Saturday Hardware Reviews

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With the latest stepping of the dual processor series, AMD dishes up the Manchester core to set new standards in energy efficiency and price/performance ratio. Taking advantage of the proverbial excellent gaming and floating point performance and stripping the dual cores of 50% of their hard-earned cache in combination with a frequency sweetspot of 2.0 GHz results in a killer CPU at a reasonable price tag. Arguably, there are cheaper processors on the market, there are faster cores out there (as measured in clock frequency) and there are "the others" but after wrapping up this review, there is nothing out there that combines that many positive features as the Manchester running at 2.0 GHz, using the moniker X2-3800+.

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This card overclocked better than I expected, I was able to reach the core speed of 485 MHz and 1200 MHz on the memory. The card was 100% stable at that speed and no artifacts occurred. In reality and according to Riva tuner the card runs at 526 MHz core and 1200 MHz for the memory, very impressive indeed. Now you are probably curious to see if the Asus Extreme N7800GT is as fast as or faster than the 7800GTX.

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Given how every 7800 GTX is going to be as near as dammit to the reference design, if bundles and pre-overclocking don't bother you, you'll probably find yourself going for the cheapest, which could give this card an edge. You might, however, find yourself looking at a 7800 GT with a better bundle and cheaper still, while offering almost the same level of performance.

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Priced at £129.99, the financial cost of having a passively-cooled card is a £10 or so premium over a regular ATI Radeon X800 GT0 256MB card. Is it worth it? That depends upon how much you value silence. Whatever the case, the X800 GTO is another fine addition to ATI's burgeoning PCI-Express family.

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Today we will be sharing our latest thoughts about the new ram released by OCZ awhile back. We got their new Gold GX gamer memory with low latency and of course high overclocking capabilities as usual when it comes to their memory. We have tested this product vs some other OCZ memory to see how they can perform in normal usage and under overclocking so stay tuned for this new memory review.

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Three years later here we are with 1GB of their Gold DDR400 dual channel memory ready for interrogation. It is important to note that this is not the VX (Voltage eXtreme) version of memory, just the regular Gold DDR400 memory. However, while it's not high voltage, it does come with some extremely tight 2-2-2-5 timings right out of the packaging.

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Today, we bring you our first review of a retail 945 motherboard courtesy of Biostar. The I945P-A7 is currently Biostar's sole Intel 945P-based motherboard. It only offers a little more than a standard 945P board, though. Biostar added an additional PCI Express slot that it calls PCI Extreme (PCI-EX). Unfortunately, it's not exactly the SLI goodness you get from other motherboards equipped with dual PCI Express x16 slots - it's not meant for gaming. However, using the two slots in tandem does require installing identical SLI-supporting NVIDIA-based video cards and drivers that support SLI and running it all under Windows XP. The PCI-EX slot operates as an x4 PCI Express slot, and the bridge connecting the two cards is required as it is with standard SLI. Basically, it seems to be a non-gamers SLI but on a mainboard featuring an Intel chipset.

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Today we're taking a look at the ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard which is based on Intel's 955X chipset. It includes support for all Socket 775 processors along with the latest Pentium-D and Pentium XE. We're looking at the Premium version which includes additional Wireless and TV Tuner. It's a feature-packed board with plenty to offer, so read on and check it out as we compare it against the older Intel 925XE solution.

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The N4SIE-A7 is another typical Biostar offering. I find it hard to get too excited about it (that's not necessarily a bad thing if you like simple and to-the-point hardware). The bundle is quite skinny, and Biostar didn't add much excitement to the already good nForce4 SLI Intel Edition feature set.