Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Since it is Halloween, Gadgetell is taking a look at some the tech horror stories our writers have experienced.  Here is one tale.

In my house, we usually built our own computers; we had, at most, two computers that were purchased pre-built.  The second computer we built did everything it was supposed to.  It connected to the Internet and could be used to write school reports on.  Not to mention it handled “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” almost perfectly (if you were willing to take away some of the draw distance).
 
The computer had many hours logged into it, the hard drive was maybe three quarters filled.  Oblivion and Civilization IV took care of most of that for me.  My brother used it to go online, and my grandmother used it every hour we weren’t there to play her casino games.  It had served us well. 

That was until the one morning when we awoke to something we were quite used to. . . .

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We’re always being told to “Think outside the box.“  Well, Antec is putting their money where there mouth is with their upcoming “Skeleton” case.  And they aren’t offering the bare bones minimum with it either. 

There is plenty of room for expansion with 7 expansion slots and 4 drive bays.  2 of the drive bays are internal and 2 are external.  If you take advantage of expanding the capabilities of your computer, you are going to need some more cooling than just an open case.  Antec throws in a front-mount hard drive cooling fan and a 250mm fan on top (that’s the bowl looking thing with the Antec logo).  If you are feeling extra-funky, you can even enjoy the fact that the fan is multi-colored.

Ok, so admittedly, it sort of looks like a science experiment with K’NEX gone bad. More after the break.

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Considering that everyone seems to be on an eco-trip since that An Inconvenient Truth was released, it’s nice to know that someone in the computer design world is also paying attention. 

MSI, for example, has designed a great new eco-friendly motherboard known as the Wind Board. 

It has a passive cooling system, which means that there is no need for those fans that you see on most motherboards.  As you might have guessed, that means a lot less noise, like zero decibels worth.  So not only is it ecologically sound, it is also less noisy.  Who would have thought that the eco-friendly option could be the better one?

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Alienware has re-launched its Area-51 7500 into the Area-51 desktop which now supports the most robust gaming platform in the PC gaming industry. The Area-51 is now packed with NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI-based motherboard and NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 dual GPU single graphics card to deliver high definition PC gaming with high frame rates and smooth Blu-ray disc playback.

The nForce 790i Ultra SLI is the only nForce platform that supports DDR3 memory up to 2GHz. This gives out record-breaking memory speeds that support even the most graphics intensive PC games. The nForce790i motherboard is compatible with 1600MHz FSB Intel CPUs and allows unmatched visual computing through NVIDIA 2-way, 3-way and Quad SLI technology.

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