Daniel Schuhmann

We give five new power supply units the full juice treatment after our previous stress tests laid many supposedly high-end units to rest in the scrap heap. Did vendors take heed of the hard lessons they learned during our past tests?

Versatile, robust and easy to use: Innovatek's Fan-O-Matic Pro Rev. 3.0 more than meets expectations as a high-end fan controller. But such luxury comes at a price - which in this case totals more than $240.

Power supply performance specs are going through the roof, but you can't tell from looking at a device whether it will actually deliver the 600 watts it claims to. That's why we put them through their paces in the lab - and this is how we do it.

If the CPU stays cool, then the cooler's good. If that sounds too simple, then you're right: in reality, a lot of factors affect a cooler's "performance". We'll let you in on what they are and how we tested them.

Is the sky the limit when it comes to the size of coolers? These behemoths unleash hurricane-force winds on CPUs, but does that always mean they are effective? THG's review of 10 new coolers should be a breath of fresh air.

Four vendors say their power supplies have a lot more to offer than just serving to juice up PCs. With value-add nomenclatures such as Audio Standby and Realtime Power Meter, do their special features live up to the vendors' claims?

It's impossible to gauge the ill effects noisy power supplies have on your mental health, but needless to say, loud fans are irksome. While vendors' past attempts to deliver low-noise units were met with varying degrees of success, we see how the latest crop measures up.

Users are demanding ever-greater performance from CPUs, graphics cards and other components. But more performance requires more power, so that fancy new system needs a high-performance power supply to work well. Shopping for one can be tough, however - do the printed specs jibe with actual performance, or will your new machine stop working before you even get to fire it up? And what's the deal with energy efficiency? Fortunately, THG checked it all out for you.

Blue screen, registry error, blank screen... ack! Somebody tell me: how I can retrieve my data? How do I get my system running again? THG shows you which tools to use, and how to use them to get everything running again - without data loss or the dreaded reinstall.

Asus' StarIce is big, heavy and looks uncannily like a jet plane reactor. Does the leviathan device get the job done by keeping temperatures down for overclocking and other CPU punishing apps?

Here we go again - another new power supply specification, with more connectors and more pins to confuse matters. Do the old ATX connectors fit into the new 24-pin connectors? What else has been updated? THG sheds some light on the new ATX power supply standard.

The new Zalman CPU cooler is even bigger than its already-large predecessor, and now also cools LGA775 CPUs. But does bigger mean better cooling performance?

When it comes to heat, the new Intel CPUs run at the limit. To help prevent users from seeing red, several manufacturers have created brand new coolers that help your P4 keep its cool. We put 5 of them through their paces.

In theory, water coolers represent an optimal solution to keep CPUs cool and quiet. But in practice, water coolers in the past have been difficult to install and use. THG tests a new crop of seven to see if water cooler vendors have gotten their cooling acts together.

Installing WindowsXP and the recently released Service Pack 2 no longer requires separate installations. Using a process called slipstreaming, Microsoft allows users to burn CDs that combine a WindowsXP installation CD and Service Pack 2.

Common wisdom dictates that water cooling systems might offer better performance but are hard to install and represent a cumbersome amount of extra components. But can external water cooling systems prove naysayers wrong? THG tested four models to find out.

WindowsXP is dumber than you think, but there are ways to boost performance from a dual processor platform when you assign CPU tasks manually. To help you do that, THG has created a free software utility that lets you get more dual-processing bang for your buck.

Does it always have to be water-cooled? Coolermaster presents a brand-new cooler that can be run passively or with a fan.