With the hundreds of PC cases that are on the market today, the spectrum of styles and designs is very wide. On the bottom end of the scale there is the case that is there to do its job and not much else, whereas on the top end of the market, there are the highly customisable cases that have stacks to offer. The design of these cases follows pretty much the same pattern, but there are some people out there that would like to have a case that on the outside is a little understated & aesthetically clean and on the inside has a little more to shout about.

When we think of a value case, in general most people would visualise a case that has its 6 sides, a space to mount everything and some basic I/O. With the T9 however this is not the case. The chassis is made up of a very light aluminium frame with an open plan layout on the inside. With this open plan layout, the case still comes with three 120mm LED lit fans, tool-less drive bay fitting, two grommets on the rear to allow for water cooling pipes to pass through, 7 expansion slots, a point on the floor of the case to bolt an SSD to and space to fit a combination of upto 9 5.25″ and 3.5″ drives.

Other items that come with the case include three front USB2.0 and one USB3.0 port, front audio headers, the acrylic side panel window and most significantly the option of having the motherboard tray, expansion ports and drive bay locks in four different colours.

The Sharkoon T9 Value Series case seems to, on paper, fit into the latter of these groups with its understated looks, simple design and bright internal colour options. We do have to remember though that this is a value case with the bare essentials, so have Sharkoon been able to make a product that still offers a level of flexibility, simplicity and a fell of quality in a back to basics design?

After X79 proving to be a pricey upgrade this Christmas, a lot of users are still looking at what the famous Z68 platform has to offer, and with prices falling as we get closer to that special day of the holiday season, it’s the perfect time to upgrade it seems. Couple this fantastic value with a range of components that can really be pushed to their limits including the 2500k, 2600k and the newest 2700k processors and you have a system that will last the test of time, or at least until Intel bring out Ivy Bridge.

We recently took a look at the budget-friendly Z68AP-D3 from Gigabyte recently which offered the performance needed but for an extremely low price point. Today we see Asus doing something very similar with the new P8Z68-V LX budget board.

Though from a first glance we see a budget board, Asus have also tried to give all of the features you want and need including some that you would only assume to see on top high-end boards such as a UEFI BIOS, EPU/TPU features and multi-GPU support.

Priced at £78.82, this is one of the best priced Z68 boards on the market, and being released just before Christmas seems to be a great tactic by Asus, but has the performance been affected or can it keep up with its bigger brothers that are double the price? Let’s find out shall we!

ADATA have introduced what they are describing as a budget entry level solid state drive. The S510 SSD is available in an 120GB capacity only although for a true budget entry model they should probably get around to offering 60/64GB models instead. It uses the latest SF-2200 series SandForce controller which allows it to achieve read/write speeds in excess of 500MB/s. Using the latest Asynchronous MLC NAND Flash memory chips the drive is able to achieve 550MB/s read and 510MB/s write.

The drive is shipped with an adapter for 3.5″ to 2.5″ which is useful for older cases without native 2.5″ drive support. There is also free disk imaging software for easy movement of your OS. Max IOPS stand at 85000 and MTBF is million hours. The drive also uses only 4.5W of power fully active and 0.6W idle if you are considering this as a possible laptop upgrade. ADATA is offering a 3 year warranty on these new drives.

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HighPoint have claimed that the USB 3.0 ports have been optimised for external USB 3.0 storage devices such as SSDs and external hard drives. HighPoint are making these available immediately so expect to see them on big e-tailers like Amazon by the end of the week. There was no official pricing from HighPoint since they are giving partners the chance to set prices their way but expect these to be $50 or less.

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The boards all come with a fully sized PCI-E 16X slot should the user want to add a discrete GPU but for most users of these budget boards the integrated graphics on the AMD APUs should be more than adequate. Connectivity is not fantastic all three boards lack USB 3.0 and the mATX boards only support 2 DDR3 DIMM slots. Graphical connectivity is fullest on the ATX board, which has DVI, VGA and HDMI: you can see the full ATX board below:

ECS A55F-A

The other boards start to see features dropping off as they become cheaper, for example the M2 board loses a DVI slot and 2 DIMM slots whilst the M3 board loses the DVI and HDMI while only keeping the VGA input. All three boards come with PCI slots for users still running older expansion cards. With regards to capacitors and VRM don’t expect anything fantastic, these boards have been built from the ground up for providing functionality at a fantastic value price. No pricing yet but these boards are going to be very cheap, expect them to show up in 2 weeks or so.

ECS A55F-M2

ECS A55F-M3

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The Pro II series AS203 SSD drives will be available in 32,64, 128 and 256 GB models all three utilising the SATA 3GB/s interface and all three also come with 128MB of cache. They use pretty standard MLC NAND Flash memory chips and support the TRIM command ( which essentially allows the operating system to clean up “waste” files that are no longer needed). The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is 1 million hours so expect good product life.

The maximum write and read speeds vary between the; 32GB model 200Mb/s Write and 100Mb/s read. The 64GB model which has 250Mb/s write and 180Mb/s read whilst the 128/256GB models have 250Mb/s read and 230Mb/s write. All sizes of SSD in the Pro II series come with a 2 year manufacturer warranty and have an optional “Optimisation Kit” which has Acronis true image back up software, a 3.5″ to 2.5″ converter and a SATA to USB adapter.

Pricing has not been announced officially yet but expect prices to be much lower than the popular branded SATA 3GB/s devices. £50/$80 for the 32GB, £65/$100 for the 64GB, £110/$180 for the 128GB and £240/$400 seem like reasonable price estimates for the kind of price point Apacer will be aiming for.