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You have your notebook resting in its standard position on your lap. Suddenly, you start noticing that familiar tingling feeling when it starts to heat up and you start counting down the minutes before you have to prop the laptop upright, or sit at an awkward angle to give it some breathing room. Aside from health concerns like developing a …

PACKAGING AND CONTENTS Lets take a quick look at the packaging. The front of the U Stand box has the typical solid white and purple colors, indicative of Cooler Masters design. There is also a large shot of the U Stand itself with a notice that it supports up to 17 laptops: On one side, we have a smaller picture …

PACKAGING AND CONTENTS (CONTINUED) I want to focus on the fans before getting to the U Stand, as I find them to be instrumental in the overall scheme: The two sides of the fans are quite different from each other. This side is the one that latches onto the back of the U Stand as illustrated by the latches on …

THE U STAND With the accessories out of the way, let’s get to the U Stand itself. It sports a nice perforated matte-black finish over a sleek aluminum base which is nice and cool to the touch: Right off the bat, you will notice a grip-strip at the top of the U Stand. This can be stripped off and placed in different …

TESTING METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS Luckily, I have two laptops to test with the U Stand. One is the 13 Dell Vostro 1400, and the other is a 17 HP Pavilion DV7-1428CA. Since both machines are not capable of gaming (especially the Vostro), I decided to run the AIDA64 stress utility benchmark, and record the temperatures from both AIDA64 and Speccy: …

FINAL WORDS AND CONCLUSION Cooler Master really hit the nail with their newest introduction into the Notepal series. The U Stand adopts much from coolers in the same family, such as the U2 and U3, while brining new improvements to the game. The U Stand offers a plethora of height options, excellent cooling performance, and a solid base of features. …

THIS DRAW HAS BEEN WON.  SEE BELOW! Have you been sitting on the fence thinking about getting an SSD?  Drooling over the thought of having one in your own system? The simple fact is that a solid state drive almost makes it seem like the computer knows what you are going to do before you do.  Its just that fast …

Its been a while in the making but The SSD Review has finally got its hands on eight (8) new generation SATA 3 SSDs in the name of Patriot Wildfire 120GB SATA 3 SSDs for RAID testing. With a host of companies offering the latest SandForce controllers on their SSDs, Patriot is setting out to leap above the pack with …

FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS Patented Configurable Cooling Fans Two patented 100mm silent fans are included and placed underneath the aluminum surface. These fully configurable fans can be used to pinpoint to the hottest areas of your laptop (i.e. CPU, HDD) for unsurpassed cooling performance. Ergonomic design Five different height settings showcase the ergonomically design for best viewing/typing angles which  allows you …

This is the my Test Bench and it is truly as intimidating as it appears. Many hours of dedicated planning and consideration have gone into this build and it has been used in many benchmarking excursions and extreme overclocking sessions. She has even set a few HWBot world records along the way!  Click on the photo for full resolution. SYSTEM …

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES Fast becoming one of our favorites, and a go-to benchmark, is the new Anvil Storage Utilities. This is a Beta version, as it is still under development. This benchmark is just too great to pass up though, and we will be using the 1.0.28 Beta6 version. A key thing here is to note the extremely high IOPS …

HDTUNE PRO 4.61 One thing that became very apparent when using the Patriots was the excellent latency that we were receiving. A PCIe raid card allows the SSD to function at its very best, eliminating much of the overhead and latency of some other connection methods. The LSI 9265-8i is a great performer and allowed for some of the best …

WIN7 EXPERIENCE INDEX The Win7 Experience Index (WEI) represents Microsofts method of rating computer systems and, more specific to our usage, provides a storage evaluation through a graduated rating system up to 7.9 on pc components and the system as a whole. This benchmark is built into Windows and anyone can use it by simply typing: Go to Win Orb/All …

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE One thing that becomes readily apparent when we are running the synthetic benches is that they are just that; synthetic. Where the SandForce drives really excel is in the actual real world tasks, that utilize a variety of data. In PCMark Vantage the data simply cannot be manipulated, and a result is provided based on the …

CONCLUSION At the end of the day, we need to illustrate a very important point. While the LSI 9265-8i is the fastest RAID card on the planet, it simply cannot give these drives the true justice that they deserve.  The throughput of the Patriots, both in MB/s and IOPS, if they could scale perfectly in RAID would be phenomenal. 4.440 …