HW Roundup While 550W PSU is enough for everything
LEGIT REVIEWS TESTED AMD's answer to Intel's Conroe offensive. With the latest price cuts of AMD CPUs, it was interesting to see whether an X2 5600+, a sub-$200 CPU fare with Intel's own E6300, which fits nicely into the same category. When testing in real world games, a surprise happened in
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where Intel took a beating. AMD took the lead in Doom 3 as well, while Quake 4 returned point for Intel. However, AMD demolished Intel in Serious Sam 2. Head over there and read a highly surprising review. But to see almost 50% faster frame rate in Serious Sam... even worse than Athlon 64 vs. Intel Pentium 4 in Unreal Tournament 2k4.
Steven from Legion Hardware made
an impressive point in todays' world of reviewing power supplies with ridiculous wattages. Steven took all the latest and greatest components on the market and managed to power everything with Thermaltake's Pure Power 550W. This sort of ends the dilemmas that Corsair's 620W PSU cannot handle AMD's QuadFX with two 8800GTX cards in SLI.
XSReviews tested two
MSI 8600GT boards in SLI mode, to see what kind of performance boost can two boards bring. We only lack the point, because for 300 dollars you can get a card that can eat two of these babies, and you aren't locked to a single hardware vendor. Their second review of the day is
zeroTHERM GX810, an add-on cooler for graphics cards.
Even though Nvidia launched its mainstream DX10 offensive, ATi's own Radeon X1950Pro and X1950XT aren't without an answer. Bjorn3D tested
PowerColor X1950Pro SCS3, board based on very good RV570 chip. Still, with one month to go before arrival of DX10 mainstream parts, somehow we feel that neither Nvidia nor AMD will have a decent performing DX10 parts, and that older 256-bit powered DX9 GPUs will have more juice, even though they will be leashed of DX10 goodness.
We haven't seen much of the budget monitors reviewed, but Takaenoki from FastSilicon.com reviewed a monitor from a company which we never heard of, Haans. Their
widescreen 17" G-HW173D proved to be quite an interesting one, especially given the price bracket.
SysOpt tested
Ultra's ChilTec cooler, a mixed air/TEC combination. While it cools really good, main problem is that Peltier element will eat up several amps from the 12V rail, so you have to be sure not to have less than 50-60A on the 12V side, especially if you are running more than one power-hungry graphics card.
TechGage tested
SteelSeries 3H and 4H, two headsets for gamers and folk that want some decent sound support for chatting over Ventrilo or TeamSpeak.
To stay in the gaming segment, bit-tech went on to see how
a gaming rat pack of four perform in games.
For the end of this Friday's roundup, we picked a news that are a break for the open sauce and alternative OS community. Phoronix decided to bite the bullet and started to support
Solaris OS in their own hardware reviews. Ever since Marc Andreessen's new project switched from Linux to Solaris, Solaris has been gaining on strength, and now sites like Phoronix have decided to support the OS as well.
The INQuirer
Hybrid Mode
