A testing time
TOM'S HARDWARE pits the best from AMD and the best from Intel and overclocks both of them until the blood pours out. The
Core2 Extreme goes up to 3.68GHz and the Athlon FX 64 up to 3.05GHz. That's bloody high. AMD's performance increased by just over 7% while the Core went all the way up by nearly 17%. What does that mean to Mr and Mrs Smithes? Well what about the Core2 Extreme compressing an entire 150 minute movie on DVD just under six minutes and a 120 minute movie into DiVX in 93 minutes, one hour faster than AMD's.
Puget Computers has compiled a handy guide to buying
your computer hardware. Nothing that most of of you do not already know but having somewhere where you can go and find everything glued together is always good. There's also a few bits and pieces regarding why you should build your computer and why you shouldn't. As a system builder, Puget systems explain why you should go for one of them. and shows where the benefits are. Obviously, the conclusion should not surprise anyone.
Tweaktown reports on the latest motherboard supporting Core Duo Mobile, the
MSI 945GT Speedster-A4R. The board has a small footprint - mATX, is passively cooled and is black in colour. You only get two PCI slots and one PCI-e x16 one. There's also only one PATA port but four SATA ones. But apart from that, the board is feature packed. Two firewire and two GbE ports, eight USB ones, DVI-I port, Svideo and RCA Video ports and of course 5.1 Audio support. It's a mild overclocker though.
Digitaltrends reviews the
Altec Lansing AHP612 wireless headphones. They are all that a good headphone should be. Provides with decent sound quality; it has a good wireless RF technology - omni directional 900Mhz -, a 150ft range and is comfortable to wear. Other than that some of you might find that there is still room for improvement when it comes to construction and design. The price is right for such branded headphones. Degradation occurs gradually as you move away from the base.
GDHardware checks the
WD Raptor 10K 150GB SATA HDD, running at 10krpm, with a 16MB buffer, NCQ support and a five year warranty. As the reviewer puts it, it is a real prosumer hard drive, aiming to fill the gap between dirty cheap and dirty expensive storage. The WD Raptor is compared to a Seagate 7200.7 drive and is tested alone, in RAID-0 and in RAID-1. If you are after the fastest SATA hard drives on the market, then look no further than those.
Laptop logic goes around with a
Toshiba Portege M400-S933 laptop. It is a hybrid, convertible laptop that can turn to a tablet with a twist of the screen. It runs very cool and comes with lots of system utilities to customise it just like you want it to be. As for most toshibas, it has an excellent quality built. But you might be put off by the mediocre battery life and the fact that the bundled software puts a load on the computer. Obviously you can uninstall them if you wish. The Protege is manned by a Core Solo T1300 coupled with 512MB memory, a 12-inch XGA screen and a 80GB HDD. The INQuirer
Hybrid Mode
