Hardware Roundup Intel rules the roost
TOMS HARDWARE has a review of a
$720 DIY 4GHz Dual core, water cooled gaming rig. Impressive for the price. THG also gives you a DIY photo gallery as well as ample details on how not to fail. The reviewer takes advantage of the Pentium D 805 processor, the right heir to the Celeron 300a that was used a few years ago to build overclocked rigs.
Our sister publication, Vnunet.com, is impressed by
Sony's SDM-E96's flashy flatscreen. While it is only a 19-inch monitor, the Sony monitor is made of one piece of plastic and can be tilted easily. Qualitywise, Sony is up there with the best and with a native resolution of 1280x1024 and a different design, it will be a hit in the retail.
A clash of midrange cards took place at Bit-Tech where the
Sapphire X1600 Ultimate faced the MSI NX7600. The later is cheaper than the Sapphire model which has a better heatsinks and more tweaks thanks to AVIVO and the fact that you will be able to use it for Physics acceleration soon. It will all boil down to the type of game being played as well as whether a tenner is a big sum of money for you.
UK-based XSreviews reports on the
OCZ EB 2GB PC3700 kit of memory modules, complete with the patented Mirrored Platinum XTC Heatspreader together with lifetime warranty. It is not as overclockable as one could expect, especially from OCZ. It produces good performance and has a good looks. But as it is expensive, you might have to look elsewhere if you are penny-pinching.
Vedran Dakic from
IT-review tests Crossfire motherboards, featuring the 975X and the RD580 chipsets together with two top of the range processors. A bit rough and an unfinished feel mainly with regards with the benchmarks. You might want to wait for the R600 series to solve some of the problems but the Crossfire has turned to a competent competitor for Nvidia's SLI. Our good friend,
David Kanter from Realworldtech, has some more information regarding Cavium MIPSes network and security co-processors. The article has a look at the Octeon family, which is composed of up to 16, 600MHz cores. Cavium's products are targeted at the telecommunication sector first and foremost, but one should bear in mind that with AMD's forthcoming HTX sockets, companies like Cavium will come forward with hardware to make good use of the HTX and HT structure.
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