Nox Xtreme Hummer 3.0 full-tower case revealed

TC Mag reports Nox Xtreme introduced the Hummer 3.0, a new full-tower steel case that supports micro ATX, ATX, E-ATX, XL-ATX and Flex-ATX motherboards. It measures 610mm x 232mm x 520mm (H x W x D) and is sold in Europe for around 109.90.

Nox's PC case comes with an all-black coating, a top-plated I/O panel with USB 3.0 (x 2), USB 2.0 (x 2) and eSATA (x 2) ports, a built-in, 2-channel fan controller, six 5.25-inch bays, six internal 3.5/2.5-inch bays, four pre-drilled holes for watercooling tubing (all are at the back), and is equipped with four fans - one 230mm model with white LEDs in front, plus two 140mm spinners on top, and another 140mm fan at the rear.

Nox Xtreme Hummer 3.0 full-tower case revealed - More news at DV Hardware

MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB OC�ed Video Card Review

Introduction

If you didn't think the MSI could make a GTX 580 more exciting than the Lightning version, you're wrong! As Computex begins to get up and running, MSI is kicking the show off with the brand new MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition; because the Lightning wasn't already Xtreme enough?!?!

So, what's so Xtreme about the Xtreme Edition? Well, it's everything you love about the MSI GTX 580 Lightning, but with double the memory. The thing is, to be completely honest, I'm not the biggest fan when it comes to these huge memory cards because they do tend to carry a decent bump in price, but extra performance tends to be limited.

If you're going to get a 3GB GTX 580, though, you may as well do it right with the GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition. Before I even throw this card into my testbed here, I find myself already so excited about it. I'm a massive fan of the Lightning series. By adding one word to the end of a model, we know that it's going to be epic in the best kind of way.

The Lightning series hasn't disappointed us before and while unfortunately our original Lightning max overclock was less flattering than what we've seen on other peoples, we've got high hopes for the Xtreme Edition today, even though we know that double the amount of memory on the card could and should limit our memory overclock.

Before we get into to the overclocking side of things and then the performance we're able to get, we first need to check out the package that MSI is offering. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the card itself before covering the default clocks, the overclock and then the performance.

Package

The package in typical fashion is pretty big with some extra bits and pieces that we tend to only see with the Lightning and HAWK series from MSI. We've got the standard stuff like Quick User Guide, Manual and driver CD. Across the bottom we've got two extra-long SLI connectors, above that two 6-Pin to 8-Pin PCI connectors, a DVI to VGA connector and another three cables which let us measure the voltage of the card via a multi meter.

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Mach Xtreme MX-GX USB 3.0 16GB Thumb Drive Review

It's been awhile since we looked at a thumb drive, but it's time to get back into the thick of things. Over the coming days we'll see three of the latest and greatest USB 3.0 thumb drives that are capable of holding large amounts of data and transferring that data at high speeds. The last drive we looked at was the Mach Xtreme MX-FX; today we are looking at Mach Xtreme's newest offering, the MX-GX.

The Mach Xtreme GX is available in four capacity sizes; 8GB, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Each capacity size has a different read / write speed rating even though they all use a quad channel controller. Today we are looking at the 16GB model that is capable of 140MB/s read and 30MB/s write speeds.

After a few minutes of searching, I was able to find the Mach Xtreme MX-GX 16GB online for 49.99 USD at Amazon.com. This price falls in line with other 16GB USB 3.0 drives with similar read / write speeds. Google only reported one hit, though, on our product search, so there aren't too many of them floating around on this side of the pond.

Our initial testing with ATTO gave us a read speed of nearly 100MB/s and a write speed of around 20MB/s. These results were recorded without using Mach Xtreme's add-on software layer that is designed to improve transfer speeds. With the software installed we saw a performance gain, but I'm still not sold on end users installing a software package on each of their systems just for flash drives. Motherboard manufacturers are adding a 'Turbo USB 3" feature in the BIOS that gets around the software layer, but so far we've only achieved limited success.

As you'll see at the top of the next column, in CrystalDiskMark we found that the Mach Xtreme MX-GX performed very well when reading data, but the write performance was around the same speed as a good USB 2.0 flash drive. Depending on how you use the MX-GX, this could be an issue.

If you plan to put a large amount of data on the drive and then use the Mach Xtreme MX-GX to read that data on different computers, then you will be fine; it'll just take longer to put that data on the first time. If you plan on using the MX-GX as temporary storage that is constantly revolving data, then you will have to wait on the write process more often. At just 30MB/s write speed you will be waiting around quite a bit for large files.

If that isn't bad enough, the 4K write speed is only .01MB/s; you will be waiting around for small file transfers as well. Let's take a look at how the synthetic numbers relate to real world performance.

AS SSD Copy Benchmark was used to determine the real world file transfer speed of the thumb drives. Three tests are ran; ISO, Program and Game. The ISO file is a large file, Program is a series of small files and Game is a mix of several large and small files.

The real world file transfer speed of the Mach Xtreme MX-GX isn't that great. Actually....we've tested USB 2.0 drives that were faster.

The MX-GX wasn't without issue either. The software package caused all sorts of trouble when we plugged the drive into a USB 2.0 port and the drive went half crazy when tested with AIDA64 (the latency tests). I wouldn't suggest anyone test this flash drive with AIDA64. You can add AS SSD's standard test as well. Since the 4K write speed is so slow, the test takes forever. We stopped the 4K write test after 18 hours.

No one likes to be a spoil sport, but the Mach Xtreme MX-GX just didn't do it for me. The testing issues turned me off from the drive right at the start, but the real world performance when trying to transfer files was the final straw. The last chance was transferring data off a Lenovo W701ds (with USB 3.0) and the data writes just took forever. I eventually just pulled the HDD and transferred the data over SATA.

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