Monday Reviews

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For me, this would be my first hands on experience with DDR2. Even though I had never personally used a stick of DDR2 RAM before I received my new system, I had been reading extensively and following DDR2's evolutionary process since it first surfaced on the market in 2004. My interest in DDR2 was first peaked when I ran across this white paper article entitled New DDR2 Memory Offers Advantages for Dual-Processor Servers published by Thor Sewell in September, 2004. Since then I have ravenously devoured all the articles and reviews I could find detailing the technical advancements concerning DDR2 in preparation for its mainstream emergence into the Computer Enthusiast market.

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The Epox 9U1697 GLI motherboard that's passing through the PCSTATS test labs today is based on ULi's last chipset which was quite a sleeper, the M1697. Make no mistake about it, the Epox 9U1697 GLI motherboard is inexpensive but that doesn't mean it's a slow motherboard! Now here is the tricky part - while there are two PCI Express x16 slots on the Epox 9U1697 GLI motherboard, they do not officially support nVIDIA SLI or ATi CrossFire. Dual videocards can be used for multiple 2D displays, like for workstation style applications - but that's it. Now that nVIDIA owns ULi, it's possible that it may eventually certify the ULi chipset as SLI compatible, but that is something you shouldn't bet on.

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The card itself is really massive as previously mentioned, and uses the same PCB as the X1800XL. This is not true for X1800GTOs from other manufacturers which have one less mosfets on the PCB. This made us think that the X1800GTO from HIS could possibly be unlocked to all 16 pipelines without too much difficulty – more on this later.

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If you’re looking for a simple out of the box NAS solution, the Linksys NSLU2 is a good all around contender. Novices will appreciate the easy default setup, while pros will benefit from the extensive open source initiative surrounding “The Slug.” However, limited supported capacities and only 2 USB ports make other offerings very attractive options if you don’t want to void the warranty.

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The Kontron "786LCD/mITX LV Plus" is a very convincing product, even though it does have some slight flaws. If you don't mind the couple of extra watts with the power-consumption and you for example need 3 network connections for a system, you should definitly consider this motherboard. The board is also an excellent choice for networking solutions, mainly because of its extensive (remote) hardware monitoring. The price also seems right.