Monday Hardware Reviews

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While the hottest CPU on the planet is the Athlon 64 X2 dual core itis not the only new CPU from AMD. The Athlon 64 has hit another revision with the Venice core at 90nm. It adds SSE3 support, acts better with mismatched memory, and overclocking on it looks to be promising. Today we look at the Athlon 64 3500+ Venice core, and compare it against the 3800+ Venice core, and the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual core in performance. Then we run it through the overclocking wringer to see how far we can push it past the default 2.2GHz.

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The PoV 6600 GT is a great card for those who don’t want to spend tons of money and still want a card that will allow them to play the latest games. It has support for all the hottest features, and as long as you can accept you won’t play the games at ultra high resolutions with high AA/AF, you won’t be disappointed.

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After running some standard benchmarks I wanted to run the memory in a variety of situations. First, using the standard 3:4 Divider and timings of 4-4-4-12 I wanted to see how far I could push Centon's Advance PC5400. Starting with the stock voltage of 1.8V I was able to achieve a memory speed of 682MHZ. I then bumped the voltage to the max available on my motherboard, 2.2V (ASUS P5AD2-E Premium), loosened the memory timings to 5-5-5-15 and pushed on.....only my system refused to even boot, giving me the dreaded "System failed CPU test". Evidently the Micron ICs didn't care for the extra voltage. So, regardless of timings or voltage, the max overclock ended up being 682MHz. At this time I'm willing to blame my motherboard for the lack of overclockability, I will follow up on this in the forums after I get another board with better memory options.

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This dual channel memory is rated at 625MHz DDR with a timing of 3-4-4-10 and is specifically designed for DFI nForce4 motherboards. While this default speed is blistering fast it can be pushed even further. Overclockers will adore this product for its raw performance, stability and reliability. Without a doubt, this memory is the best of the best! Watch the Video to find out more...

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ASUS hasn't done anything really wrong with the EN6800 Ultra card, but it's let an opportunity go begging to design the ultimate GeForce 6800 Ultra, one that would use a custom heatsink, SmartFan, and, perhaps, a cooler that takes up only a single slot. As it is, it's a case of a reference card dropped into a regular, feature-rich ASUS card package.

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EPoX sent us one of their newest motherboards recently, the 9NPA+ Ultra, which is based on nVidia's new nForce 4 Ultra chipset for the AMD Athlon Socket 939 processor platform. We've compared the motherboard against the nForce 4 SLI chipset to find out if there are any differences in performance in a non-SLI system setup. If you're on the market for a new PCI-Express Socket 939 motherboard with some decent overclocking support, you might be interested in the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra.