Daniel Schuhmann

In Part I of our power supply roundup, we went through five mainstream PSUs rated at up to 700 W. Round two sees us tackle another seven mid-range units in an effort to determine which power supply deserves your attention.

Good performance, high efficiency and low price: It’s not easing choosing a power supply that offers all three of these features. Tom’s Hardware tests mainstream power supplies of up to 700 watts to determine which will meet your needs best.

Home theater PCs should be as quiet as possible. Since most of the noise is caused by the fans on the CPU and power supply, we tested two passive power supplies that use no fans.

Dip below the conventional mainstream market and you'll find highly integrated platforms priced at about $80 dollars. We take a look at a Celeron-powered Intel board to see what sort of performance is available for less than $100.

Zalman's CNPS9700 has held the top spot in the air-cooling category of our cooler charts for the past 18 months. We tested five other big-name coolers against the incumbent and were surprised to find that it'll be forced to share the spotlight.

Windows 2008 Server can be installed for only specific server roles to reduce resource requirements. And the installation can be done in a command prompt-like environment, almost totally without any use of windows.

The higher the CPU frequency, the higher the heat dissipation. Cheap CPUs ship with simple coolers that aren't suited to overclocking.

We're back again with six more cooling products, rating cooling performance, noise and ease of installation.

Keep cool! That's what CPU coolers are there for. 45 % of our candidates fail our test. We uncover weaknesses and expose false promises.

Combine 64 bit Microsoft Vista and 8 GB of RAM ($198) and you'll see a measurable improvement in performance. We show you how to do it, talk about the gotchas, and provide pointers on tweaking your system.

Microsoft will release Windows 2008 Server as the direct successor to Windows 2003 Server in the spring of next year. The new server OS, code named Longhorn, shares the same kernel with Windows Vista and incorporates many additions compared to its predecessor.

In Part 3 we focus on the hardware for the solar arrays used to generate power for our PC. We fretted over every half-watt to obtain the longest possible up time even on cloudy or rainy days.

Windows Vista offers more than just a pretty user interface with transparent window effects. You want to know all about Vista, and so did we. Here's what we found.

Since AMD's conversion to a 90 nm fabrication process, its Athlon 64 CPUs have developed into real power misers. Their modest power intake also reduces cooling requirements. To investigate this product area further, Tom's Hardware tested six current coolers for AMD CPUs.