclockers had been ill-informed by marketing hype and misleading enthusiast opinions. Benchmark Reviews later published several other complimentary articles for performance hardware enthusiasts, offering an instructional guide on Thermal Paste Application Methods and testing for the Best CPU Cooler Performance. As the author to both of those articles, I have discovered that the most critical factors pertaining to thermal cooling performance seems to be overlooked. In this massive follow-up article, which was built from entirely new project data taking over one year of research to publish, our collection of test material has grown to include every product we could acquire from the marketplace. Benchmark Reviews has received advice of industry experts, manufacturers, and elite overclockers to bring you this comprehensive 80-Way Thermal Interface Material cooling performance comparison benchmark test.