Samsung Galaxy Tab review

Price R7,000

At first glance the Samsung Galaxy Tab appears to be a half-hearted attempt at competing with the iPad. The 7” screen does not look nearly as impressive as the iPad’s 10” whopper but the smaller screen has the benefit of reducing battery drain. The Galaxy Tab uses a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU which is DX9 capable. This hardware makes the Galaxy Tab capable of playing 1080P HD content without any problems at all. The Android 2.2 “Froyo” OS feels smooth and responsive but Samsung would be wise to upgrade to the tablet-focused Android 3.0 “Honeycomb”.

The size and weight of the Tab makes using it as an e-Reader an appealing, albeit expensive, notion. The Galaxy Tab comes with both 3G and WiFi as standard but also supports voice and video calls using either the bundled headset or a Bluetooth headset. It is because of its specs that the Tab manages to fulfil three roles: tablet, e-Reader and smart phone.

However, this jack-of-all-trades is master of none. The Tab is too big to use as a phone unless you enjoy strange looks in public places. It’s also more than 5x the price of the Amazon Kindle e-Reader and with the iPad 16GB 3G WiFi costing R5,600 it makes little sense to choose the Galaxy Tab over the de facto winner of the tablet wars. Until the price drops, the Galaxy Tab remains a little alien.

Michael Reed
60%

Acer Iconia review

Price R15,000

Dual screen notebooks are nothing new. Toshiba’s ill-fated Libretto W100 7” netbook attempted to replace the ubiquitous keyboard with a touch screen and failed. Acer has evidently decided it can succeed where others have not and has introduced the Acer Iconia. The Iconia is a dual capacitive touch screen 14” ‘touchbook’ equipped with an Intel Core i5 and 4GB of memory. The lack of an optical drive and limited number of ports and slots make this device more akin to a netbook than a full-feature notebook.

The traditional keyboard and touch pad are replaced with virtual representations which work to a degree. Enthusiastically touch-typing on the virtual keyboard results in sentences riddled with spelling errors and lingering questions about what you were trying to type. While the virtual keyboard is atrocious, the virtual mouse touch pad is a dream to use and blows everything else out the water. At full tilt with the screens at maximum brightness and both touch surfaces in use, the battery will be gone in just under three hours.

Even the proprietary software which places user interface for browsing multimedia and social networks on the bottom screen does little to improve the overall appeal of this notebook. Had Acer built a notebook with just one of these amazing touch screens and opted for a decent physical keyboard and touch pad then that would be a notebook worthy of interest. The Iconia, while a great proof-of-concept, is ill-suited for the needs of general daily use.

Michael Reed

50%

GSkill Phoenix Pro 60GB Review

Price R1 500

Kingston was the first company to offer well-priced SSDs but thankfully they are not the only or the last to do so. The GSkill Phoenix Pro 60GB SSD costs R1 500, which in the world of SSDs is downright reasonable. For that tidy little sum of money you get a 64GB SSD and a 3.5” compatibility kit, allowing the drive to be installed in a normal desktop chassis that lacks a 2.5” bay.

The GSkill Phoenix Pro 60GB uses the new SandForce SF-1222 controller that also appears in the OCZ Agility 2 60GB. This controller is being hailed as the best consumer controller available although at the current pace of SSD development it is likely to be dethroned before the porcelain is even warm.

The SandForce SF-1222 controller contains a feature called DuraClass technology, which SandForce claims can extend the life of the drive by providing improved endurance and performance. Another feature of the SandForce controller is its RAISE technology, which supposedly provides RAID-like reliability and protection in a single SSD setup. We assume they mean RAID 1 not RAID 0.

The Phoenix Pro 60GB is an odd drive in that it is simultaneously exceptional and mediocre. The burst speed benchmark result puts the GSkill in the lead when compared to both its controller-kin, the OCZ Agility 2, and the lightning fast Intel X25-V SSD. The lead drops away when looking at the average read/write performance. In fact, the Agility is slightly faster in the average write result albeit by only 2MB/s. The Phoenix Pro then rises from the ashes and takes the lead in the 4k 64-bit thread write test with an impressive 81.68MB/s.

ATTO benchmarks also gave an interesting result when the Phoenix Pro was tested. The maximum write speed was actually higher than the maximum read speed (259.72MB/s versus 250.58MB/s). And yes, the tests were run repeatedly to ensure that the results weren’t an anomaly.

The GSkill Phoenix Pro not only boats an asking price on the same level as the budget-friendly Kingston 64GB offerings, but it still manages to perform better than most drives in its class. The only drive that makes even the GSkill shrivel is the Crucial C300 RealSSD 64GB, which is faster in both burst speed and average read performance. But – and it’s a big but - in the 4k 64-bit thread tests (the one that gives you an indication of real world performance) the GSkill takes the lead and is still R700 cheaper.


Michael Reed

90%

Full product specifications, benchmarks and other data can be viewed in the December (165) issue of PCFormat Magazine

Noctua NH-D14 Review

Price R900

The Noctua NH-D14 is a monster cooler that dwarfs the Thermalright Venomous X and Cogage Arrow. It uses a twin tower design comprised of six copper heat-pipes and 42 aluminium cooling fins, all of which are nickel plated.

Noctua has bundled two different fans with the NH-D14; the NF-P14 and the NF-P12. These two fans (one intake and one exhaust) are almost impossible to hear even in a reasonably quiet environment. The louder of the two, the NF-P12, has an acoustic noise level of 19.8dB, which is only slightly louder than the sound of a pin dropping from a height of 1cm from 1 meter away (15dB).

Noctua has included Ultra-Low-Noise Adapters (UNLA), which drop the fans’ standard 12v power supply to 7v, further reducing the speed of both fans to 900 RPM, which in turn decreases the amount of noise that they make. Using these adapters will see the NF-P14 become the louder of the two fans, with an acoustic noise level of 13.2dB (only 0.2dB louder than the hum of a light bulb). The beige and brown colouring of the fans is an avant-garde approach and will come down to personal taste but even the most conservative consumer would be hard-pressed to ignore the performance weighting.

Noctua’s SecuFirm 2 mounting kits are solid and provide a reasonable degree of assurance that this massive cooler will not tear your motherboard a new one. A tube of Noctua’s NT-H1 thermal compound is included and is an excellent non-conductive compound that works instantly without the need for curing (heating and cooling the compound several times before it reaches its maximum transfer potential).

The NH-D14 is not only the quietest cooler, but it is arguably the best air cooler money can buy. The Thermalright Venomous X was able to keep the Core i7 975 idling at 36°C while the mercury hit 65°C under full load for an hour. The Noctua was able to match the idle temperature, and at full load the maximum temperature never rose above 60°C, making it the best tested ever at the PCF Ranch. However, a large part of that praise needs to be reserved for the NT-H1 thermal compound. Under the same testing conditions using the NT-H1 compound, the Venomous X was able to improve on its load temperatures by 3°C, resulting in a maximum temperature of 62°C.

Additionally, the size of the NH-D14 is a problem for motherboards that have limited space; it will simply not fit on some motherboards. Beyond the inevitable, the NH-D14 is an excellent, albeit expensive, cooler which is capable of handling the modern silicon toaster while remaining eerily quiet to boot (get it?).

Michael Reed

90%

Full product specifications, benchmarks and other data can be viewed in the December (165) issue of PCFormat Magazine