Back after a nice few days at Myrtle Beach.  Nothing from Hurricane Earl of consequence however, my backup plan of going to a hurricane party at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville was definitely a winner!

Our friends at Bjorn3D open the day up with coverage of the XFX HD5970 Black Edition and ask if it's the fastest card on the market.

Unfortunately we cannot say that this card is worth $1200 (price from Newegg.com). Nonetheless, it isn't that much more expensive than buying two HD5870 Eyefinity6 cards, and it comes with not only a cool LAN bag but also a very limited edition video card. It is also about the same as the other two special edition HD5970 cards from ASUS and Sapphire, and in our opinion is a better value than either of these two cards. 

PNY GeForce GTX 460 OC XLR8 Video Card anyone?  See Benchmark Reviews for more.

Overclocker's Club bring the Thermaltake Armor A60 Case up for another review.

Though a small mid tower case, there is a lot of space on the inside. The case looks great, cools appropriately, and has a lot of neat features. The Armor A60, just like the Armor A90, is equipped with a mouse and keyboard cable lock, as well as the option to lock the side panel in place. This ensures security in public places where the components could be at risk for tampering or theft, catering well to the LAN party goers that want to protect their hardware without having to modify their case.

Free stuff!  (Gigabyte GTX460 768MB)

By spec alone, these upgrades would seem to be an enthusiast's dream, taking one of the top coolers on the market and making it better. But as we know, paper specs do not necessarily make for a tangible improvement out in the real world. We decided to put the Super Mega to the test, to find out if it can indeed surpass the Megahalems in cooling performance or not.

Here are a couple of performance mouse reviews.  The first is from LANOC and covers the Cooler Master Inferno Storm Mouse.

With StarCraft 2 out fresh I jumped into a few matches, then into some Alien Swarm, ending with Modern Warfare 2. The tracking I saw in Photoshop came in handy in game, making clicking on my SCV’s easy as pie. The rapid fire macro was a blast to play with in MW2 with a sniper rifle or a hand gun, but in the end it was difficult to handle in game, not to mention the fact that most people will call you a hacker.

This is followed up by Kit Guru and the Thermaltake eSPORTS Mouse.

The eSPORTS Black doesn’t glide quite as effortlessly as some mice like the SteelSeries Xai but when we consider the price difference, this is quite understandable.  The rough surface of the Dominator gaming surface doesn’t help matters; a finely woven cloth surface would probably be more appropriate for this mouse.  We did try out the Dominator with the Xai which we regard to be one of the smoothest gliding mice on the market and it was noticeably better.

Odds and ends.