Monday Reviews

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This is why we see a new batch of video cards from the two big players (ATI and NVIDIA) every six months or so. It was only December when we were looking at the almost-top-of-the-line ATI Radeon X800 XT, and already I have in front of me the upgraded X850 XT Platinum Edition. The X850 XT PE is based on the R480 core clocked at 540MHz, has 16 pixel pipelines, and 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 590MHz (1.18GHz DDR). We have rounded up a good number of cards to pin against the X850 XT PE, including NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line Geforce 6800 Ultra. Let's find out if this behemoth is all it's cracked up to be.

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Manufacturers tend to take different approaches to retail video cards. Some may focus on a nice bundle, with extra features. Others go a bit further, like adding overclocking features and funky cooling solutions. Most though, are content to just slap their logo on the heatsink and call it a day. Gigabyte is one of the few who go a step further - most of their video card lineup consists of silent versions on both the ATI and NVIDIA side. Today, we're looking at two higher-end ATI based cards - the X800 and X800XL. That's right; a 100% fanless X800XL - a 16 pipe card clocked at 400 MHz. Surprisingly, Gigabyte did not include oven mitts in the bundle!

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Having left off testing the X800XT for a few months, we have had ample time to live with this new technology in normal day-to-day use and especially game play. It is certainly nice to have the option of antialiasing, anisotropic filtering or high resolutions without worrying about performance loss. Such performance grunt may be regarded as overkill when so many recent games are CPU-bound, but we totally disagree with this viewpoint. These high-end cards are not purchased to deliver 500fps at some previous level of visual quality, but are instead designed to deliver conventional frame rates at heightened levels of visual quality hitherto unattainable. In future games, hinted at by the Ruby and CryTech demos, these modern cards will be far from CPU-bound, in fact, in dual-core systems they may well struggle to deliver. Although initially touted as a Playstation game, and irrespective of its eventual competence, the KillZone 2 trailer provides the best indication of how future games will look. Grab it below and you’ll never again complain that your video card is TOO powerful.

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One of the main benefits of this X700 Pro vs the vanilla one is that this one comes packaged with Sapphire's A.P.E. software. This is definitely the easiest out of the box overclocking software I have ever used... to a fault. Simply slide in the install CD and run the setup app and reboot. Done. Don't bother to look for any settings or fancy system tray setup. It won't be there. For the minimalists among you this little app will be extremely attractive but for control freaks like me that love bells, whistles, switches and options (for starters) this little app just won't sit well and you will most likely opt to use your preferred overclocking software instead.

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Where the Bravo X700 gets its market share is from those loving their silence. Utilizing the heatpipes and heatsinks, the silence would be golden in an HTPC machine. Seeing as the card is bundled with TV Out, HDTV support and paired with CyberLink and not a Half-Life 2 voucher coupon, this is what you'd want in playing your latest and greatest movies. However, at the lower resolutions, the Bravo X700 will be able to perform well for those who have an itch to play a game or two on a large HDTV. When it comes to a PC, the dual digital outputs will be great for the executives who can't be bothered with a whining fan but also need to power dual digital LCDs. Either way, the PowerColor Bravo X700 is one card you don't want to overlook when it comes to finding a very versatile card at a midrange price.

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The HIS iX850XT Turbo card is without doubt the best value X850 XT card I have seen. Thanks to the included iTurbo program, HIS can guarantee that it will run at full Platinum Edition clock speeds without issue. This was proved to be true in our benchmark suite, where we never observed any problems running it at these elevated speeds. When you consider that the X850XT Platinum Edition offers no improvement in performance or features compared to the iTurbo, it is a little more difficult to recommend.

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GSkill was smart to release a lower-end product into their line-up, as not everyone can afford the top of the line memory, nor do they need it. With the GSkill 2-3-3-6 memory you get a great “bang for your buck” with retail prices hovering around $100 USD. The memory performs well, has better timings then most similarly priced memory, and is no slouch in the OC department. The only major disappointment I had with the GSkill memory is that I was not able to achieve the type of overclock that the GSkill website claimed. Overclocking will vary from stick to stick, but if you are going to claim a certain overclock, I think that all of your products should be capable of those numbers. Possibly I just got a bad batch…hard to say.

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At 667MHz with 3-2-2-8 timings the memory bandwidth was found to be roughly 6700MB/Sec. By pushing the FSB of our processer up to 316MHz and running the 3:5 divider we were able to get over 8,000 MB/Sec of bandwidth....

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Focusing on the enthusiast and high-end workstation markets, Intel started its multi-core desktop campaign last month by introducing the 955X Express chipset and Pentium Processor Extreme Edition dual-core CPU. Today's release is aimed at the mainstream market, though. The new mainstream chipsets are the 945G Express Chipset and 945P Express Chipset (the 'G' variant providing onboard graphics), and the three new mainstream dual-core processors are the Pentium D Processor 820, 830 and 840, which run at 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz and 3.2GHz, respectively.

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Every once in a great while the internet rants and raves about an up and coming component that will allow you to be an overclocking God. Even though such occurrences are rare they are starting to become more common every time DFI unleashes its ingenious BIOS engineers and layout designers. The one problem is timing, since it never seems to happen in OUR time. Meaning more specifically the slow release time of their boards. I can't think of a single time DFI has ever released a board on OUR time, but when they release it time stops, and people buy them. Ever since the LANPARTY series originated a couple years ago, owning a DFI motherboard really says something about you as a computer enthusiast. The Ultra-D is such a board of this recognition despite being a somewhat lesser vessel than its bigger SLI brother. SLI still begs the question as to why, since the obvious single card configuration gives you more than enough gaming power, but that's another story. For now we'll stick to pointing out the features of what we have here right now, the LANPARTY Ultra-D...

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Today we're taking a look at VIA's latest small form factor All-In-One EPIA motherboard, the SP 1300 based on the latest processors and chipsets to come from the VIA labs. This low power consumption platform with hardware MPEG-2 decoding and hardware MPEG-4 acceleration might just what you're looking for in a silent HTPC or car computer. Read on as we take a close look at the humble yet impressive EPIA SP 1300 All-In-One motherboard from VIA Technologies.

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ABIT Fatal1ty AN8's passes its biggest test, that is, being a supreme enthusiast-orientated S939 motherboard. What makes it so good is the sensible choice of a feature-rich chipset, nForce4 Ultra, and due care and attention that's given over to both frequency and fan-speed manipulation. These two factors combine to push the sample's stable HTT frequency to 320MHz - the highest yet seen at HEXUS. It's achieved without any additional cooling and it paves the way for the Fatal1ty AN8 to be paired with the best S939 overclocking CPUs available today, be they Venice or San Diego cores.