Friday Morning Reviews

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AOpen's GeForceFX 5900XT packs in 128MB of DDR RAM, supports dual monitors, has TV-Out capabilities and comes with a bundled copy of PowerDVD 5. Factor in the $239 CDN ($175 US) price tag (which is one of the lowest priced FX 5900XT's we've seen), and pretty much everything else can be forgiven if the card does seem a little vanilla. Oh, did I happen to mention that AOpen boosted the default core clock speed from 390 MHz to 420 MHz too?

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With its Prescott compatibilities this board can run any skt 478 processor, many of which can compete with the other, more exciting processors out there. For this reason we gave skt 478 one more try when we chose to build our most recent test computer. As far as price/performance this platform is tough to beat.

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Gigabyte has brought to the table a great 865PE board that will fill the bill for any family looking to upgrade, especially if they are looking to add a rig to an already existing home network. The wireless lan being included saves a few dollars, and the performance can only be beaten by the 875 boards, and only some of those at that. The board is extremely user friendly, all the way down to the documentation it comes with. This board will not disappoint anyone!

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Hightech Information Systems, HIS for short, isn’t the most famous graphics card manufacturer in the world. They have, however, been around since 1987 and are Hong Kong’s leading graphics board maker. In 2002, they partnered up with ATi and adopted the “Excalibur” coin for their ATi based video cards. The term Excalibur came directly from the sword of King Arthur. If you don’t know the story, read the book or catch the movie coming out this summer in North America.

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AMD has finally released the Socket 939 version of their Athlon64 processors, which includes the Athlon64 FX53 (Socket 939), the Athlon64 3800+ and the Athlon64 3500+ with the two latter running the dual memory controller but being restricted to the smaller 512 kB L2 cache of the Newcastle die. However, the entire family of Socket 939 processors is capable of running unbuffered memory, which shaves off one bus cycle on each initial memory access.
Aside from the price advantage over the Socket 940 processors, is there any gain in performance caused by the lower latency memory access? Moreover, does the cache reduction hurt the performance and if so, what are the critical applications?

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By now, you probably have heard about Corsair bringing back 2-2-2 to the world of memory. Well, now it's Bjorn3D's turn to play with some of these new modules from Corsair. For those who haven't heard, these modules are from Corsair's new XL memory line.