The F2-4200PHU2-1GBNT are G.SKILL's latest budget DDR2 memory kit. Even though they lack heatspreaders they offer excellent overclocking. Our sample would go from the advertised DDR2-4200 up to a blazing DDR2-5800. What makes this kit even more attractive is that you can tighten the timings to 3-3-2-4. All this comes at a very competitive price of only $75 for a 2x512 MB dual channel kit.
With all the attention on the high ends cards being released most people overlook the bargain video cards that are already out by numerous OEM manufactures. It seems everyone is on the band wagon and this includes Diamond Multimedia. With the release of the GTO and GTO² series there are some goods deals to be had. We'll be taking a look at Diamond's Viper X800GTO PCI-E to see it's no X1900 but would take the sting out of finally upgrading to PCI-E.
At this year's CeBIT NVIDIA had a load of new products and was very aggressively marketing them, which made ATI's existing customers feel insecure. In order to level the playing field and reassure distributors that ATI is indeed able to compete, this presentation was created. It quotes several big websites on topics like X1800GTO, 7600 and 7900.
ASRock did it again. The 939SLI32-eSATA is the killer budget board of 2006. It comes with two PCI-Express x16 slots and supports NVIDIA's SLI. Other new features are Gigabit Ethernet and support for eSATA. Also the overclocking has been polished some, the dreaded 275 MHz limit is gone and there are more memory timings options available. With a CPU socket upgrade card this board can even run with AMD's upcoming AM2 CPUs.
In this presentation ATI talks about "The Product Stack" which is one way to measure how much bang you get for your buck. There is a comparison of different price segments against what the competition from NVIDIA has to offer. Also there is a hint of "cable-free CrossFire mode" with upcoming Catalyst 6.5.
G.SKILL presented their new 2GB F1-4000BIU2-2GBHV DDR memory kit at Cebit. If you are looking for a well overclocking 2GB memory kit you should definitely take a look. Even though it comes with CL3 timings, it will also run at CL2 and CL2.5. It can do all its overclocking magic at only 2.6V so this may be a good choice for users of budget motherboards which do not offer allow voltage adjustments in the BIOS.
OCZ has been a technology leader in the overclocker's memory business for quite a while now. Their new DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum XTC kit comes with stock timings of 4-5-4-15 which we could tighten down to 3-3-2-4 and still get some serious overclocking out of the memory.
Our Cebit coverage ends with reports from SiS, Asetek, Foxconn, Primecooler, Scythe, Arctic Cooling and NVIDIA. The highlights here are definitely the NVIDIA Quad-SLI and slides from the NVIDIA press conference.
In this Cebit report we have coverage of ASUS, Gigabyte, Elitegroup and MSI. With those names you can bet you will see a lot of AM2 motherboards. Also nice were ASUS' leather-covered notebooks.
Today we have Day 4 of our Cebit experience with the latest products from Biostar, ASRock, Sapphire and DFI. The highlights here are the various AMD Socket AM2 motherboards and Sapphire's HDMI+HDCP+Audio video card solution. Sapphire also showcased their Blizzard VGA watercooling which is based on a Thermaltake design.
In this Cebit report you will find coverage of Albatron, Corsair, Tyan, Akasa and Powercolor. One highlight is Albatron's new i975 motherboard which is designed to run with two PSUs and comes with 10 SATA ports and 7-phase CPU power.
Our second day of Cebit coverage includes the companies GeCube, Sparkle, Sirtec, AOpen, Zalman and ABIT. Among the highlights are dual-GPU X1600 from GeCube, quad-12V rail PSUs from Sirtec and overclocking with Crotale at ABIT's booth.
This is our Day 1 coverage of Cebit 2006, the biggest electronics expo in the world. We have reports from the memory manufacturers A-Data, G.SKILL, Kingmax, OCZ Technology and Patriot.
The Matrix VX is a new budget case from Thermaltake with a great amount of features borrowed from high-end cases. It is specifically designed for LAN party users with full aluminum, screwless drive installation, two 120mm fans for case ventilation, side panel with large transparent plexiglass and net weight only of 3.8kgs.
Mushkin has been making performance memory for enthusiasts for a long time. Today we have their new DDR2 XP2-5300 memory on the testbench. This 2 GB kit comes with tight timings of 3-3-3. It can even run at impressive 1000 MHz when the timings are relaxed to 5-5-5. The elegant black heatspreaders add to the excellent impression this memory left.
Powercolor (Tul's graphic card division) is no newcomer to the graphic card segment. Over the years, it has built up a strong reputation, which it is constantly improving. In the past weeks, we were all able to notice that Powercolor started offering a "lifetime" guarantee on their X1900 series cards. Today, we take a look at the opposite side of the X1000 spectrum - the low end X1300. But perhaps low end is not the correct word. The card comes pre-overclocked to a massive 600 MHz compared to ATI's default of 450 MHz. Using HyperMemory technology the VGA memory can be expanded from 128 MB to 512 MB.
ASRock is a subsidiary of ASUS and manufactures low-cost motherboards. The ASRock 775XFire-eSATA2 for Intel Socket LGA775 is based on Intel's i945 chipset and can run ATI Crossfire. Due to a lack of PCI-E lanes in the Intel chipset this is only possible in x16/x4, but this board costs only USD 80.
ASUS was the first motherboard manufacturer to have an ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 motherboard ready. Some retailers even got their shipment early and were selling boards before the official Xpress 3200 launch. It seems ASUS has learned from the A8R-MVP and improved their board in many ways. If all boards with RD580 will work as good as the A8R32-MVP, NVIDIA better starts worrying.
ATI held their european Xpress 32000 launch event at Seville, Spain. While the marketing people were showing off presentations and gave out technical info, Finnish overclockers Macci and Sampsa set out to break the 3DMark05 world record using the new chipset, a pair of X1900XTX and dry ice. We bring you exclusive coverage of the nightly overclocking session.
ATI, the company that is most known of their powerful and quality graphic card solutions, released their first Crossfire mainboard chipset with the RD480. Today they present the new Xpress 3200 chipset. The most important feature is support for x16/x16 PCI-Express when running in Crossfire mode. There are also a lot of other interesting changes.
German video card specialist Mad Moxx has released a special edition of the Sapphire X800 GTO². The Mad Moxx X800 GTO² Burstfire comes premodded with 16 pipelines out of the box. To improve cooling an Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer has been installed on the card. For paying a small premium over the regular Sapphire card you can stay away from BIOS modding, aftermarket cooler installation and voiding your warranty.
G.SKILL is well known in the community for making high-quality memory products which perform good and are not too expensive. The F1-32000PHU2-2GBNS 2GB DDR-400 kit is going for around $160 - one of the best prices for a 2 GB kit right now. For such a bargain price you would usually expect slow CL3 timings on memory. However, G.SKILL specifies this memory as 2.5-3-3-6 at only 2.6V.
AOpen is offering a wide range of products, many of them geared toward living room multimedia. The dual-core capable AOpen i945Ga-PHS is a motherboard designed to be used for building a Media PC. Its outstanding feature is integrated VGA with analog, TV and HDTV output without the need of any addon card. This gives you everything to build a very low profile Media PC.
After ATI's launch of the X1900 Series the people at NVIDIA sat down and took a close look at where the weak points are and where NVIDIA's lineup is superior. This presentation compares X1900 performance against the 7800GTX and in the second part of the presentation tells us why SLI is superior to Crossfire.
Swiftech has always been known for their innovative cooling solutions. Today we will take a look at their 100% copper chipset cooler: the MCX159-CU. Its creative design allows for greater heat dissipation in even the tightest spaces, and on almost all motherboards. Not only does it cool well but the included 40mm fan is also remarkably quiet.
