Tuesday Reviews

Quote

The introduction of RADEON X1900 series brought bannana type smiles to our faces. ATI customers were happy to get more raw power for their SM 2.0 / SM 3.0 games. Beginning of 2006 ATI however offered only high-end boards and no cut down versions were available. Until Q2 2006 if you were in the market for new Canadian processor you were either stuck with X1900 XT or XTX -- great cards, but expensive and bulky. Around May, ATI decided to kick NVIDIA's green buttocks and take on GeForce 7900 GT. With that in mind, RADEON X1900 GT has been introduced.

Quote

That's not a typo, the memory really did reach 900 MHz! The core reached a reasonable 578 MHz. It's interesting to note that the clocks reached are going to give it a huge boost not dissimilar to the 7900 GTX which at stock is 650/800 - you can clearly see that though the core is lower here, the memory is much higher, so you never know, it may even outperform a stock 7900 GTX!

Quote

BFG Tech were gracious enough to provide their OC examples of all three products, two-up for some SLI testing. BFG are staid factory overclockers with the majority of their gamer-led products, bumping things up above stock as a way to appeal. Taking a good look at their versions of GeForce 7600 GT, 7900 GT and 7900 GTX was therefore always going to be interesting.

Quote

One thing that sets EVGA apart from other companies is the support EVGA puts behind each and every product they sell. If you go onto EVGA's message boards, it is clear that they care about the customer. Lifetime Warranty, 24/7 Toll free technical support phone- line, and a 90-day Step-Up program add up to make EVGA the choice for NVIDIA products. That and being the fastest SLI setup available can go a long way. A set of overclocked 7900GTX cards by EVGA is about as fast as it can get for out of the box performance.

Quote

At first glance the MSI Computer NX7600GT-VT2D256E PCI Express videocard is pretty impressive compared to GeForce 6600GT class models. The frame buffer has been increased to 256MB over the original GeForce 6600GT spec of 128MB. While nVIDIA did also release a 256MB version of the 6600GT, this time around the videocard can take advantage of the memory. The MSI NX7600GT-VT2D256E videocard also supports two dual link DVI output connectors as well as a whole host of TV output options; everything from component output to traditional S-Video is rolled in.

Quote

With the release of socket AM2, socket 939 processors have plummeted in price. Given this and the lack of any performance difference between the two sockets and many users are either happy to stick with their existing CPUs and buy new boards or take advantage of the price differences for a completely new 939 system. Today we are looking at Abit's final socket 939 swansong - the AT8 32X.

Quote

Although not likely to recommend this board to someone well versed in overclocking I would still whole heartily recommend it to someone looking to get into overclocking and looking for a user friendly, feature packed board. This is Foxconn's first go at the 975 chipset and I feel for the entry level enthusiast it is a solid choice, there's no doubt that future Foxconn boards based on this chipset will pick up where this one left off.

Quote

As Conroe prepares to hit the streets this next Friday NVIDIA has geared up their chipsets to support this new CPU breed. The new nForce 590/570 chipsets are NVIDIAs latest entry of support for the Intel line and offers some great new features as well. Take a sneak peek at what is coming right around the corner from the good folks over at NVIDIA.

Quote

Chances are that, unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you know who or what OCZ is. If you are one of those that have been living under a rock then you need OCZ and you need to continue reading. OCZ has become a force to be reckoned with as a top ram manufacturer, they consistently put out excellent products and seem to always be releasing something new and even better than before. Well OCZ has done it again, this time they've decided to aim at a specific genre though, the PC Gamer, with their new SPEC OPS limited edition ram. This ram is not only an excellent performer but it really looks cool, OCZ went with a camo motif on the heat spreaders for the SPEC OPS line. So come along as I check this stuff out...

Quote

This review fortunately is in its third and this time final stage of update! Those of you that read either of the first two iterations know that the initial tests were performed using a pre-release version of the ASUS M2N32-SLI motherboard. The board that was used to perform the preliminary series of tests on the Mushkin Redline XP2-8000 DDR2 was very limited limited in its ability to perform at any multiplier with a FSB greater than 230, even with HTT reduced to a 3X multiplier. We had read numerous reviews and reports about this motherboard's vast improvements in the newer, just released version (1.03 G) so we arranged to obtain one for a chance to see really put this memory to test.

Quote

It's now officially the summer of 2006 and it's time to do publish another article on how to build your own gaming notebook. The changes from 2005 to 2006 were significant when it comes to notebooks. Intel started shipping dual-core processors (Yonah) for their Napa based platforms (i945PM/GM) and we finally saw ATI and NVIDIA putting high end graphics in decently sized notebooks. Our previous two articles we used 15.4" widescreen notebooks, but this year I am moving up to a 17" screen with a native resolution of 1920x1200. With an upgradeable NVIDIA GeForce 7900GTX 256MB video card powering the 17.0" WUXGA Wide Screen display at 1920x1200 the notebook I picked out seems worthy enough to replace the one I picked out last year. Without further ado let's meet this year's DIY gaming notebook, the Clevo M57U!