Noctua prides itself on creating products of the utmost quality. Love or hate their signature brown and beige color scheme, it has easily become synonymous with quality, innovation and most of all: silence.  Naturally, when you have such high success, it becomes easier to remain complacent and just coast off your already great designs. But, that isn’t what Noctua has done. Instead, they’re constantly iterating and improving upon its existing designs in order to push even higher performance, compatibility, and the overall user experience.

Today we’re taking a look at a pair of coolers which perfectly display that mentality. The [...]

Laptops with high-performance components are great for gamers on the go and creative professionals, but high performance and dinky fans often means their temperatures can rise from 0°C to volcano in an blink of an eye. Excessive heat can not only damage the hardware, but can also make your hands very uncomfortable, not to mention the annoying fan whine.

Today, we’ll be reviewing the NZXT’s Cryo X60 notebook cooler. The Cryo X60 notebook cooler is equipped with two 120mm fans, four USB 2.0 ports, integrated fan speed control and an aluminum design that helps give it a polished style and increased durability. It offers the option to power the cooler [...]

Up until the release of Sandy Bridge processors back in early 2011, overclocking was something generally reserved for only the most hardcore gamers and enthusiasts who wanted to push their systems to the limits. Overclocking required countless hours of tinkering and testing, which was generally a bit too complicated for mainstream users.

With the release of Sandy Bridge however, the landscape of overclocking has really changed dramatically. Significant overclocks may now be had with simple motherboard overclocking buttons or 5 minute adjustments in the BIOS, which greatly simplified the once complicated and confusing task.

With overclocking [...]

A couple years ago Corsair came to CPU cooling market with the Corsair Hydro H50 all in one CPU water cooler, which provided computer enthusiasts with a way to easily install a water cooling system without the knowledge, hazards, difficulties, and costs of building a fully custom water cooling setup. Because of its ease of use and its relatively good performance, several years later Corsair along with a multitude of companies introduced a variety of these all-in-one water coolers. Now, the market for these products seem to be expanding at an exponential rate.

While the CPU cooling market is currently saturated with companies trying to get into the closed [...]

Back in 2004, NZXT started out as a computer case manufacturer based out of Los Angeles, California producing some very innovative cases such as the NZXT Nemesis, NZXT Guardian, NZXT Gamma, etc., and with their success in the computer case market, they’ve recently branched out quite a bit to cover a wide variety of computer related products such as CPU coolers, power supplies, case accessories, notebook coolers and more.

Today, we’re going to be reviewing a couple of NZXT’s offerings from their Havik series of CPU coolers, the Havik 120 and Havik 140. Both CPU coolers have quite a solid reputation among the hardware enthusiast community [...]

20 years ago back in 1992, Cooler Master started out as an OEM CPU cooler manufacturer after realizing a strong demand for CPU cooling with the emergence of the PC market. For years that’s all they did; however, with the continued success of their innovative cooling designs, they began expanding into the world of computer cases and, as of late, have even gone into the gaming peripherals and mobile accessories markets as well. Today, we’ll be taking a look at one of Cooler Master’s newest and most innovative CPU cooler designs, the Cooler Master TPC 812.

Coming from a long history of innovative Cooler Master CPU [...]

For nearly 20 years Cooler Master has been making some of the most well known computer performance peripherals and accessories on the market. It seems that lately they’ve put a lot of focus into their peripherals department, but today we’re going to be looking at one of their latest CPU coolers, the X6 Elite.

The X6 Elite features six 6mm heatpipes, a 120mm fan with the ability to add another fan later in a push/pull configuration if you desire to, and a unique angled stance which we will talk a little more about later on. Cooler Master has priced the X6 Elite at just $42.99, and has included a two year warranty should anything [...]

Back in 1998, Spire started out as an OEM PC hardware manufacturer, but recently, they’ve been starting to work their way into the enthusiast grade computer accessories market. Their lineup currently includes power supplies, chassis, and of course, cooling solutions – most of which you probably never heard of before. That’s why today, we’re going to be looking into their TherMax Eclipse III, or TME III for short. The TherMax Eclipse series has proven to be a reliable cooling solution in the past, but with only a single fan it was definitely fighting an uphill battle against coolers [...]

Since 2005, Noctua has been producing some of the most well known cooling products in the PC accessory market. Their most well known products are quiet fans and very large CPU coolers designed to be used by extreme PC enthusiasts who want to get the absolute most out of their air cooling solution. Today however, we’re going to be looking at something a bit smaller and a bit more compact from Noctua – the NH-L12 Low Profile CPU cooler, which is catered towards smaller form factor PCs such as mITX, mATX, HTPCs, etc. While there are similarly styled coolers on the market (even some from Noctua), most of those don’t go as far to cater to [...]

Being PC enthusiasts, we love to buy huge cases and load them up with tons of fans. This is beneficial as more fans typically translate into better airflow and of course, better cooling performance to chill our hot hardware. However, with more fans, more cooling, and more airflow, one problem that’s bound to happen is increased noise. While a bit of noise is perfectly acceptable when you’re doing something intensive like rendering a video or playing Battlefield 3 with a headset, it can get annoying when you’re trying to appreciate some Beethoven and your PC sounds like a 747 about to taking off. To make a PC a bit more quiet, [...]