Ryan’s Holiday Gift Picks

Our Editor-In-Chief Ryan Shrout had quite a few tech items on the brain as the holiday’s approached.  Here are three practical items that are sure to get lots of use out of a techie friend or relative.

1. EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores – $289 USD

A relatively new entrant to Nvidia’s lineup, the 448 CUDA core powered GTX 560 Ti 448 makes for a good high performance gaming card without totally breaking the budget.  In our recent review he found that the performance was pretty close to that of the higher priced GTX 570 and at least 15-20% faster than the original GTX 560 Ti.  Keep in mind that this is a limited edition part so once they are gone, they will be MIA forever.

2. Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500GB USB 3.0 – $89 USD

An external hard drive offering 500 GB of storage and a USB 3.0 interface for speedy transfers…

If you know someone who is constantly moving around lots of large files between different computers, has a nostalgic love for sneaker netting, or who has mentioned wanting to try out that whole "backing up" thing, this external drive may be the perfect gift.  Another benefit of this particular drive is that the USB 3.0 connection is removable and can be attached to any 2.5-in hard drive or SSD .  Standard hard drives will work as well but require a secondary power source.

3. Extended Battery for Verizon 4G LTE MiFi – $89 USD

The Verizon MiFi is a device that acts like a wireless router, and provides an internet connection to WiFi devices via the Verizon LTE cell phone network.  An extended battery means being able to provide that connection for longer.

If you often find yourself using your 4G modem (either Verizon or Sprint) for a road trips or instead of hotel WiFi, you will probably love to know you can find extended batteries to push past the 3-4 hour limit they tend to have. For $89 (kind of high, I know) you can get a 5000 mAh battery that will extend that to 9+ hours!  This is definitely a key item for our travels to shows like CES!

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