Really like the Xai so far. Ergonomics aren’t up to the Steelseries golden standard Ikari Laser (most comfortable mouse EVAR) but they are “good enough” and can also be used somewhat ambidextrously since it’s not TOO right handed shaped, and has thumb buttons on both sides.

4HD not really to my tastes, but the semi-rough surface user in my house really likes it so far. Tracking is EXCELLENT for both the mouse and pad.

At long last, the final ASUS P55 unboxing! I wouldn’t be that surprised if there are more to come though…

“EVO” is a new designation for ASUS. I remember it used to be so simple. There was “Product Name” and “Product Name Deluxe”. Sometimes there was a “Product Name SE”. Now it seems like they need to have 18 different suffixes to help users figure out their huge P55 product line. It makes me want to yell at their product management team, “IT’S ONE CHIPSET!!” Here’s the whole lineup:

P7P55D LE
P7P55D
P7P55D Pro
P7P55D EVO
P7P55D Deluxe
P7P55D Premium
P7P55D WS Supercomputer
Maximus III Formula

IT’S ONE CHIPSET!! 8 BOARDS! They don’t even have an mATX board! Gigabyte at least has that excuse for having 6 boards (two mATX, and distinctly different feature sets throughout). MSI seems to have the cleanest lineup with eVGA committing the “too many boards” sin as well…

The sun was bright. I know my sunglasses aren’t very cool, but it was either that or be all squinty. I’m taking Monday off so I had to shoot some unboxings at home or risk falling behind. I can’t believe how long it’s taking me to finish all of the P55 unboxings!!

Was waiting for a couple of co-workers so we could all go for nachos, and I’m standing there with the cameraman going “okay, well why don’t we just shoot a video”. Here’s what we ended up with.

Here we take a look at Intel’s latest and (almost) greatest processor: The Core i5 750. This bad boy runs at 2.66GHz stock, except that because of turbo boost it’ll pretty much never run below 2.93GHz! I highly recommend grabbing an aftermarket heatsink & fan to take advantage of turbo boost as well as all of the overclocking headroom with Intel’s latest chip.

Here’s the unboxing video:

You can also check out our overclocking guide for the i5/P55 family here:

But here goes another one! I checked out the XFX 850W Black Edition power supply I LOVE the look of this thing, and even if you don’t really like the look, you gotta admit it’s great to see someone shaking things up a little bit. The last thing we need is more plain black boxes with sleeved black cables coming out of them.

I also took a quick boo at the latest LGA1156 CPU cooler for Arctic Cooling. The Freezer 7 Pro was an icon for “performance per dollar” and the new version maintains that rock bottom pricing and great feature set.

I haven’t been able to keep up with my new video release schedule on my blog. I’ve been aiming for one product showcase or unboxing video per day, and then one NCIX Tech Tips episode per week. It’s been keeping me VERY busy! I hope you’re all enjoying all of the updates. Feel free to ping NCIX Esther on Facebook if you have any requests for unboxing videos

I was given the task of creating an eye catching demo system for our new Aberdeen store which will be opening in the next little while. I decided to bring take it with me on Friday as a homework project for the weekend (as if I didn’t have enough to do this weekend…) and I’m quite pleased with the results. It’s a bit of an “all show and no go” configuration with the Intel X38 “BoneTrail” motherboard and an ASUS 8800GTX, but since those parts look slick I decided to run with it. Here are some day photos that I took. I will add some night ones once I have a chance to take them (maybe at night would be a good time for that)

edit: NIGHT SHOTS!!

This was one of the most difficult Tech Tips we’ve ever filmed. We were in the studio until 8:30pm trying to get the footage we needed to make this episode. It doesn’t help that I was having a bit of an off night (some days we just fly through things and this one was many takes for every shot) but I think the other thing that doesn’t help is that there’s just sooo much to say about this case. It’s hard to keep it from sounding like an infomercial, but if we keep it too “opiniony” then we just won’t be able to get enough in about the features and whatnot.

The short version is that I LOVE this case. I think that out of the box it’s the best PC case on the market right now. I <3 my modified TJ07 still, but if this case had been available at that time I would have bought it instead of buying something that I needed to put so much work into.