Tuesday Reviews

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The stock speeds of the SuperTalent RAM were more than acceptable when compared to the Crucial 4000. Scoring right behind the Crucial, the SuperTalent RAM has an excellent score at Stock speeds. Of course, when overclocked, the Crucial 4000 comes out on top. Once again, you can see the benefit that Dual Channel RAM provides. The SuperTalent wallops the single stick of Geil.

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After finishing all of the testing and looking back on everything I am quite impressed with this memory. Though I was able to run the memory at the specified speed with little to no problems I wouldn't say that everything went according to plan. I was not able to get Comanche 4 to successfully complete even with my DDR voltage maxed out. I do feel that part of the problem in the overall equation was the motherboard being maxed out. I don't think that my processor had anything to do with the problems since I was using an engineering sample and was able to lower the multiplier. So with all of these things being taken into consideration I would say this memory stands up pretty well. It would have been nice to be able to run the memory with latencies of 2-2-2-5 at DDR400 however since their specifications say nothing about this I won't knock it too much. So I guess my one sentence summary of the memory would be as follows: If you have an overclockable Intel motherboard and processor and want to get your memory to 250MHz or faster this PC4000 from GeIL should do the job.

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If you want the fastest graphics engine for gaming on the planet, you basically have two choices: ATi's Radeon X800 XT or NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, and each one can dominate the other depending on the game or benchmark being run at the time. Until now, we had only reviewed one of each of these graphics powerhouses in retail form.

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All good things come and go – and that is what exactly happened to the Winbond BH-5 memory IC’s. Their ability to cope with 2-2-2-5 timings (the tightest timings possible) combined with their sheer overclock ability shocked the enthusiast community. However, as quick as they came, the Winbond chips were discontinued (another shock for the enthusiast community) and the industry was set to go for more MHz rather than extreme low latencies.

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Is the latest MSI motherboard for Socket 939 capable of delivering blistering fast performance when combined with your expensive CPU? We take a closer look at the Neo2 Platinum edition, and see how much performance increase we get from upping the HTT speed

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With the Socket 775 Intel processor introducing so many legacy free technologies at once, it's going to be simpler and less costly for consumers to just implement everything at once. Or.... not at all and side with AMDs solutions. In this review, PCstats.com is testing out Gigabyte's new Intel Pentium 4 flagship motherboard, the GA-8ANXP-D. Based on the 925X chipset, the Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D supports the new Socket 775 Intel Pentium 4 processor formfactor, and can be run with up to 4GB of DDR-2 memory.

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What I will be stating is that if you are moving to the new Intel LGA775 specification or the new Athlon64 PCI Express motherboard and you just need a basic 2D videocard, the X300 based alternatives on the market will make you more than happy. If you are even considering gaming, do yourself a favor and upgrade to an X600 if you want some decent playable framerates on any of the more recent or newly released games on the market.

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Overclocking is of course a hot topic with 90nm CPUs. We decided to test out the Athlon 64 3000+ with the stock AVC cooler with a copper base and aluminum fins. This is the one you currently get with boxed Athlon 64s. First we checked what the temperature of the CPU was at idle and under heavy load with the Abit hardware monitoring utility. At idle the 3000+ at default speed ran at 47 degrees Celsius. Under heavy load it peaked out at 59 degrees Celsius. Now let's look at our preliminary overclocking results.

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The Albatron K8X800 Pro II v2 has working multiplier settings, 1.9 max vcore, 2.9 max DIMM voltage but still lacks working AGP and PCI dividers. The Albatron K8X800 Pro II v2 motherboard is a solid piece of hardware. Bundling so many features it’s almost mind numbing. 8 channel onboard sound, Gigabit Lan, IEE1394 round out the features found on higher priced motherboards.