The Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB and VelociRaptor 600GB are two of the fastest SATA hard drives money can buy. HDD performance almost always comes at an acoustic price, but are these drives quieter than the predecessors, and do their speed/capacity/acoustics compete well against an SSD plus low cost high capacity HDD of similar cost?

Hardware Secrets discovered that there are some power supplies in the market carrying fake 80 Plus badges. In other news, Gigabyte proudly opened the world’s highest altitude motherboard RMA center in Lhasa, 11,975 feet above sea level. Discuss this news in the forums.

Microprocessor industry analyst David Kanter recently posted a detailed analysis of Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge Microarchitecture at Real World Technologies, describing it as the "most ambitious and aggressive microprocessors designed at Intel." It touches on the Atom as well as the new AMD Bobcat and Bulldozer microprocessors as well. Well worth a read.

Meanwhile, work on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is happening on many fronts to break free of legacy limitations of the BIOS. UEFI may feature on motherboards released before the end of the year. A succinct summary by AMI's Brian Richardson.

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The Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB emphasizes low noise and energy efficiency, while the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB is all about performance, with 64MB cache and new SATA 6Gbps interface. We examine the noise, vibration, energy efficiency, and performance of these two equally large, but very different drives.

In the few months after the Serenity was SPCR-certified as a silent PC, Puget went back to the drawing board to make the i7 PC even quieter. The development team made changes to fans, subtle improvements to the chassis, a series of small upgrades in other components, and perhaps most importantly, resorted to binning (like the big boys) to cherry-pick only the quietest components off their shelf for the SPCR edition. This second sample that we just finished testing is nothing short of marvelous.

The new Lian Li PC-Q08 supports up to six hard drives, a standard ATX power supply, and even a 30cm long graphics card in a stylish, well-crafted, 21-liter mini-ITX/DTX enclosure.

Corsair's new AX850 has 80 Plus Gold certification for 90% efficiency, totally modular cables, a hybrid passive/active cooling for silent operation, and is backed by a 7-year warranty. It's perfect for a Silent Gaming Rig in a thermally advanced case.

The SolidLogic Montevina GS-L10 is a passively-cooled mini-ITX system. Powered by a dual-core mobile Intel processor, this silent PC by Logic Supply offers a whole lot more performance than the standard Atom box without gaining much girth.

The Momentus XT 500GB is a hybrid notebook drive from Seagate featuring two 250GB platters spinning at 7200 RPM, 32MB of cache, and 4GB of SLC NAND flash memory. Is it truly an affordable high capacity drive with SSD-like performance?

A German affiliate of HEC, Cougar is offering the 80 Plus Gold rated premium GX series only in the EU at this time. How does the GX-700 fare against other Gold PSUs?

At long last, an Intel CULV processor has finally made its way into a nettop device. The Zotac ZBOX HD-ND22 sports a dual-core Celeron SU2300 CPU and ION graphics in a compact, VESA-mountable form factor.

The TruePower series has been bread-and-butter for Antec for many years, but the line has recently received a refresh. Partly modular cabling, high efficiency, lower noise, and high quality parts are all promised in these new Seasonic-made models. How do they fare against the SPCR short list?

The GELID Icy Vision is an impressive GPU cooler equipped with 5 copper heatpipes, a sizable fin stack, dual 92 mm fans, and compatibility with some of the hottest graphics cards on the market including the Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 480.

The Silverstone Sugo SG07 is an impressive cube/breadbox style mini-ITX case with a large 18 cm fan for cooling, a 600W 80 PLUS Bronze ATX power supply, and enough room for an extra long graphics card as well as a moderately-sized CPU cooler.

A roundup torture test of samples from every fanless power supply line in the marketplace instigated by the Seasonic X-400 Fanless, which cruised through 15 hours of full-load operation at nearly 60°C temperature in the "case". Which fanless PSUs can actually deliver rated power with virtually no forced airflow?