Benchmark Reviews has seen Solid State Drive products from every angle, and while SSDs have overtaken hard drive products in terms of speed, there still remains the giant task of beating HDDs in price. That's exactly why OCZ has created the Agility Solid State Drive. Identical to the popular OCZ Vertex SSD in every aspect except NAND selection, the Agility SSD series offers the same Indilinx 'Barefoot' controller and 64MB of DRAM buffer allowing a fast 230 MBps read speed. Benchmark Reviews tests the reaction time and bandwidth performance for the 120GB Agility OCZSSD2-1AGT120G model against over two dozen other storage products in this article.

For years, the focus on computers has been on faster, better performing systems. Recently, however, with rising energy costs and more environmentally conscious consumers, computer manufacturers have turned to designing machines that use less energy, cost less, and still have many of the advantages of modern computer systems. In the realm of mobile and energy efficient computing, two real competitors have recently emerged. Via, with their Nano chipsets named after biblical references, has dominated the field until recently; at least as far as pure statistic performance is concerned. Intel is the other name, and with that name they have competed quite fiercely for the lion's share of the mobile and ultra-economic computing market. But name is all they had to go on, since their products, the Atom series, have fallen short of the standard set by Via. With the release of Intel's newest Atom, though, that has all changed. Benchmark Reviews is bringing you the down and dirty on the first ever dual core processor made specifically to combine improved performance with low energy consumption as we test the Intel BOXD945GCLF2D Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini-ITX Motherboard/CPU combo kit.

Considering the state of the global economy, along with local recession and unemployment, performance computer builders have had to make some difficult decisions. It's not easy to convince enthusiasts that they should invest their money in mechanical hard disk products in the age of Solid State Drives, especially when performance favors SSD's almost two-fold. But the cost of high-performance HDDs has remained very affordable, and the capacity is ever-expanding. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive against a large field of high-performance storage solutions.

Home Theater PCs continue to gain popularity, particularly as more television networks are pushing their content over the web. They're also a great platform for gaming, watching Blu-Ray movies, running a custom DVR, and centralizing media storage. For some of these tasks, a low-power Atom system might be sufficient, but for gaming and processing high definition content, most consumers will want a little more horsepower. That's where a quality HTPC chassis can make a big difference. With room for full-size ATX components, seven hard drives, and five fans, the SilverStone LC10B-E that Benchmark Reviews is covering today should fit the bill.

Sapphire has four ranges for most top-end products they offer: standard, Vapor-X, Toxic, and Atomic. While each is different in its own right, for most gamers it is the Toxic design that draws the most attention. Combining the Vapor-X cooling with overclocks seen on the Atomic, the Toxic brand is the most elite air-cooled video card Sapphire offers. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the performance on the Sapphire HD4890 Toxic Vapor-X 11150-01-40R video card against many of the other best graphics accelerator solutions in the price segment. FPS tests compare frame rates between low to high-end video cards, including a pair of CrossFireX Radeon HD 4770's.

Yesterday at Computex, AMD took the wraps off of two highly anticipated processors: the Athlon II X2 250 and the Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition. Both are based on AMD's 45nm SOI process with the key difference being the amount of L3 cache. The Phenom II X2 550, codenamed Callisto, gets the full 6 MB cache of the Phenom II family and will serve as AMD's new flagship dual-core processor. The Athlon II X2 250, on the other hand, is based on the new native dual-core Regor die that omits L3 cache completely and targets the mainstream segment. Benchmark Reviews was fortunate to receive samples of both processors. Yesterday we covered the Phenom II X2 550 and today we bring you the Athlon II X2 250 ADX250OGQBOX.

We all want more for less. That's why enthusiasts overclock, and that's why we build HTPCs. The PlayStation 3 game console has sold millions of units because of its ability to delivery realistic video game performance, but Sony has sold more units because of the PS3's Blu-ray Disc player capability than any other factor. Bringing personal computer technology into the home theater environment has just come one step closer, thanks to the NVIDIA ION platform. The synergistic effect of an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and the dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom process have delivered true high-definition performance beyond any HTPC before it. The Zotac IONITX-A-U packages the Atom N330 CPU and 9400M GPU on a Mini-ITX DDR2 motherboard. Benchmark Reviews discovers how nice it is to have native HDMI connectivity from the HTPC into the HDTV in this article.

With multiple core CPUs, multi-GPU video graphics sub-systems and hotter than hot mainboard north and southbridge chipsets it becomes necessary for most gaming computers to have more and more fans. With the fans comes noise. Of course there's water cooling, but not everyone is capable or even brave enough to give that a try. So what do you do? Well one option is to use a fan speed controller. There are many fan controllers available but today Benchmark Reviews will look specifically at the NZXT SEN-001LX Sentry LX aluminum digital dual-bay fan controller.