Monday Hardware Reviews

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During Computex 2005 in Taiwan there was plenty of talk around town about ULi's fight back into the chipset scene. The company formerly known as ALi has sent us their newest AMD64 reference motherboard based on their M1695 Athlon 64 two chip chipset solution. Read on as we take a complete look at the design behind the chipset and how it performs against VIA's K8T890 Pro and nVidia's nForce4 Ultra chipsets. Do we have a real new chipset competitor on the block? Read on and find out!

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If a low cost nForce 4 Ultra board is what you are looking for then the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Zenith VE is going to be hard to beat. At $81 it gets you the nForce 4 features we love, along with some decent overclocking options. It also gets you in the door with dual core support, and we like the black understated PCB look. For a budget box pairing the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Zenith VE with the 3000+ Venice core gets you in the door for just $227.

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Earlier this year Corsair launched their 5400UL part which is designed to offer impressive timings (3-3-2-8) at 675MHz DDR. Not only that but they make claims that their memory can do over 800MHz DDR with relaxed timings. Read on as we take a look at Corsair’s latest performance DDR-2 memory and see how it performs at stock speeds and just how far we can overclock the sticks.

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What do you want from a £290 video card today? Is it performance, performance, and yet more performance in present games, or is it a deal of futureproofing at the expense of, you've guessed it, performance. PowerColor's X800 XL 512MB pricing treads dangerously on X850-class water, which is a great deal faster in almost every conceivable gaming scenario.

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Albatron has put out a unique nForce 4 SLI board that those looking for a lower cost solution. While overclockers may want to steer clear with only an average feature set those looking to mod, or just wanting some more case real estate for watercooling can take advantage of the smaller depth. You won't find a board packed with extras, or high end hardware, or extra SATA ports. The bottom line is that the Albatron K8SLI is an interesting implementation of the nForce 4 SLI with a low cost, and small footprint that makes it stand out.

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PDP Systems with its introduction of Patriot Memory +XBLK line takes dead aim at the DDR enthusiasts. They bring to market tight timings and flexible VDimm requirements to allow you to stretch the usability of a PC3200 Module to that of a PC4200 Module. A well done introduction into the market space, giving us yet another vendor for serious consideration when choosing our memory.

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The amazing thing with these modules is that we can even run it at these overclocked speed (270MHz) at the most extreme latencies of CAS 1.5-2-2-5 rock solid. This is the first time we have had DDR running at this incredible timings at these speeds.

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You need to evaluate what you require in a graphics card. On the one hand, XFX's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB makes a compelling case as a cheap, relatively-speaking, workstation-class card, capable of running exotic displays. On the other though, and this affects the majority of potential buyers who tend to be gamers, you'd be better off opting for a single GeForce 7800 GTX or a couple of GeForce 6800 GTs in SLI formation. £470, then, will be either a snip or prohibitively expensive, depending upon your intended need.

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Soltek is one of the manufacturers that has picked up the VIA K8T890 chipset. While the nForce 4 has captured most of the product territory on the high end VIA has a long history of making chipsets. To see how this latest version stands up we will look at the enthusiast class K890Pro-939. First lets look at the specs to see what we are dealing with.

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The installation went well, with no Significant issues to be noted. One nice thing about this card is the lack of a power source; No extra molex is needed to run this particular card. This minimizes messy wires for that neat freak. Now some may think this card is large, and depending on your motherboard layout you may have space issues. The card comes very close to the heat-sink fan on my Asus P5WD2-Premium. It may be close, but it did not pose a problem.