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As for the performance results we see that for the most part, the two sticks of RAM performed very close to each other even with the differences in timings. The latency of the Crucial memory at its tightest timings was a good bit lower than the Corsair memory, and provided better synthetic numbers. The real world differences between timings was less than 3% in basically all cases.

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Recently we've had a taste of Intel's 915 chipset at it's finest, the ABIT AG8. Now it's time to check out the 925 chipset based board, the ABIT AA8 DuraMAX. With this board we still have PCI Express and LGA 775, but this time we graduate to DDR2. We already shown you what this board can do with our recent 3GHz CPU review, but now it's time to get serious and dig into this board a little deeper.

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Today 3DXtreme takes at a look some budget memory covering a wide spectrum from PC3200 to PC3700 and varying from CAS 2 to CAS 3. We have Wintec Amp-X Gaming modules, SuperTalent 512MB CAS2 modules and some Geil Value PC3200. This gives us an opportunity to evaluate lesser known brand names to see how they compare to a more well known brand. Like a lot of electronics today it doesn’t take much to create a product, all that needs to be done is base it on a well established IC chip like Samsung or Infineon and the result is a product that performs nearly as well as the top of the line memory for considerably less. Let’s have a look at our memory offerings today and see how well they performed.

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In this review, OCModShop is testing OCZ’s Gold Edition PC4000EL DDR Dual channel kit. This 1GB of total memory consists of two 512MB modules and is specifically paired to use a dual channel motherboard. The OCZ PC4000EL DDR is rated to run at 250MHz while maintaing fast timings of 2.5-4-4-7 at 2.8V. Unofficially, this memory can easily run at 265MHz. The DIMMs are absolutely beautiful and have a quality look. The copper heat spreaders are gold plated and buffed to a mirror finish with a light golden color. Not only does this help protect the module from physical damage, but it looks really shiny, and we all like shiny things! The spreaders also add to the product’s weight, weighing in at 74 grams (a normal DIMM weighs an average of 40g).

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DDR2 is finally here. I've been excited about this memory ever since it was first announced. It's great to get excited about new hardware. The only thing that's bad about new hardware is the fact that you know you're going to have to upgrade to it. In this case it's a little worse. There are currently no AMD platforms that except DDR2 and the only Intel DDR2 platform requires a LGA775 CPU and a PCI-E video card. Your upgrade to DDR2 is going to require a major commitment. However, this is the future of memory and you know you want the newest and fastest components.

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The addition of anti-spyware tools comes at a time when Dell customers are facing a deluge of problems with such software. Fourteen months ago, spyware accounted for less than 2 percent of support calls. Now, it accounts for 20 percent. More support calls leads to higher costs and, of course, customer dissatisfaction, George said.

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Specifically, Intel will release a dual-core, dual-processor model in the first quarter of 2006, said Richard Dracott, general manager of marketing and planning for Intel's enterprise platforms group. Later that year, Intel will release another model with power-saving features geared for the confined quarters of thin rack-mounted servers and thinner blade servers, he said.

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Like other software makers, Microsoft prices many of its server software products, such as Microsoft's SQL Server database and BizTalk integration package, on the number of processors. That long-standing licensing convention is being challenged by the arrival of multicore processors, which are moving into mainstream use.

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While Internet2 users share a single 10gbps network, NLR users can have their own dedicated 10gbps link to themselves. Experts say Abilene provides more than enough capacity to run most next-generation applications, such as high-definition video, but that it doesn't offer enough capacity for some of the highest-performing supercomputing applications.

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Instead, Intel will boost performance on its chips by increasing the size of the cache, a pool of memory located on the processor for rapid data access. Current mainstream Pentium 4s now have 1MB cache. In the future, these chips will have 2MB of cache, like Intel's Xeon server chips and the "Extreme Edition" Pentium 4s designed for gaming PCs.

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After adding the coolbits registry hack to my system I started overclocking the card from its stock speed of 425MHz/500MHz. This is the first time I have used the "Detect Optimal Frequencies" button which worked really well. After it finished testing different speeds it overclocked the card to 495Mhz/630Mhz. I then tried to push the card farther than what it set it to but running it any faster would cause artifacts to appear or the system to lock up. This overclock is quite nice and will give you some extra power which will make gaming less choppy and more enjoyable

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DFI's LANParty 875P-T is a very interesting motherboard, and one of only a few in its class. It allows users to upgrade to a Socket 775 Intel Pentium4 processor, while at the same time allowing them to keep all of their old hardware since. This is possible because the DFI LanParty 875P-T is based on the Intel i875P chipset. Of course, this also means that there is no PCI Express x16 or DDR-2 RAM support. However, with the imminent replacement of the 925X by the 925XE, and little in the way of high end PCI Express videocards to choose from, the DFI 875P-T is a good alternative right now.

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Any and every GeForce 6800 Ultra is an excellent gamers' card. BFG's effort is above average, as the company offers a pre-overclocked core at default core prices. BFG's popularity is on the rise and it's easy to see why. If BFG can beef up the entire bundle, add, say, basic VIVO, and keep a keen price, its range of 6800-series cards will be hard to beat. As it is, you can literally place the names of NVIDIA's AIBs into a hat and pick any one. Most cards keep to the reference design and most range between 400-450MHz core

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Corsair has earned a reputation as makers of fast and reliable ram, and this tradition continues from past ram formats and into DDR-2. While not earth shattering, performance-wise today, DDR-2 is forward thinking as Intel scales their clock speeds, and the TWIN2X Pro Series is up to the task.

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Of course, companies like Gigabyte like to get in on the action in the enthusiast market. It's the area where margins are higher and where a company can really get noticed. To that end, Gigabyte developed its flagship 8Sigma line of motherboards. This family of motherboards is billed by Gigabyte as a 'Fusion of Top Innovations', and it features support for Intel's LGA775 Pentium 4 processor, DDR and DDR2 memory, Intel's High Definition Audio, dual gigabit ethernet, and Gigabyte's patented U-Plus D.P.S. eight-phase power circuit. I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on the GA-8GPNXP Duo from the 8Sigma line, and that is what we will be taking a look at in this review.

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Knowing Abit and how innovative they are with new technology I had high expectations for this motherboard. Of course being Abit they had no problem surpassing what I expected and just blowing me away. I don't think that any overclocker could really ask much more from a motherboard when it comes to the BIOS, voltages, dividers, and stability. With this motherboard I was easily able to overclock my 2.8GHz to almost 3.8GHz while running the memory at 360MHz. The onboard features such as firewire, gigabit LAN, 8-channel audio, and four USB 2.0 make it basically unnecessary to buy anything but a video card. µGuru is something Abit really did a great job on and I can't stress enough how useful and powerful this suite of applications is within the BIOS and Windows. Finally to top it all off Abit throws in their new µGuru clock which is such a simple idea but so very useful and helpful.

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The Epox EP-5EGA+ is a next generation board which is based on the new Intel 915G and ICH6R chipsets. The standard flavour is the 915P, but as you guessed it, the 915G boasts its own Intel GMA900 integrated video package. It also comes with the high bandwidth PCI Express x16 slot for graphics cards, so there are couple options video-wise. If your computing requirements include high bandwidth peripherals like SCSI controllers or standalone Gigabit Ethernet NICs, there are two PCI Express x1 slots that have an amazing 250MB/s worth of bandwidth just waiting to be tapped! That is almost twice the regular PCI bus bandwidth! Of course, there are still four PCI v2.3 slots for your legacy devices, like sound cards, wireless LAN cards, or what have you.

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X800 PRO pricing sits around the £280 mark in the U.K. at the time of writing and GeCube promise us that if you find the X800 PRO CS:CZ Limited Edition in the U.K. or indeed elsewhere, it'll be competitive with any and all X800 PRO pricing from other manufacturers.

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The DFI LanPartyUT 915P-T12 is really an amazing motherboard that packs in a ton of features that both enthusiasts and casemodders can enjoy.

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This is a good board that has good performance and overclocks well, though it could do better if the PCI-E lock worked better. There were really no problems with this board, though there was nothing overly amazing, a good solid first LGA775 board.

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One issue that arose after posting of the article was that the S909 BIOS revision sets a default temperature of 51 centigrades as opposed to the 70 centigrades we stated in our review. The discrepancy stems from the fact that after flashing to the newer BIOS we did NOT clear the CMOS and, therefore, the onset of the Smart Fan was apparently stuck at 70 centigrades and caused the major throttling we found.

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Through competing companies, the SFF PC has evolved from a bite-sized desktop replacement concept, into a Home Theatre PC, multimedia and audio station, and killer gaming rig. In this review, PCstats is investigating what the Soltek QBIC miniPC has to offer. This is a bare bones Small Form Factor (SFF) PC, based on the Intel i865G chipset and Pentium 4 800MHz FSB processor architecture. Soltek's EM340IM QBiC model supports any current Pentium 4 Northwood CPU, so if you don't need a lot of power simply get yourself an inexpensive chip and you're all set.

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Some businesses had opposed earlier versions of the Spy Act, saying that though they were against spyware, the bill was so broadly drafted it could imperil legitimate software as well. The Energy and Commerce Committee responded on Monday by making some last-minute changes before the vote.

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With so many differently clocked 6800 models to choose from, consumers have a couple of routes to follow. They can shop on price points alone, or shop smart and overclock for a little after-the-fact performance upgrade. For example, the Albatron GeForce 6800GT is not quite as fast 6800 Ultra version, but with its core running at 350MHz it is still plenty powerful, and a heck of a lot less expensive than a 6800 Ultra. It's also safe to assume that the 6800GT is overclockable to Geforce 6800 Ultra levels (400MHz core), and in fact in our own round of testing we were able to push this card as fast as 433MHz!

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The advanced graphics port first showed up long ago after the bottlenecks of the PCI interface were reached by the first graphics cards to fully stress the memory bandwidth of the interface. At the time, there was a lot of hype but no real performance difference between the two but in time the superior AGP interface eventually showed it’s worth and became the only interface available for graphics cards until now with native PCI Express for ATI graphics cards. Today, we look at Sapphire’s X600 XT which uses the new standard and to see what results we get.

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He added: "Part of the reason people steal music is money, but some of it is that the DRM stuff out there has not been that easy to use. We are going to continue to improve our DRM, to make it harder to crack, and easier, easier, easier, easier to use."

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Another PCI Express video card makes its way into our hands for testing. This card from Gainward features a hand-picked GPU for better overclocking, but can performance justify its price?

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Today, I'm going to take a quick look at some DDR2 from Corsair in the form of the TWIN2X1024-5400C4PRO 1GB kit. You might be thinking to yourself, '5400!?!' Oh yeah...this RAM is designed to run at 675MHz. The fastest DDR I reviewed was 550MHz, so I was definitely excited to check out this DDR2 kit from the top performance memory company on the planet.

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Over the next few pages PCstats will be sussing out the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard to see just how it performs, and the features it offers up. Built upon the nVidia nForce3 Ultra chipset, the MSI K8N Neo2 supports the socket 939 AMD Athlon64 or AthlonFX processor, and will support up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR memory. With respect to its onboard components, users of the MSi K8N Neo2 Platinum will find two onboard Gigabit NICs, IEEE1394 Firewire, 7.1-channel audio, four Serial ATA ports with NVRAID (RAID 0, 1, 0+1), and MSI's own CoreCell technology. That might not sound like a lot, but remember the four Serial ATA channels are integrated, as is Serial ATA/IDE RAID, and all this runs us about $140USD.

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The ASUS AX800XT/2DT package has a number of positive features going for it. The card is small, well-built, quiet, and looks damn good. The very fact that you can pop it into a small PCIe-based system is a real bonus. ATI/ASUS also use a native PCI-Express design with no bridge chip in between. The benefits of the faster PCIe link won't manifest themselves until applications require massive streaming from motherboard to GPU (and vice-versa), but it's nice to know that architectural bottlenecks aren't going to hold up progress.

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uGuru gives Abit the most advanced bios and monitoring features of any board out there. You can keep tabs on everything from your system up time to the voltages. Speaking of voltages you have more voltage settings for more components than in any other Socket 754 board. The board also comes with some great documentation. Stability of the board is good, and the price is competitive for the features it buys.

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Because this motherboard has so many overclocking features I could tell from the start that things were going to go well. I decided to overclock normally by choosing the standard overclocking option and adjusting the FSB and voltage. After increasing the FSB and adding more voltage as needed my final result was a FSB of 265 taking my 2.8GHz P4 to 3.7GHz! With this overclock it also pushed my Corsair memory to DDR706 which is extremely impressive. To achieve this overclock I flashed the BIOS to version 1003 and set the DDR voltage to 1.9v, northbridge to 1.5v, and CPU to 1.5875v. I also locked the PCI-Express to 100Mhz and PCI to 33.33MHz. Unfortunately my cooling got in the way after increasing the CPU voltage causing it overheat and shutdown my system. I know this motherboard could have given me more, however without watercooling my processor would have been in danger.

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If you recall back in 2002, R300 (RADEON 9700) was blasting at full speed with its full availability. Although it was still a .15µ micron process it was a very mature silicon (ATI's first .15µ chip was the R200) with very few if no flows. R300 was ATI's greatest success which accounted for best performing DirectX 9 chip. During 2002, ATI was already working on a new design -- the R400 which was later canned mainly because of beyond DirectX specifications which could make the chip a bit too avant garde if you will.

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In this review PCstats is testing something a little more mainstream, but no less interesting; a pair of GeIL's Ultra Platinum PC3200 512MB DDR RAM DIMM's. Each DDR memory module has a liquid crystal thermal monitoring sticker attached, which shows the temperature in both Celsius and Farenheit. Each stick of Ultra Platinum PC3200 DDR is rated to run at 200 MHz, while keeping memory timings of 2-2-2-5 at a voltage of just 2.55V. To help protect the memory from physical damage, tin coated copper heatspreaders are utilized.

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It's also a problem that has affected Gates personally. He said his home PCs have had malware, although he has personally never been affected by a virus. "I have had malware, (adware), that crap" on some home machines, he said.

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At the heart of the controversy is Microsoft's longtime insistence that the browser isn't a standalone piece of software, as it is most commonly thought of, but merely a feature of the Windows operating system. In future releases of Windows, starting with the long-awaited Longhorn, Web browsing functionality will be embedded deeply within applications, reaffirming the Windows interface rather than the browser as the center of the computing experience.

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Today 3DXtreme has the great pleasure of reviewing SuperTalent’s newest Memory product being introduced at the budget level. It is common when shopping for PC Memory to see brand names like Corsair, Kingston, OCZ and while you are getting a high quality product the price for such offerings can be too much for many folks on a budget, especially for CAS 2 Memory in the PC3500 (DDR433) variety. SuperTalent slides in here with a solution for those who want the speed but won’t break the bank. Let’s have a look at this Memory and see how well it performs.