Mainboards, Processors

Tom’s Hardware Guide has posted an article about workstations powered by AMD’s Opteron microprocessors which are used to render thousands of frames for modern movies.

AnandTech has reviewed a number of mainboards based on Intel’s premier 925X core-logic. This mainboard roundup covers five different products from ABIT, ASUS, DFI, Foxconn and Gigabyte in a price-range starting from $161 and climbing up to $277. The reviewers compared mainboards using overclocking, performance, features and price criteria.

Graphics cards

FiringSquad has taken a sneak peak at ASUS Extreme AX800 XT graphics card. This product is clocked at 500MHz for chip and 1000MHz for memory and equipped with two DVI slots which allows you to connect a pair of displays with DVI-I connectors, something that Powered by ATI consumer oriented products have always missed.

Right after NVIDIA’s announcement of the new graphics processor, a number of web-sites published their previews of the new chip that recompile NVIDIA’s marketing documents and add some thoughts about the new GeForce 6600-series lineup. You can become acquainted with NVIDIA’s latest offering to mainstream market over the following web-sites: bit-tech, FiringSquad, Guru of 3D, [H]ard|OCP, HotHardware, Neoseeker, Tom’s Hardware Guide.

Monitors

Digital Silence has posted an article which explains all the highs and lows of modern TFT LCDs. If you are considering a purchase of a TFT display in the near future, you will probably find this issue pretty interesting.

Mobile devices

TrustedReviews has reviewed Acer Aspire 2023WLMi widescreen notebook. This particular multimedia laptop is powered by Intel Pentium M 1.60GHz processor with 512MB DDR SDRAM and the MOBILITY RADEON 9700 visual processing unit. The main feature of this product is Acer’s Arcade utility which allows to slideshow photos, play music or DVDs through its own software menu, avoiding the need to boot Windows.

AnandTech has taken a look at Voodoo Envy M:860, a yet another powerful notebook from VoodooPC. The machine is based on AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor DTR and is equipped with MOBILITY RADEON 9700 VPU. Find out what can this gamer’s notebook deliver to its owner besides astonishing gameplay on the

PSU Review

Overclockers.com has reviewed Vantec’s Ion2 power supply unit that was designed to work utmost quietly. Besides that, the 350W PSU provides 2 connectors for Serial ATA hard disk drives, 6 Molex connectors for storage devices or graphics cards and 2 small Molex connectors that are used to connect FDDs. 

PC Roundup

PCWorld.com has posted its monthly top 15 desktop PC chart. Different computers are compared to each other in “Power PC” and “Value PC” segments. Personal computers in the high-end range are prices from $2502 to $4799, while the machines in the entry-level series cost from $699 to $1795. It is pretty interesting to point out that PCWorld.com used its new benchmark called WorldBench 5 to test all those computers.