Monday Hardware Reviews

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PCSTATS is testing the MSI RX850XT-TD256E videocard, which does not feature CrossFire. Based on the Radeon X850 XT, this PCI Express card is backed by 256MB of GDDR3 memory and supports VIVO, TV/S-Video output and component output. The ATi X850 series of GPUs are the current 3D performance leaders and the XT is the second fastest available GPU in the line. As usual for MSI Computer, the software package is among the best on the market and includes full versions of XIII, Uru and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Other software includes FarStone's VirtualDrive and RestoreIT! software as well as CyberLink's DVD Solution software.

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Things are getting interesting in the video card market once again, mainly because of the ATIs new 'Crossfire' dual-videocard feature. In the mean time, ATI still holds quite an edge in the (single) high-end videocard arena with its range of X800/X850 graphics cards. Today, PCstats will take a look at one of MSI's latest ATI-based cards, the PCI-Express based RX800XL-VT2D256E. Catchy name. The MSI RX800XL-VT2D256E uses the ATI Radeon X800XL core and is backed by 256MB of speedy Samsung GDDR 3 2ns memory. The most notable feature of the card is its dual-DVI connectors, but it also sports a full complement of multimedia abilities including VIVO, and HDTV-out as well as a nice software bundle.

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While there were a couple of tests that the X800XL clearly dominated, the 6800 GT performed very well in every test. As stated above, the image quality is superb, with no problems noticed at all. There is also the benefit of having shader 3.0 available, which ATI does not currently have.

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Even though it only seems like a little while ago the 6800Ultra was being introduced, it is time again to meet Nvidia's latest 3D king, the Geforce 7800GTX. While in recent years Nvidia have had stiff competition from ATi in the high end sector, as it stands right now, they have beaten ATi to the punch with the Geforce 7800GTX GPU, leaving ATi to react for the first time in quite a while. Today, we check out not one, but two 7800GTX reference boards in both normal and SLI mode to see just how much performance this new 3D beast can deliver.

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It started off with a couple ATI Radeon X700 graphics cards and then everyone wanted to get in on the act. Today we've got an absolute monster of a roundup for you comparing 11 Radeon X700 cards from 8 different companies including ATI, GeCube, PowerColor, HIS, MSI, Sapphire, Gigabyte and ASUS. Read on as we take a close look at all the cards, their packages and most importantly how they perform against each other!

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Today AMD officially launches the 64 bit Sempron. We look at the 3100+ based on the Palermo core running at 1.8GHz with 256kb of L2 cache. We were able to easily overclock the Palermo core to almost 2.4GHz with mid range air cooling, and no bumps from the default voltage.

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After putting ECT's awsome little Prometeia Mach II GT though its subzero paces, there's no way we can overlook a round of phase-change overclocking... so after hooking everything up, I pressed the power button and watched the temperatures drop. A few moments later the Prometeia Mach II GT powered on the rest of the computer, and I immediately loaded the BIOS and found that the processor was running at a chilly -27C.

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Today we take a look at Gigabyte's K8T890-9 motherboard designed for Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64’s. It includes support for the latest Athlon 64 x2 processors and is based on VIA’s K8T890 chipset. We compare the K8T890-9 motherboard against an nVidia nForce 4 based motherboard to help work out where VIA's latest AMD64 chipset stands.

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G. Skill has come through with a high quality, high performance DDR product. With stock speeds of 300MHz guaranteed you can’t really go wrong here. The graphs in the testing portion of the review show that the stock settings perform as well as other overclocked TCCD modules. The ability to run with 1T timings provided a nice boost, but is by no means guaranteed.

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There's never been a better time to buy system RAM than right now. £130 buys you a 1GB DDR1 dual-channel pack that gives superlative performance when paired up with a S939 CPU, preferably a fast one. The performance advantage over regular memory, usually specified with 2.5-3-3-7 timings, can be close to 10%, so investing in some high-quality RAM makes decent sense.