This week on the roundup, we’ve got fresh gear from Cooler Master, Thermaltake, and Zotac to discuss:
- Cooler Master intros Scout 2 case. Enthusiast ATX cases look awfully alike on the inside these days. The Scout 2 is no exception; its charcoal black innards have a PSU emplacement at the bottom, a cut-out behind the motherboard tray, and grommeted holes for cable routing. There are even sideways-mounted hard-drive bays with removable trays. (The Scout 2 has room for up to seven hard drives and two SSDs in addition to three 5.25″ optical drives.) That said, Cooler Master has doubled down on cooling, giving the Scout 2 room for no fewer than nine 120-mm fans. Folks can switch fan LEDs on and off from the front panel, too. Oh, and according to Cooler Master, this enclosure “brings an ultramodern rifle appeal that elevates its abilities up to the pinnacle of support for its size”—whatever that means. The Scout 2 will be available in “Midnight Black” and “Gunmetal Grey” finishes starting next month.
- Thermaltake launches Toughpower Grand Platinum PSUs. 80 Plus Gold is, like, so yesterday. Thermaltake’s new Grand Platinum 600W and 700W power supplies are stamped with 80 Plus Platinum certification, which implies efficiency of up to 94%. Not too shabby. These bad boys also feature single 12V rails, modular cabling, and “flower-shape” 140-mm fans that keep running for a bit after the system switches off. And they look pretty slick, with white paint jobs and rounded edges.
- Zotac pushes the limits of the GeForce GTX 660 Ti. By default, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti runs at 915MHz with a 980MHz boost speed, and its GDDR5 memory pushes bits at an effective 6Gbps. There are plenty of cards on the market that exceed those speeds, but Zotac’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition may well be the quickest. It features blistering base, turbo, and memory speeds of 1098MHz, 1176MHz, and 6.6Gbps, respectively. Too bad this is only a limited-edition model.
That looks like the same cooler Zotac slaps on the slower GTX 660 model we reviewed last month. It proved both quiet and effective on our sample, but I’d wager the variant strapped to this card has to work quite a bit harder.