ASUS
P5WD2-E Premium: $245
usa.asus.com

We’ve tested ATI’s CrossFire chipsets and found them amazingly strong in performance and overclocking. In a word, the Xpress 200 and 3200 generations are about as perfect as a chipset can get. Yet it’s hard to overcome the stigma left over from two prior generations of lackluster, occasionally unstable core logic. Intel, of course, has offered impeccable chipsets for years, and the only negative anyone might say about them is that the company tends to limit its enthusiast appeal by restricting overclocking options. This ASUS board marries the best of both worlds, offering all of Intel’s benefits paired with ATI CrossFire functionality and certification.

The P5WD2-E Premium has everything you could ask. The board is based on Intel’s flagship 975X chipset backed by twin x16 PCI Express graphics slots (eight PCIe lanes to each slot). The 1,066 MHz front-side bus accommodates Intel’s latest dual-core CPUs, including the vaunted Extreme Edition parts, as well as up to 8GB of DDR2 memory. Intel’s ICH7R southbridge offers all of the 3Gbps SATA RAID speed and flexibility a consumer might want.

Of course, ASUS adds its own value to the product, not only in the company’s legendary speed and stability but extra perks such as a heatsinking PCB design, formidable overclocking options in the BIOS, Dolby Master Studio, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, eSATA and SPDIF ports, and much more. For buyers who demand the finest, this is it.

Priced under $100, this is one of the best ways to bolster a high-end notebook’s storage subsystem with plenty of performance to spare.

ZALMAN
VF900-Cu GPU Heatsink: $49
www.zalmanusa.com

In the ultra popular world of gaming, overclocking is king, and those who know enough about the subject to be dangerous know that you don’t just stop OCing at the CPU. The GPU can be just as important in the race for higher frame rates and superior filtering, but cooling it can be tricky.

The VF900-Cu takes the concept behind the great 7000 CPU cooler series and adapts it for mounting on video cards, complete with blue ramsinks and copper heatpiping. This 6.5-ounce bird’s nest of copper fins shields a 2,400 RPM (maximum) dual ball bearing fan with a top noise output of 25 dB. Inside of a case, that’s essentially silent. Test results show the VF900-Cu knocking four or five degrees Celsius off of what rival third-party GPU heatsink fans can deliver.

Zalman heatsinks may be one of the sexiest add-ons you can sell into a system, but they’re not the easiest to install. That’s where your expertise and value comes in. Those who want to game hard without getting their hands dirty—and there are plenty of them—will gladly pay for the style and performance the VF900-Cu can deliver, especially with a clear case to highlight the investment.

D-LINK
DFL-800: $1,149.99
www.dlink.com

In a nutshell, the difference between a consumer-level firewall and one appropriate to an SMB is simply muscle. If you have 50 remote workers all trying to dig into the server over VPN sessions, a low-end firewall device will crumple like an underfoot beer can. A serious denial-of-service attack? Same problem. While there are differences in the details, the extra grand a company spends on a firewall is meant to buy an iron-clad gate, not a hollow-core door on creaky hinges.

The DFL-800 is one of the best values available for SMB firewall protection. The appliance sports dual WAN ports for fail-over protection and server load balancing, seven 10/100 LAN ports, a 10/100 DMZ connection, and a serial port console connection. Upscale features are everywhere here, from AES encryption to advanced bandwidth management tools. D-Link supports up to 300 IPSec, PPTP, or L2TP VPN tunnels, which is very aggressive at this price point.

Network administrators will find the DFL-800’s configuration and management capabilities quite comfortable. Email alerts, remote management, and real-time system logging all come standard, and the VPN configuration options, while quite granular, are all easy to access and grasp thanks to D-Link’s habitually friendly interface.