Monday Hardware Reviews

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Today, PCStats will be checking out the econo line Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC-8EKRS socket 939 Athlon64 motherboard. This motherboard is based on the vanilla nForce4 chipset and it seems like the only difference between this and the Ultra version is Serial ATA II (this version supports standard SATA). Other onboard features include a PCI Express x16 and two PCI Express x1 slots, an integrated 7.1 channel audio codec, Gigabit LAN and IEEE 1394a firewire.

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ECS' PF5 Extreme has its fair share of good and bad points. Let's take the good first. The company's Scalable D.G.E. technology offers up a possible quad-display setup that's run off two PCI-Express cards. No, it's not SLI or CrossFire, so don't expect true dual-card 3D performance, but it's handy for those that need the screen real estate and a step up from mixing onboard graphics displays (i945G) and discrete cards'. The layout and feature-set for a £90 board are both good, too.

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Well the new chipsets do come with a new southbridge; ICH7. Today we're going to look at three new motherboards from Foxconn which use all three of the newest chipsets from Intel. And to find out if there is much performance benefit, we included a 925x board.

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This board has some very interesting things that someone upgrading from their older PIV or Athlon system and wants AGP and PCIe, DDR and DDR2. Overall this is a solid basic board for someone who doesn't overclock much, if at all.

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Today on BFR we have the opportunity to review Gigabyte's GA-K8N Ultra-9 motherboard. Last year we looked at their GA-8GPNXP Duo which is based on the Intel 915P chipset and packed full of features. The Ultra-9 has a Socket 939 Processor type and, like the 8GPNXP, is feature rich containing the Nvidia nForce4 Ultra chipset with on board sound, ethernet, IEEE 1394b (FireWire), 2 RAID controllers, as well as Gigabyte's ever popular Dual BIOS technology. This motherboard also has an extreme amount of SATA connections.

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Now, this overclock is with the stock Intel HSF included with the socket 775 CPU. I started upping the FSB in small increments, waiting for a “BSOD” or some strange behaviors in performance. I was very surprised but the only system changes I noticed were increases in temps. I used the program AiBooster provided with my ASUS board to overclock. I verified all overclocked speeds with CPU-z. As you can see below, my system was able to reach 4.0Ghz with no problems.

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Mushkin's new Redline memory modules push the limits just like our favorite race cars. The latest attempt to push the boundaries puts Mushkin in a good lead in the memory market with its new Redline 2-2-2 memory modules for the hard-core gamers abroad. Today's memory seems to keep pushing the limits with the game in mind, and that's a good thing with today's games becoming more and more demanding. So with that in mind, memory manufactures are keeping heads above water and making every effort to give all possible to those pushing their systems.

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The reference Geforce 7800GTX core is clocked at 430 MHz and the memory is clocked 1200 MHz. The Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample core is clocked at 480 MHz for the core and the memory is clocked at 1300 MHz. Yep you read it right; this is the fastest air-cooled Geforce 7800GTX card clocked at 480/1300. Memory bandwidth reaches 41.6GB/second. And the best part is that you are under warranty from Gainward at that speed.

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There's little doubt that ATI's RADEON X850 XT graphics card provides decent performance in the high-end sector. Our benchmarks have illustrated that it performs at around the same kind of pace as a GeForce 6800 Ultra, and around 5% slower than ATI's own X850 XT Platinum Edition. Performance, then, isn't really a concern.

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By now, you've probably heard it a thousand times, but it deserves repeating. NVIDIA's 7800 GTX launch was not just a typical paper launch. A handful of companies had cards on the virtual shelves of e-tailers the day that the new card was announced. As a matter of fact, we even had a retail board for our preview article. Today, though, it's time to look at retail 7800 GTX offering from Gigabyte, a name I'm sure you all recognize.

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The Sapphire bundle is really becoming sub-par. They have certainly kept up with cooling needs and pay great attention to that side of the business. The inclusion of the Component output even shows that they have a lot of care for things other than just pure gaming. That being said, they really either need to just completely dump the bundled software or get new games. Two year old software that isn't even in the most popular genre do nothing but cost people money that they would otherwise spend on more parts.