Tuesday Hardware Reviews

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Earlier this month we reviewed the ATI All-in-Wonder X800XT and really liked what we saw. A top performing graphic card with an excellent set of features complimented by smart design and accessories. Today we have the luxury of reviewing another AIW X800XT but this time it's from the friendly folks at Connect3D. Like the ATI card, this model comes with a bundle of features including EAZYLOOK, TV-ON-DEMAND, and MULTIMEDIA CENTER.

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Dollar for dollar, you still just can't beat the value and features compressed into this one computer peripheral. It's a TV, it's a top notch gaming card, it's an FM Radio, it's a personal video recorder, well, I guess it is pretty darn well everything. You buy it, you install it and instantly your drab and boring computer has an amazing amount of potential and power needed to turn it into an excellent gamer or a home theater system.

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As gamers and geeks alike, we often times find ourselves getting wrapped up in the exciting world of high-end video cards and forgetting about the more budget-oriented models. With talks of SLI, 512MB cards, CrossFire, and NVIDIA’s recently released G70, you can’t really blame us. When it comes down to it, we all want to have the latest, greatest, and consequently most expensive hardware that is available at any given time. This isn’t really possible, however, unless you’re a die-hard gamer, or just disgustingly wealthy, in which case the rest of us simultaneously admire and hate you. Just kidding. Today, with the average shallow-pocketed geek in mind, we will be examining the performance of ATI’s X800 XL 256MB video card on a PCI-Express platform.

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In the high-end videocard market, the Radeon X800 XL VPU offers great value. Perhaps that's why these cards are selling out everywhere. Today PCStats will be checking out this high-end value king in the form of the ATi Radeon X800 XL PCI Express videocard. Backed by 256MB of GDDR3 memory, a 512MB version is available also, but the extra memory does little in terms of real world performance. Like all other videocards currently on the market, the Radeon X800 XL supports S-Video/Composite TV-out as well as component output for HDTV owners.

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Much like the PowerColor Bravo X700, this HIS X700 iCooler was good, but not breathtaking. Power and performance simply can't come from an X700, no matter who you buy it from. What we have here is a card that's perfect if you're the occasional gamer, someone who loves their dual LCD displays or a home theater enthusiast who just needs their HTPC projected on to a HDTV.

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nVidia has recently released the new 7800GTX. This new top of the line video card delivers great performance but unfortunately not everyone can afford one. Most users today still dont even have a PCIe slot. We searched for an AGP card that can deliver the goods and doesnt hurt the pockets. Thats when the ASUS Geforce 6600GT entered the picture. ASUSs products are known worldwide for their high quality and performance. In this article you will discover how to benefit from their performance without breaking the bank.

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Think carefully about what you want from a S939 board. If it's features above all else, look elsewhere, frankly. If it's the promise of sky-high overclocks and care and attention paid to cooling and tweaking, the ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 SLI is hard to beat. Recommended to the enthusiast/gamer.

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If I had to sum up the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra in one sentence, I'd have to say that it's a case of substance over style for a nice price. Powered by the nForce4 Ultra chipset, it brings home good performance all around with while outshining the competition with it's memory and drive systems.

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SLI motherboards are getting more and more popular as the video card prices go down, we got a sample from Gigabyte called K8nxp-sli which we have had on our test bench and thoroughly tested it with both benchmarking and overclocking. If you are in the market for something like this then you should pay attention to this review to see how these motherboards really perform.

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The Mushkin Redline memory uses Winbond UTT ICs on a Brain Power PCB. What many people may not realize is that UTT stands for UnTesTed. So the ICs are basically unlabelled and binned by whoever is assembling them, in this case Mushkin. The PCB is a jet black, 6 layer design from Brain Power, Brain Power PCBs are known for their overclocking abilities.

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In a multithreaded environment, the CPU demonstrated some excellent performance, besting the 3.73 Extreme Edition which has a 266FSB and over 500MHz clock speed advantage. Image and video editing are really the 840's forté as we've seen results that are truly amazing. We didn't publish the results, but DVD Shrink was remarkably quicker with the Extreme Edition 840, taking half the time the 3.73 XE did to shrink Revolutions, and this was during our multitasking tests.