I started the project of reviewing the GX Typhoon as one of those who thought monochrome LCD technology had well passed its heyday. But what did I end up feeling? Hope.

There are things that an LCD like the Typhoon could never do. It will never be a mini movie screen. It will never show Winamp visualisations. It will also never slow my computer down or prevent me from using SLI. It will never take me more than five minutes to design a basic screen, or fifteen for a complex one.

What it / /will do is give me a lot of handy information at my fingertips, and I can easily add more. It will pull my weather report from the web, display my song titles and even my calendar entries. It will display my Speedfan info on my test rig, and monitor my temperatures on my main rig. It will do it colourfully, intelligently and easily. It will allow me to control Windows Media player and it will give me data on that, too.

In short, it will do everything I would ever need an intelligent display to do.

Add to this the ability for / /proper add-ons -- a baybus that can run more than a few milliamps of current before it fries; a separate control panel that I could configure independently; a watercooling pump monitor or IR blaster for my TV or a lightbus that ties to my music beats or anything else that comes up that could be useful. And all this comes with an interface that's open and encourages users to develop more great ideas.

With the pros and cons on the table, the GX Typhoon is, to me, proof that small-scale LCD technology isn't dead...far from, it's just starting to come back into style. The classics always do.