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Today we’re taking a quick look at the Antec Sonata III Mid Tower Quiet Case. The Sonata III was bought as a replacement for the Sonata Piano Finish case. It’s actually very similar, although it doesn’t have quite the same piano-finish look to it. There have been improvements in other areas though, and they’ll be [...]

After years of not having to worry about wireless, I was forced to buy a new router to replace a fried one (lightning) and was now looking at wireless-N. Where I was stuck was trying to figure out was if I should be going for one of these “Dual-Band” Wireless-N thingies or not. They supported [...]

I recently bought an Intel Quad Core Q6600. I’ve been doing a lot of Video Encoding for the Apple TV, and while a fine chip, the E2140 just wasn’t cutting it time-wise for quality encodes. I grabbed some pics of the process with my new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W35 (if the blurry pics from my previous [...]

It’s been well known for some time now that heatsinks aren’t always perfectly smooth and flat. Sometimes the machining process used when making a heatsink leaves much to be desired. A poor surface means poor contact with the CPU, which translates to less effective cooling, and thus, higher temperatures. “Lapping” the heatsink is a technique [...]

While writing up an article and scrounging for information on all the BIOS settings, I came across a couple Anandtech articles for other ASUS motherboards that have *very* similar settings to the P5K-E. If you’re looking to find out what most of the memory/cpu/fsb/frequency/voltage/timing options do, check out the articles here and here.

In a prior article, I was playing around with OS X installs on regular PC hardware. I’ve kept a couple of the installations going for the time being, and have been using one of them to recode some videos that we have in DivX and XviD format into H.264 for the Apple TV I recently [...]

I bought the 20″ SyncMaster 206BW to replace an old weak 17″ CRT that was showing signs of age. I also wanted something that would show a little more screen real-estate. Monitors are one of the few things where I’m very hesitant to buy online. Picture quality can vary drastically between monitors, and in no [...]

Setting up an HTPC to run Media Center, I was looking to get an optical output so that I could hook it up directly to our receiver. Current sound cards with an optical out unfortunately run around $100 at the low end. I had a couple motherboards that actually have optical outputs, but for the [...]

A couple years ago, I bought a Logitech wireless desktop that included a keyboard as well as the MX700 mouse. It had the advantage of being cordless, used 2 AA rechargable batteries in the mouse (for which it included a charger), and used 2 regular AA batteries in the keyboard which usually lasted around 6 [...]

I wanted the following in a printer: Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X support Print-to-CD ability Low cost ink cartridge replacements Low printer cost (less than $100) That was really about it.