Belkin Powerline AV Network Adapters

Manufacturer:Belkin
UK Price (as reviewed):£60.67 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$129.99 (ex. Tax)

Building the perfect home network can be tricky, especially if you’re dealing with multiple systems all over your home and it gets even more complicated when you want to start streaming or sharing files or media over the connection.

While wireless technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years with now large scale uptake of the draft 802.11n standard, wireless connections can be flaky in larger houses with more solid construction, and the speed and range will vary depending on a whole range of variables.

Iiyama ProLite E2208HDS - 22" Full HD LCD

Manufacturer:Iiyama
UK Price (as reviewed):£146.79 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): TBC

It's been a long time coming. But things are finally starting to get interesting in the affordable monitor market. For the past 18 months or so, the sweet spot in terms of price and performance has been the 22-inch widescreen segment. However, despite the illusion of choice generated by the huge number of models on offer, nearly every 22-inch display has essentially been the same.

Athlon X2 7750 vs. Intel E5200 OC & Value

Manufacturer:AMD
Athlon X2 4850e US MSRP (as reviewed): $61
Athlon X2 5200+ US MSRP (as reviewed): $66
Athlon X2 6000+ US MSRP (as reviewed): $76
Athlon X2 7750 BE US MSRP (as reviewed): $79
Phenom X3 8430 US MSRP (as reviewed): $104

Manufacturer:Intel
Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 US MSRP (as reviewed): $84

While some of our readers enjoy overclocking to break records and often go to extreme measures to do so, generally most enjoy overclocking for free performance. If you're on a tight budget this "free factor" is ever more important so stretching out those Dollars, Euros or Sterling (which are pretty much the same thing these days) that much further.

First Look: Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB

Manufacturer:Nvidia
Expected Pricing: $499 MSRP
Release Date: 8th January 2009

Nvidia will release its next high-end graphics card at CES in Las Vegas on January 8th and the company has given us the opportunity to give bit-tech’s readers a sneak peek at how the GeForce GTX 295 will perform. However, because the card is not available on the market yet, and won’t be until January 8th at the earliest, the company has asked us to adhere to a number of restrictions.

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic

Manufacturer:Sapphire
UK Price (as reviewed): £575 (inc. VAT) - expected
US Price (as reviewed): £700 (ex. Tax) - MSRP

Core Clock: 800MHz
Memory Clock: 4,000MHz (effective)
Memory: 2GB GDDR5
Warranty: Three years parts and labour

We love watercooling here at bit-tech. It’s that badge of honour that shows you’re a true enthusiast that you’re not going to let the threat of a few leaks and kinked tubing stop you from reaching those ever elusive higher clock speeds.

Intel X25-E 32GB SSD

Manufacturer:Intel
UK Price (as reviewed):£505.99 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$719.00 (ex. Tax)

Companies love the word extreme; it conjures images of back flipping, snowmobile riding wolverines, cliff top power sliding rally cars driven by Travis Pastrana and death defying low altitude skydiving. It’s gone beyond just meaning the bleeding edge of whatever it’s applied to, it’s become a byword for awesome.

Seagate drops warranties to three years

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate is to reduce its standard warranty period on consumer-grade drives from five years to a mere three to bring them "in line with industry standard [...] offerings."

First spotted on Friday by techPowerUp, the move comes in to effect on 3rd January 2009 and affects all consumer-oriented products including the popular Barracuda 7200 range of desktop drives, the Momentus range of notebook drives, and all "

AMD Athlon X2 7750 & 7550 CPUs

Manufacturer:AMD
AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition UK Price (as reviewed): £65-70 (inc. VAT) - est.
AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition US Price (as reviewed): $79 MSRP

AMD Athlon X2 7550 UK Price (as reviewed): £55-60 (inc. VAT) - est.
AMD Athlon X2 7550 US Price (as reviewed): $69 MSRP

It feels like a strange time of year to be releasing a new CPU - a bit too close to Christmas when everyone is winding up for the year here in the UK. That's not a complaint though, because this is AMD's first Athlon dual core refresh for a while.

Hiper Alloy Keyboards

Manufacturer:Hiper
UK Price (as reviewed):£17.24 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$34.99 (ex. Tax)

In the past few years there seems to have been an avalanche of gaming peripherals hitting the market targeted at those looking for that crucial edge against the opposition. We’ve seen customisable Macro keys, multi-coloured back lighting for that bling-bling factor, extra gaming keys tacked onto the side, and even LCD screens providing in-game data.

Lian Li PC-9

Manufacturer:Lian Li
UK Price (as reviewed): MSRP £170
US Price (as reviewed): MSRP $250

In the hardware enthusiast industry, it seems a given among marketing departments and PR companies that bigger is almost always better. More cores, higher clock speeds, bigger fans and more features are commonplace highlights in new product press releases, and we’ve recently seen high end cases following the trend, expanding to enormous sizes to accommodate more and more elaborate cooling setups and feature lists.

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Windows Vista SP2 beta performance

Manufacturer:Microsoft

On Friday, Microsoft announced widespread availability of the Windows Vista Service Pack 2 beta through its Customer Preview Program ahead of its official release in the first half of next year. According to the latest rumours, the release candidate for Service Pack 2 will be available in February 2009 and then the final version will be rolled out at some point in April.

While Service Pack 2 will no doubt be less of a

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB

Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)

As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB

Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)

As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB

Manufacturer:Samsung
UK Price (as reviewed):£73.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$99.99 (ex. Tax)

As we saw last week in our Solid State Drive group test, there’s still plenty of life in mechanical hard disk drives. While not as fast as the new solid state drives at reading data, they still hold the edge in write performance, cost and capacity and for the majority of systems we’d still recommend a decent large mechanical drive.

MSI Eclipse SLI

Manufacturer:MSI
UK Price (as reviewed):£274.00 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$341.36 (ex. Tax)

For the longest time, we've felt MSI was missing something from its branded motherboards. While we always aspire to keep things simple so they're easier to understand and not layered in babble, MSI was missing out because its Diamond boards weren't really considered in the same way as Asus' Republic of Gamers, Gigabyte's Extreme series or the Foxconn Quantum Force range and as a Tier-1 manufacturer it's still important to have that leading brand for recognition.

Zotac Nitro OC Controller

Manufacturer:Zotac
UK Price (as reviewed):£75.22 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): TBC

Back at the inaugural Nvision festival in August, there weren't really any major announcements made by Nvidia, but some of its partners did reveal new products. One revelation during the show was Zotac's Nitro – a hardware-based overclocking controller that is designed to tweak and tune Zotac graphics cards.

Zotac Nitro OC Controller

Manufacturer:Zotac
UK Price (as reviewed):£75.22 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): TBC

Back at the inaugural Nvision festival in August, there weren't really any major announcements made by Nvidia, but some of its partners did reveal new products. One revelation during the show was Zotac's Nitro – a hardware-based overclocking controller that is designed to tweak and tune Zotac graphics cards.

Antec Signature 850W PSU

Manufacturer:Antec
UK Price (as reviewed):£135.68 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$223.99 (ex. Tax)

Antec's new Signature power supply series is designed to be the pinnacle of consumer PSU technology. By this, we don't just mean high power, we mean the black box is full of clever tricks and quality components rarely seen outside of the realm of servers.

Offering components like Tantalum ceramic capacitors, independent VRMs, Japanese capacitors and fan, a dual PCB layout, 80 Plus Bronze and SLI certification, as well as a five year warranty it certainly has some neat tricks up its sleeve. The Signature, while manufactured in co-operation with the industry giant Delta, takes on some of its server grade ideas, which means it's about as far from a simple rebrand as you can get.

Thermaltake Spedo

Manufacturer:Thermaltake
UK Price (as reviewed):£125.35 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$133.90 (ex. Tax)

When naming a case for the western market, we’re pretty sure Taiwanese manufacturers just pick a typically fast/macho/cool sounding name out of a hat and go with it. While this usually works out all right (Aurora, Cosmos, etc.) we’re not really sure that the image of ludicrously small, tight, swimming trucks was what Thermaltake had in mind when it chose the name of its latest chassis. I suppose we were thought to imagine words like slick, streamlined and fast instead.

Asus P6T Deluxe

Manufacturer:Asus
UK Price (as reviewed):£219.37 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):$299.99 (ex. Tax)

As ever with Asus, it's the first company to get us final, working hardware so it's the first full review of an Intel X58 board we've put together. We have others testing, although we're happy to point out from the start that the Asus has just worked thus far. We've already featured the P6T Deluxe in a first look, as well as demonstrated its overclocking ability in our Core i7 920 at 4GHz article.

Sitecom WL-308 300N XR Gaming Router

Manufacturer:Sitecom
UK Price (as reviewed):£92.81 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): N/A

We have to admit, we’re always a bit sceptical when reviewing anything with the world “gaming” in its product name, mostly because it invariably ends up being overpriced, under featured, LED covered pro-gamer endorsed tat. So imagine our surprise when we unboxed the Sitecom WL-308 Wireless 300N XR Gigabit Gaming Router and found that not only was it free from pro-gamer endorsement, but was also an extremely capable router in its own right.