Stefan Mileschin

We’ve got a few gems for you today, starting off with Tom’s Hardware and the Seagate’s Momentus XT 750 GB hybrid drive, now in its second generation. It seems hybrid drives manage to combine the best of both worlds – SSD and HDD – at an affordable price. Seagate had added some tweaks to the formula that aid boot times and improve write caching.

If you’re a datacentre administrator and need a final nod on your purchase order for new Opterons, you might want to take a look at Anandtech’s Opteron 6276 tests. Against past present and competitor solutions there’s a lot to be read about it.

Hot Hardware tested NEC’s EA273WM-BK MultiSync monitor, a largish 27-inch screen with a rather plain spec sheet where only one main feature really shines through: the weight. Literally weighing in at 16lbs / 7Kg, it’s one of the lightest panels around.

Corsair is better known for PC cases, power supplies and memory. Keyboards… not so much. Guru 3D has a Corsair Vengeance K60 gaming keyboard in the house and seems to be pleased with the keyboard specs. Wrist rest, WASD identification caps, anti-ghosting tech and the likes seem to give it some unique features.

Techspot is calling it the people’s Sandy Bridge-E, the Core i7 3820, which comes in at a sub-$300 price tag, yet with all the bells and whistles of its much pricier brothers. It repeatedly beat the i7-2600K so it’s got to be doing something right.

Hardware Secrets has Asrock’s secret weapon on their test bench, the X79 Extreme 6/GB. It’s a Sandy Bridge-E motherboard with SLI and CrossFireX capability, two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and a single PCIe 3.0 x8 slot. The list of features goes on a bit, but you’re buying something of a high-end board for $280.

Antec’s Eleven Hundred case was reviewed by Hardware Heaven. Stuart says it’s an impressive case, but with room for some minor tweaks. No front fan, for one, and the length of the fan wiring limits the use of add-on fan controllers. You can squeeze extralarge graphics cards into the case, as its XL-ATX sized.

Diablotek makes a mean SSD to USB 3.0 SATA adapter kit, you can see it on Techware Labs’ review. It isn’t an ideal solution for everyday use, but it gets the job done. Of course you’re limiting performance on the SSD drive by hooking it up to the USB port, even a 3.0 for that matter, but if you need to copy stuff around for a fresh install or somesuch… this’ll do it.

Legit Reviews has a very high-end specced Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 motherboard. For $370 you’d expect nothing short of gold plating and platinum wiring, and according to Legit, it’s worth it. Unfortunately it is a limited run that is very hard to find. Read all about it.

While Intel is launching its Intel 520 SSD, based on SandForce 2281 SoC, OCZ is pushing the envelope with its Octane 512GB SSD and a new v1.13 Performance Firmware (with an Indilinx controller). It doesn’t size up to the expectations Chris had.

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/hyb...of-both-worlds