Mainboards

If you are looking for a decent upgrade and do not want to spend a lot of money, HotHardware has reviewed SOYO Dragon2 KT880 mainboard. Build around VIA KT880 chipset this mainboard is designed for AMD Athlon XP microprocessor and offers an array of high-end capabilities, such as Serial ATA-150 along with Parallel ATA RAID, 7.1 surround sound based on VIA Envy technology and Gigabit Ethernet.

For those whose eyes are turned to a bit more up-to-date technology there is a review of a Socket 754 mainboard at Overclocker Café. The Shuttle AN51R mainboard is based on the nForce3 250 chipset supporting everything you would expect from a powerful mainboard, including onboard RAID controller, 5.1 audio, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire and USB 2.0 ports. Read about a mainboard designed by the world’s leading maker of PC barebones.

Doom III

AnandTech has summarized their experience with the Doom III game. Now they are trying to make some basic recommendations for those who are going to upgrade their systems according to Doom III requirements.

Beyond3D has asked id’s technical director John Carmack a number of short questions in regards Doom III rendering technology. While the interview is pretty short, it contains some interesting facts to consider. 

Memory

VR-Zone Hardware has reviewed a quite unique DDR2 memory product manufactured by Crucial. As reported, Crucial’s Ballistix PC2-4300 memory modules operating at 533MHz have pretty aggressive latency settings – CL3 3-3-10. But do such settings really improve performance and how much?

Small PCs, Portables

Tom’s Hardware Guide has put up a roundup of thirteen PC barebones from AOpen, ASUS, Shuttle, Jetway, MSI and Soltek. Read on to find out which of the barebones can serve as a PC, DVR and DVD player at once and in a quiet way.

Modding, PSU

With growing popularity of “untraditional personal computers” users who want to adopt an unusual hardware for their PCs have to choose between plethora of products from loads of makers. For instance, tens of companies produce water-cooling kits and you never know which one is the best. Bjorn3D has reviewed a yet another solution: Kingwind Arctic Liquid Cooler with fan speed control and LCD display that can cool-down central processing units and graphics processing units from various makers.

If you are feeling the need to efficiently cool down AMD’s and Intel’s latest microprocessors, then read a review of the CoolerMaster’s  KHC-V81 Hyper 6 cooler. This cooler is enormously big and is made of copper; furthermore, it utilizes the so-called heat-pipe technology for even better performance. However, you may encounter some problems during installation and usage of such device.

ExtremeMhz.com has reviewed a mouse pad produced by Razer. The eXactMat Limited Edition is designed especially for the Razor Viper optical mice. The mouse pad is two sided one: the first side is designed to ensure high speed mouse movement while the second side is build for the ultimate pointing control.