Monday Hardware Reviews

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The bridged card opens up the X800 XL for a well-established market that covers a plethora of chipsets, and the Rialto bridge doesn't appear to hurt performance at all. GeCube's eschewed the reference design by using an in-house cooling system, although it's not as elegant as the company's Uni-Wise implementation. Going with a custom cooler has added extra noise over and above the reference card's, so GeCube loses a few marks here. The card, too, is a larger-than-normal affair, making installation into small form-factor PCs needlessly difficult. The saving grace, as far as design is concerned, is the inclusion of ATI's no-frills Rage Theater ASIC, giving rise to basic VIVO functionality. The bundle makes a point of reiterating the card's HDTV and VIVO compatibility, but, other than that, it's strictly average.

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Economical videocards of today allow users to experience all the same DirectX 9 eye candy that higher end models offer. This is quite a change from the past when both ATi and nVIDIA removed important features out of their low-end graphics processors in an attempt to cut costs. Times have changed for the better, and hopefully this will bring the world of full-fledged PC gaming to more consumers.

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Today I am reviewing the latest offering from AMD, the Athlon64 X2 Dual Core 4200+. This is one of the first dual core CPUs being offered to the home market. Dual Core CPUs will become the future of computing, what is dual core, and how does it improve the performance of the CPU you ask? Well read on to find out.

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It is clear that the FX doesn't quite have the same luster with the X2 on the scene. AMD is quick to say that gaming performance is best on the FX still, but clearly from our marks the FX57 will not have a significant edge over at least the 4800+, and likely will not overclock much further if at all. The advantage of the dual core remains the ability to raise the clock multiplier. While we still yearn for the days of the K6-2 when we started the site almost seven years ago when a simple jumper change would change the multiplier it seems unlikely that due to remarking, and perhaps somewhat due to overclocking AMD will not unlock mid range or lower CPUs.

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This time around Mushkin has secured a number of Winbond based UTT IC's that have been packaged and put on some Brain Power 815 PCB's. The end result was not only a new part number, but a whole new memory series called Mushkin Redline XP (Extreme Performance). Today, we take a look at their XP4000 2-2-2 Redline memory and see if it is all that Mushkin says it to be...

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Corsair XMS ram in general should be on your very short list for any enthusiast application. After working with this XPERT RAM in particular it's hard to want to use anything else. Corsair once again delivers some of the highest quality sticks of RAM in the industry.

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If you want to get to 600DDR speeds with tight timings, TCCD chips are your only choice. If you want some of the best-implemented TCCD sticks made (and soon to be the only ones made), then Corsair is the deal. What surprised me most was how high the memory would go without any tweaking at all. Talk about plug and play overclocking! I have owned many sticks of Corsair over the years and have never had even one issue at all with any of them not exceeding my expectations in quality, reliability and sheer speed when overclocked. The TWINX1024-4400C25PT once again lives up to Corsair’s high reputation.

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With the introduction of the Xpert modules Corsair has yet again captured the wallets of enthusiasts everywhere. By utilizing their X-treme Low Latency memory chips with the addition of the Xpert module they have melded performance and looks together.....

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I think it's safe to say that ATi actually has a leg up on the competition when it comes to graphics integration. Intel and VIA have been producing decent performing budget chipsets but the two company's integrated graphics options are still lousy on the 3D front. ATi traditionally has excellent 2D/3D image quality and as we've seen so far, it's integrated Radeon IGP is a solid performer good enough for the casual gamer.

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ECS has impressed us, and we have to say this is the top board from them we have ever tested. It is not yet at the top end, but it is a marked improvement. The low cost is certainly in their favor, and we hope they provide good BIOS support for upgrading CPUs down the road like Asus does. We are a bit disappointed at their not being a bit more to work with for overclocking settings particularly with the extra board cooling, but hopefully in the future that will be updated.

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The Soltek SL-N4Pro-939 is a solid choice for the Athlon 939 architecture. The combination of an attractive color scheme and solid performance make this a dependable core for any Athlon 64 system. Experts will find the BIOS options a bit limited for tweaking but novice overclockers will find the SL-N4Pro-939 gives just enough room to play with out getting into dangerous territory. Much like the K8TPro this latest offering from Soltek is a solid performer loaded with the most common options. I look forward to seeing the RedStorm 2 bring this motherboard to the next level when it is released.