Key Features

	7-inch widescreen display
	30-gigabyte hard drive
	QWERTY keyboard
	Microsoft Vista Business OS
	Windows Media Player 11
	Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA
	Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
	WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0

This infrared motion tracking system gets clipped onto your headset or visor and allows you to change your POV in-game by merely moving your head. This is a great idea, but does it work, and who is it for?

Natural Point first branched out into the gaming arena in 2001 with its TrackIR 1. Its TrackIR 3 Pro was released on a global scale and was very well-received. Its TrackIR 4 Pro is the newest incarnation of the series and sports a new headset kit. It connects to your computer by USB, so it is functional on virtually any current computer. The only thing that it requires is a headphone set of some kind or visor because the unit must have something to clip onto.

The company claims to give extended functionality in games where point-of-view (POV) is integral to game play. Its flagship application for many years has been Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, but also includes support for other gaming genres such as racing titles and even first-person shooters (FPS).

ASUS is well known for innovation in many areas including video cards and motherboards. The “Silent” line of video cards is their unique line of silent passively cooled video cards utilizing heatpipe technology without fans. ASUS is once again innovating in this area for the enthusiast gamer. The ASUS EAX1950 Pro we have today utilizes ASUS’ own unique heatsink and fan design using heatpipe. The standard reference heatsink from ATI is a one-slot design and this new design from ASUS will take up two-slots, but should provide better cooling.

The ASUS EAX1950 Pro/HTDP/256M uses the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro GPU with 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. The ASUS EAX1950 Pro runs ever so slightly faster than ATI reference clock speeds. The GPU is clocked at 581 MHz vs. 575 MHz, and the memory runs at 1.4 GHz (702 MHz actual) vs. 1.38 GHz. A 6 MHz faster GPU and 10 MHz faster memory clock speed are highly underwhelming. It makes us ask what the point of that is really. We will have to see if the new cooling unit allows a high overclock. That is where this video card may separate itself from others.

NVIDIA GeForce 8 series graphics processing units (GPUs) redefine the PC gaming experience. With a revolutionary unified architecture and full support for Microsoft DirectX 10 games, GeForce 8 series GPUs deliver unprecedented performance, extraordinarily detailed environments, and film quality game effects.

Undoubtedly a huge draw to the GeForce 8800 series GPU is that it is DX10 capable graphics hardware. Many hardware enthusiasts that live on the cutting edge of hardware and software invested in their 8800 series GPUs because they knew that not only were they going to get incredible DX9 performance immediately, but they were also building their systems to be compatible with DX10 in the new Windows Vista operating system.