For the longest time, computer cases were neglected. So it's about time that some thought went into the design of these historically overlooked PC components. Now it seems computer case designs are changing faster than ever. Of course now you have literally hundreds of products to choose from. The problem comes when trying to select the best one for you. There are of course some big names and not so big names in the industry. I've always thought of Silverstone as a manufacturer of very expensive high end computer cases. Well, that all changed when I first learned of the Kublai series cases from Silverstone, I was excited because I knew that finally I could afford to own a true Silverstone computer case. I had always admired them but knew I could never afford their steep price tags. Now that has all changed with the Kublai series. This is actually the third installment of the Kublai series cases, also known as the KL03 series of which also comes in several different flavors too.

Silverstone's third Kublai mid tower chassis is made for aficionados and serious computer enthusiasts that require a high level component with no trade-offs for cooling and quietness. Following the designing concept of previous chassis from Kublai series, the KL03 also possess many features borrowed from the Temjin series. Constructed using steel and aluminum, this chassis strikes a great balance between external aesthetics and excellent structural rigidity. Benchmark Reviews tests the Silverstone Kublai KL03B-W mid-tower ATX computer case in this article.

Windows Vista has given the hardware industry a good reason to feed Microsoft's pig of an Operating System nothing but the finest high-performance hardware. The very first thing I noticed during testing was the incredibly sluggish performance compared to Windows XP. Windows Vista caches startup programs so boot times are decent, and it indexes every single file for faster searches, but if you want a genuinely fast Operating System, you had better be prepared to change your idea of what "sufficient hardware" is. Programs and games alike suffered from poor performance, and at the end my testing I was very much convinced that the 2 GB of system memory used in Windows XP was simply not enough to enjoy (or cope with) Windows Vista. It was time to step it up, and the first thing that needed to be done was to upgrade the RAM. Installing 4 GB worth of Aeneon DDR3-1600 XMP RAM worked like magic, and would end yet another great era: the usefulness of 2 GB RAM kits in a modern Operating System.

Perhaps Benchmark Reviews likes to ride the edge of technology just a little too close, since we've tested more DDR3 and SSD's than almost everyone else on the web. The bleeding edge is where most enthusiasts like to live, but most avoid the price tag. OCZ allowed us to test their first Solid State Drive product, the OCZSSD64GB, and while the pricing very affordable the performance wasn't so impressive. Now just a short three months later, OCZ has returned with one of the industries very first SATA-II SSD products, the OCZSSD2. It would be a shame to give away the details, but it appears that the extra time at the design table was very well spent. OCZ's new Solid State Drive offers industry leading performance matched by ultra-affordable pricing, and sets a new record.

We have spent a lot of time at Benchmark Reviews talking about video cards recently - and with good reason. The discrete graphics segment of the market is currently afire with many outstanding price-to-performance options. When we looked at the offerings from the two biggest players, the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX and ATI/AMD HD 3870, we saw that game performance even when scaled to high resolution was simply outstanding. This begs the question; why with such low-cost entrance into owning cards capable of "high-rez" gaming, most users are still running a display of 19" or less? Monitors are arguably the most important component for users, getting more usage than any other component of a PC. The only reasonable answer would have to be cost, as until recently displays above the 19" mark have been prohibitively expensive. That's where the SAMSUNG SyncMaster 245BW enters the scene as very attractively priced 24" widescreen LCD monitor.

The Palit GeForce 9600 GT Sonic provides users with the best image quality and most flexible visual experience regardless of the output standard needed. The new advanced DisplayPort output supports a maximum of 10.8 Gbit/s data rate and display resolutions up to 2560×1600; high-definition video is supported with the HDMI output. Palit maintains dual Dual-Link DVI outputs on GeForce 9600 GT Sonic, further extending the usability of this graphics card. All four outputs support 40-bit HDCP and the DisplayPort output also supports 128-bit AES DPCP. Benchmark Reviews tests the Palit NE/960TSX0202 GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Sonic video card against a wide variety of Geforce products in this product review.

Lian Li is known for well made products when it comes to stylish computer cases and functional chassis. They have been on the market for seven years now and Benchmark Reviews has been pleased to have the opportunity to review several of their items. This time we will be taking a look at the Lian Li PC-A09B Classical Series Mid-Tower Case to see if it stacks up to the others.

On the 29th of May 2008 VIA announced the Nano CPU, a processor built from Isaiah architecture. Building on the market-leading energy efficiency of their existing VIA C7 processor family, the VIA Nano processor family offers as much as four times the performance within the same power range to extend VIA's performance per watt leadership, while identical pin compatibility with VIA C7 processors will ensure a smooth transition for OEMs and motherboard vendors, and provides them with an easy upgrade path for current system or board designs.

You are going to see an increased interest in GPU computing very soon. Terms such as "heterogeneous computing" and "parallel computing" are going to be used as often as the term "video card" is used in a product review. You won't want to miss this evolution in graphics technology, because we are witness to a pivotal moment in time when computers are going to stop being filled with familiar single-purpose hardware. Benchmark Reviews offers this FAQ to help our readers understand what is happening, and help introduce them to what is coming. We don't want anyone to be left in the cold when the rest of the world learns how the GPU is learning to be a CPU.