Main Menu
- Welcome to SayIT.
- Log in
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">Towards the end of last year, I took a visit out to Antec's campus in Fremont to see two new cases: the headlining P280, and the shortly-to-follow Eleven Hundred. The P280 we've already reviewed; it's as much a complement to the existing P180 series as it is a refresh, but our review of the Eleven Hundred has been conspicuously absent since its launch. That's due to a combination of bad timing and the fact that, superficially, the Eleven Hundred has an awful lot in common with the P280, pushing other cases to the front of the line.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">With the refreshed case testbed I decided it was time to take a look at the Eleven Hundred, if for no other reason than to at least get a comparison point that was similar to the P280 in our results. As it turns out, though the Eleven Hundred shares the same fundamental framework and chassis as the P280, the differences between the two are far more notable than they seem.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">If you go back and pore through our </span>Antec P280 review<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">, a lot of what you'll see with the Eleven Hundred will look very familiar. Specs are almost identical, but what's interesting is that the Eleven Hundred removes the option to mount a 240mm radiator to the top of the enclosure that the P280 has, instead replacing it with a massive 200mm exhaust fan. The fan control switches in the back are gone, too; the opening is still there since the Eleven Hundred uses the same basic chassis as the P280, but instead there's just a single switch to toggle the blue LED for the fan. The conclusion these elements (and more) lead up to is that though they share a chassis, the P280 was engineered for acoustics while the Eleven Hundred was engineered for performance.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/5730/antec-eleven-hundred-the-p280s-gloves-come-off" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></p>
I am sure that anyone would love to have a quiet power supply unit in their system. The products addressing these wishes are the fanless PSU models, which have no noise-making components by definition. Today we are going to talk about four products like that from Enhance, Kingwin, Seasonic and Silverstone.
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">We've been keeping track of the evolution of Corsair's line of enclosures since the </span></span><span style="font-size: small; ">Graphite 600T</span><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; "> was released. Even as the newer enclosures generally found themselves lower and lower in price, there was a clear evolution as Corsair's engineers gained more experience and confidence with their designs. Yet each new design up to this point has been a little bit of refinement and a little bit of experimentation without any specific specialization. That changes with the 550D.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">There's definitely some experimentation going on here, and there has to be: the Corsair Obsidian 550D is the first case Corsair has engineered specifically for silent running. That's not all they've experimented with, though, as you'll soon see.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; ">Corsair's design essentially falls into the same market as Antec's P280, but theoretically it's a step up from other silent-engineered cases like NZXT's H2. It has all the same accoutrements you've come to expect from a Corsair enclosure (including remarkable ease of assembly) while cribbing some ideas from Fractal Design's very successful Define R3. How successful this experiment was remains to be seen.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/5708/corsair-obsidian-550d-starting-to-specialize">Read more...</a></span></p>
We would lie to introduce to you a new cooler with a very ambitious name and highly promising features set. Will it win the “Super” title or will get lost among a variety of efficient but not outstanding coolers ?
Today we will talk about the efficiency and functionality of enhanced liquid-cooling systems from Swiftech that support all contemporary platforms.
Miniature Mini-ITX systems become increasingly popular these days: even in a small form-factor you can easily put together a fully functional system that will be just as powerful as a low-end and sometimes even mainstream full-size computer. Today we would like to introduce to you four Mini-ITX system cases like that from Lian Li and Chenbro.
<p><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">We've recently tested the first 80 Plus Platinum PSUs to hit our labs, courtesy of Seasonic and Enermax. Both were good if expensive PSUs, and next up on the test bench is a Platinum series that's sold by a brand without their own PSU factory: XFX. They sent us their newest product, the Pro Series 80 Plus Platinum Black Edition, which sets its sights on the high-end of the market. XFX has created an interesting casing with some unusual elements, but we need to find out how good this model actually is.</span></span></p>
<div><span style="font-size: small; "><br type="_moz" />
</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">While efficiency is all the marketing rage in the world of PSUs, we should keep in mind that many manufacturers are trying to reach 80 Plus Platinum levels using some "tricks". As we noted in our Seasonic article, there are various routes to higher efficiency, like removing resistors that may fill other roles. Shunt resistors for example transform some of the power into power loss when current flows through it, since there is a voltage drop. That's actually their job as they measure and prevent overcurrent in an indirect way.On the following pages we will show how XFX reached the requirements for </span>80 Plus Platinum<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; "> (90%/92%/89% efficiency at 20%/50%/100% load), and we'll also discuss the ODM and how well the XFX model fares in an increasingly crowded market.</span></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small; "><br type="_moz" />
</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: small; "><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/5546/xfx-1000w-pro-series-80plus-platinum">Read more...</a></span></div>
For every monitor review that I’ve done for AnandTech so far, I know that as soon as I check the comments there will be a thread with the same theme: “I don’t care about 1080p monitors, I only want 16:10 aspect ratios!” When widescreen displays first came out for desktop LCD monitors, virtually every model was a 16:10 display. The 20” Dell I have on my own desk is 16:10, and almost every vendor made 16:10 panels.
As the price of flat panels dropped and HDTV adoption took over, more and more desktop panels migrated to the HDTV aspect ratio of 16:9. The reasons behind this were easy to understand, as you could produce more displays, reuse panels across PC and TV lines, and have a lower cost across the board to let you sell them for less. Most people were more than happy to pay less for a display than to pay 2-3 times as much for those extra 120 pixels at the bottom of a display. As this happened, 16:10 panels became relegated to higher end models, almost always as IPS panels and often with high end features like AdobeRGB colorspace support and more.
Dell finally decided to address this with their U2412M display that features a 1920x1200 on its 24” panel. The U2412M is also an eIPS panel that is natively 6-bit but uses A-FRC to display 16.7 million colors. Dell has managed to bring this monitor in at $329 and can often be found on sale for under $300, while most other 16:10 24” panels come in at $500 or more. What did Dell have to do to hit this aggressive price point? We put the Dell through its paces to find out.
In a short time we've seen quite a few companies come out with their first 80 Plus Platinum power supplies. A couple weeks ago we reviewed the Enermax Platimax with 750W, which was a good PSU even though our testing showed slightly less than the advertised efficiency. Enermax also has a 500W Platimax unit, and there are several other brands launching or ready to launch 80 Plus Platinum offerings. Today we'll look at another sample, this time in the form of Seasonic's Platinum Series 860W
One thing that all of the 80 Plus Platinum models have in common is that they are very expensive. Something else to consider is that there are only a limited number of companies that actually manufacture PSUs, building various models according to the specifications their partners request. Seasonic is one such company, and we can expect other brands to use variations of the Seasonic Platinum Series we're reviewing today. The 860W model we're looking at includes two different modes for controlling the fan speed, a fullly modular connector system, and DC-to-DC converters for two of the smaller output voltages. This sounds like another market leader; let's see how it fares under test and whether it can surpass Enermax's competing offerings.
Here's a prickly subject if ever there were one: while with keyboards you could reasonably argue for the superiority of using mechanical switches over traditional rubber-dome membrane keys, mice are much, much more a matter of preference. A mouse could have all the features you're looking for, but if the grip isn't right or the texture makes you hand clammy the whole enterprise can be a bust. Understanding how delicate the balancing act of a good mouse can be, Corsair has come up with matching mice for their new gaming keyboards.