Mainboards

[H]ardOCP has reviewed ABIT AV8 mainboard powered by VIA K8T800 Pro chipset. This mainboard is designed to unleash the power of the Socket 939 microprocessors with 1000MHz HyperTransport bus and dual-channel DDR memory controller. If you are planning to build a high end system based on an AMD Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 FX CPUs, this particular mainboard may be a product you are looking for.

If you are not ready to spend quite a price for a modern i925X chipset based mainboard, PCI-Express graphics card and DDR2 memory module kit, but want to upgrade to the latest LGA775 CPU from Intel, then you should read an article about Soltek 865Pro-775 mainboard reviewed at AnandTech. This mainboard utilizes the new Socket 775, but since this mainboard is driven by the 865PE chipset it does not require any new hardware; this means that you can easily plug in you old AGP-based graphics card and DDR memory modules.

Graphics cards

FiringSquad has reviewed PNY Verto 6800 GT graphics card. This product may attract its attention by presenting only the graphics card itself (with Doom III bundle, if you purchase the graphics card at the right time at the right place!), you would not have to pay your money for any bundle, just for the graphics card.

For those of the readers who are interested in top-of-the-line graphics cards, HotHardware has reviewed ASUS’ AX800 XT graphics card. This high-end offering from ASUS is based on the ATI’s RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition graphics processing unit with slightly redesigned cooling solution, unmatched bundle and orange firm-color of PCB.

Counter Strike: Source

The release of the Doom III has proved to be quite a significant event. With a lot of the attention that has been drawn to the Doom 3 game from manufactures of different hardware as well as a great deal of end users, Valve Software could not allow everybody to forget about their upcoming products. A few days ago the creator of the original Half-Life and Counter Strike titles has released its demo of Counter Strike: Source along with the Half-Life 2 stress test. A number of web-sites could not miss an opportunity to investigate how does the yet another game hit performs. Check out specifics and details on the web-sites of your choice:

• FiringSquad about Half-Life 2 stress demo
• FiringSquad about Counter Strike: Source
• VR-Zone Hardware
• The Tech Report
• X-bit Labs

Modding, PSU, etc

AMDReview.com has reviewed a pair of PSUs manufactured by Powermax. The Demon lineup is represented by PSDE480 and the PSDE580 power supply units. The former has the 480W output and is equipped with blue LEDs. As for the latter, it is equipped with red LEDS and brings 580W of output. Also note that those PSUs come at price below $30, which is a very affordable point.

Presence PC has reviewed 30 water-cooling solutions. This review will definitely help you to understand who makes the best water-cooling solutions and how much will you have to pay for a kit if you are going to buy one.

PC Barebones

ExtremeTech has posted an article covering the XC Cube EX915 barebone. This AOpen made small form factor PC powered by i915G core-logic as well as 3.40GHz Pentium 4 “Prescott” microprocessor. Read on to find out what performance you may expect from a compact solution based on one of the hottest processors.

Optical drive

ExtremeMhz has reviewed Pioneer DVR-108/A08XLA optical drive. This device is capable of recording DVD±R disks at 16x, DVD±RW discs at 4x, DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) at 4x, CD-R discs at 32x, CD-RW discs at 24x and also read DVD-ROM and CD-ROM discs at 16x and 40x speeds respectively. The optical disc drive is equipped with technologies aimed to avoid buffer underrun and other errors while writing.