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Introduction

 

 

A few days ago we introduced you to the Data Memory Systems' Celerity 6G Plus SSD. At the time I mentioned that we are in the process of tracking down products from SSD manufactures that are not well known. Our goal is to find the hidden treasures out there, the diamonds in the rough. Today we actually found one!

 

Comay, the SSD division for Chinese based company CoreRise, is a true SSD manufacturer with a production facility. Comay is the largest SSD manufacturer that you've never heard of, I guarantee it. To put the Comay product line into perspective, they are the only company listed on SandForce's website that even remotely comes close to the number of models released by OCZ Technology. Both companies list 16 different products at the time of writing.

 

Comay manufactures both consumer and enterprise SSDs, a bit of an oddity these days. Their flagship consumer drive, the Venus Pro 3 though is a mix between consumer pricing and enterprise power features. Today we're looking at the 120GB drive and in two weeks we'll look at the 240GB model.

 

At the start of the second SandForce Revolution, when the first SATA III SF-2281 drives started to emerge, we previewed the OCZ Vertex 3 Pro. This was a similar SSD, but marketed straight to the enterprise customer. The Vertex 3 Pro never actually made it to market, at least not under with Vertex branding. The difference between the Vertex 3 Pro and the Vertex 3 was a small capacitor dubbed a supercap.

 

 

The CapXX Supercap is like a small rechargeable battery or more specifically a capacitor which to everyone other than an engineer would just be considered a battery. The Supercap is fairly small, but it holds enough power to keep the SandForce Flash Processor Unit (FPU or controller) and the NAND flash powered on long enough to write the data stored in the controllers buffers. So, if your computer loses power or the SSD loses power, your buffered data is retained. That's not the only enterprise tech the Comay Venus Pro 3 uses. Let's take a look at the specifications.

 

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Recently we had a chance to review Dell's Precision T3600, and we found it impressive. A company that seemed content to be an also-ran in the enterprise desktop space reinvigorated itself with smart new chassis designs to go along with the refreshed hardware from Intel and NVIDIA, and the resulting system proved as easy to service as it was powerful. Dell and HP can both talk up how fast their computers are, but fundamentally they're still working from the same building blocks that Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD provide them.

HP, as the incumbent enterprise vendor, sent us their Z420. From the chassis design perspective it's certainly nowhere near as radical a departure as Dell's revised Precision lineup is, but now we get a chance to set these standards against each other. On top of that, we also get our first look at Intel's octal-core Xeon processors in a desktop workstation environment. Let's see how the new HP offering compares with previously tested workstations.

Pre-E3 controller tweaking, especially the analogue sticks.

ARM Vow to Capture PC Market from AMD and Intel

Plus old HDD tech revival for Q2 Ultrabooks.

Marketing is a very powerful tool.  A successful marketing campaign or product segmentation can increase sales more than ten-fold.  It is not something we hear or talk about much in the motherboard arena – while a manufacturer will try and promote all the features they have on a product, advertising is usually limited to web advertisements, gaming shows, or an attempt to get as many positive reviews in the media as possible.  But certain manufacturers do enjoy branding their products – Republic of Gamers, Sniper, Big Bang, and Fatal1ty.  Today we are looking at just that – a Fatal1ty branded product, the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional. 

 

 

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Cooler Master's gaming brand CM Storm keeps on expanding its range of products and its latest addition is the Sonuz gaming headset which is a simpler more affordable option than the Sirus. For starters...

Cooler Master's gaming brand CM Storm keeps on expanding its range of products and its latest addition is the Sonuz gaming headset which is a simpler more affordable option than the Sirus. For starters...