I decided to buy a new harddrive for different reasons (the main one being dual/triple booting different OS's).

I looked around and decided the samsung spinpoint drives looked pretty good. I never really saw my Seagate 7200.10 320Gb as being slow and had it setup so each OS had 100Gb. Obviously as time has gone on the partitions have started to fill up.

On first powering on the Samsung I noticed straight away the drive was very quiet. On copying data it seemed quicker and even general usage seemed quicker.
To be sure, I decided to benchmark it against my Seagate and I was amazed to see the difference between the two drives.

The Samsung seems to be running 10°C cooler than the Seagate and is a lot quieter.
The Samsung also shows a huge improvement over the Seagate in the benchmarks, running over 100MB/s faster than the Seagate.

I benchmarked both drives on the same system and the same windows install/boot (installed on the Samsung). Both drives are running on the Intel(R) 82801GR/GH SATA AHCI Controller (ICH7).

I've written a review on the monitor, showing pictures of the viewing angles and the colour vibrance.

Overall this monitor is amazing value for money.
It looks stunning with its piano black finish and its stylish silver buttons. The viewing angles, colour reproduction and response time is excellent.
The connectivity is OK and at least features HDCP compatibility which is an added bonus, altho should really be the standard in the future. Also given the resolution, you can connect an Xbox360, HD DVD/Blu-ray player or a PS3 and run them on 1080i without any problems as the monitor stretches the image perfectly.

You can view the article by clicking the link on the navigation bar or by clicking here

I've just recieved a new monitor. I've been looking for ages and was mainly looking at 22" panels, but was put off as they are £160 for a decent one and all of them are TN panels. So when 24" screens started appearing for £200 I was amazed and excited as they are 1080 HD compliant aswell as having MVA panels.
I nearly ordered one from OcUK but after reading the panels they were selling weren't HDCP compatible I decided not to. Then the next time I looked into their monitors it seemed they suddenly were getting bad TN panels.

Next thing I decided to do was look around the net and I found out that the best information was on a german forum. They were talking about a monitor which looked the same, but was not DGM but Yuraku. This screen had a MVA panel and was also HDCP compatible. Also there were reports that this was the original screen and that the DGM's were in fact copies with various panels.

The more I read, the more I was convinced these were good screens. Then I found 2 companies in the UK were selling them. Aria and Misco. After hearing bad things about Aria in the past and also noticing they have a dead pixel check I decided Misco were the people to order from, as almost certainly if I ordered from aria without paying for the dead pixel check I would get a monitor with dead or lazy pixels.

So I ordered and it came today. So far I am amazed with it.
The viewing angles are excellent and the colours are actually better than my old Samsung SM-913N.

The panel used in these monitors is the same as in monitors which are selling for £450+ (Acer AL2423W , BenQ FP241VW, BenQ FP241W, LG L246WP).

click image for gallery

I decided to get a new cooler for my current GPU as the stock one has started to get a bit noisy. Mainly noticable on counterstrike source. Even with my Medusa's on I could hear the noise.

So I decided on the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 as it was pretty cheap (£9.64+VAT).

Overall it seems better than the stock one, with better temperatures and also it's not as noisy as it is a passive cooler.

click image for full review