Monday Hardware Reviews

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Today we have a very interesting video card on our test bench. We have a sample of Gigabytes Geforce 6600GT card which seems to be the card you should get if you want speed but still don't have enough cash for the best cards. We will test this and see how it performs agianst other PCI-E cards we have reviewed before. We have some gaming benchmarks coming up for you and some overclocking of course.

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The card bundle is one of the better ones out there, though it's a shame ATI (and as a consequence, MSI) no longer bundles a Half-Life 2 voucher which could have made the software package worth getting excited about. Nonetheless, performance is where it ultimately matters, and the MSI RX800XT-VTD256E brings it

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Today we have more than a couple of choices in 64bit computing. It's popularity is quickly becoming mainstream. AMD has recently released it's next generation of 64bit cpu's with the introduction of the Winchester core line built on the new 90nm fabrication process. These cpu's are now made to fit in a 939 pin socket versus the 754 pin socket of previous Athlon64 cpu's which were built on a 130nm process so you will have to replace the motherboard if you want to run these cpu's if you are coming from a socket 754 setup. Today we take a look at the 300+ and 3200+ models, both socket 939.

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The chipset area shows that Epox has a huge heatsink for the nForce 3 250GB. This is probably the largest stock heatsink we have ever seen for a motherboard, and it is actively cooled. To the left of the heatsink are the SATA RAID connectors that will handle RAID 0, 1, and 0+1, and two additional ports above it also supporting RAID. Two are integrated in the nForce chipset, and the other two are courtesy of a Marvell chip located just above the chipset, but covered by the heatsink. Above the heatsink are the IDE connectors. To the right of them are the front panel connectors, the bios chip, the LED status monitor, and the floppy connector. The VIA chip in the bottom right corner adds Firewire support with the connectors to the right of it.

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We were never able to hit 2-2-2-5 timings with the older kit at DDR400, but the latest TWINX-4400C25 had no problems with those timings. We were also able to hit as high as 278FSB at 2.5-4-4-8, which is also something we weren't able to do before.

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For quite some time now we have been reviewing Corsair's top-notch memory and have received much good feedback from readers abroad, and no comments with negative feedback. This doesn't surprise, us to be honest, as we're quite happy with each sample we receive and have yet to experiance any problems with this memory. From high-end servers to hard core gaming rigs, this memory stands out--in great part due to overclockability that continues to be much superior to its competitors.

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Today we have a PCI Express graphics card shootout comparing three different ATI Radeon X600XT cards from HIS, ATI and GeCube. After taking a look at each product we run them through our usual array of benchmarks and then overclock each as far as possible and then re-run the benchmarks to work our which is fastest for modern day gaming.