Either the whole World Wide Web is busy preparing for the Opteron launch tomorrow, or is busy reading our own performance preview of the AMD Athlon 64 processor, but not a lot of really hot stuff was located by us during the weekend. Nevertheless, here are some interesting articles for you to read.  

8Balls Hardware has reviewed rather unusual CPU cooler from Vantec, the AeroFlow VP4-C7040 intended for Intel Pentium 4 processors. It is designed to solve two main problems of air CPU coolers: aerodynamic noise from air, flowing through the heatsink and also weak air streams  below the middle of the fan. Developers at Vantec designed a special heatsink that reduces air turbulence and noise to solve the former problem and also utilised Tip-Magnetic Driving motor to resolve the latter issue.

8Balls’ boys has found that this improvements in Vantec's cooler helped it to beat Zalman CNPS6500-AlCu by several degrees, with only hardly noticeable increase in noise. Read all the details about theory and practice here.

MadShrimps has conducted a roundup of low-cost water-coolers. They compared Thermaltake Aquarius II, Poseidon Kit and Color Cool Sprinter against each other as well as against Thermalright SLK-800 air-cooler. The guys concluded that the high-end and extremely noisy air cooling can be more efficient than some inexpensive water-coolers when CPU runs in normal mode, but once CPU is overclocked with significant voltage increase, water-cooling is strictly recommended. Read the comparison here.

AnandTech has reviewed two retail mainboards, based on the recently announced i875P (Canterwood) chipset from Intel. One mainboard, Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra costs $380 and comes equipped with Ultra320 SCSI controller. An expensive device, isn’t it? Well, maybe Gigabyte designed it specially for using in servers and workstations? But why there is bunch of overclocking features, including the trickiest ones? Find out yourself here. ASUS’ famous P4C800 Deluxe costs about $200 and also features all imaginable overclocking capabilities, but is intended for a bit different market. Read an article about this babe here.

Got an ASRock mainboard? Want to increase CPU voltage, but the mainboard lacks this capability? Deutsch OCinside.de web-site can show you how. The testers have posted a step-by-step guide for soldering voltage regulators on ASRock K7VT2 and K7S8X Socket A mainboards as well as for any other mainboard, utilising not really well-known STMicroelectronics’ L6917B Programmable Dual-Phase controller. All the details (in English) can be found here.