Thursday Reviews

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The Albatron K8SLI motherboard being tested over the following pages is a compact nVidia nForce4 SLI board that packs in quite a bit into a small space. Albatron K8SLI comes with a basic set of features, such as Gigabit network ethernet, 5.1 channel audio controller (with SPDIF out), two free 32 bit PCI slots as well two PCI Express x1 & PCI Express x16 slots, and the standard assortment of SATA and IDE connectors supported by the nForce 4 SLI chipset.

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The MSI 661FM3-V Micro-ATX motherboard is based on the SIS 661FX chipset and SIS 964 Southbridge. This tiny board supports all 533/800MHz FSB Intel Socket 775 Pentium 4 processors and can hold up to 2GB of DDR memory in its two slots. Notably, The SIS 661FX chipset does not support dual-channel memory. The 661FM3-V features integrated graphics courtesy of the SIS 'Mirage' chip, sharing up to 128MB of main memory by default, but fortunately also implements a full AGP8X videocard slot. Two PCI slots are present for expansion cards, as PCI Express is not yet supported by the SIS chipset. up to 4 IDE and 2 SATA devices can be added to the motherboard.

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You want a rock solid, dependable, Socket 939, NF4, PCIe solution for your HTPC? WinFast has a motherboard with your name all over it. If you don't expect to overclock, or to use the onboard sound, you will be happy with what the Winfast NF4K8MC has to offer.

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In short, the i945G (or i945P) is a reasonable proposition for all but the die-hard enthusiast who needs the ability to run two graphics cards in tandem. I hope that motherboard manufacturers quickly release versions equipped with the ICH7R southbridge. You'll then be able to purchase it with, say, a Pentium D 820. Perfect for huge and varied storage potential, decent sound, and the loveliness that a dual-core CPU brings.

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This is a great kit from Mushkin once again, we were able to overclock it very easily and it ran smooth without any lockups or bootups during benchmarking and testing. It also looks very nice with the read heatsinks and you have great performance even at stock speeds. I think our testing says pretty much everything needed to be said about this ram and we give this kit 5 out of 5 and our editor´s choice award for the best memory kit this far from Mushkin that we have had the pleasure to test.

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Patriot Memory has started off on the right foot, Tight timings, and great overclocking along with things you expect, such as lifetime warranty. Let's hope they continue this pursuit, as I enjoy being able to pick from more than one or two vendors when it comes to performance oriented gear.

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The move to exclusivity of PCIe as the sole interface of high end GPUs may have been a bit premature, the biggest sector of the enthusiast gaming market is after all that of the DYI system builders, especially those that are willing to shell out some extra money if it's worth it but who otherwise have built a reputation of mercilessly twaining out any possible resource in their existing system configuration via overclocking or other system optimizations. Needless to say that this group is by necessity very budget-conscious, too, and if there is any way to get the performance without the price tag, that's where the entire flock will be heading.

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If you are looking for a mid-range card with passive cooling system, Tul is one of the companies that offer such solution on X700 based cards. With good performance in its class and okay bundle, PowerColor Bravo X700 is an interesting product to consider. The Silent Cooling System has proven to be a worthy addition, the passive solution performed marvelously and ran very cool.

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The dual core processor is what I consider the next major technological step in the evolution of the processor. With the exception of the bit-size increases which are major steps as well, all the other improvements to the processors have increased performance (for single processors) and have added in a few features. The dual core processor focuses on something other than single application performance, which is multiple application performance. At least for Intel, the clock speeds of the new dual cores are clocked lower than that of their top single core chips. This means that unless Intel includes some sort of new efficient clock speed technology, the performance of their fastest dual core chip for a single-thread application should be lower than that of their fastest single core chips. The dual cores are meant to handle multi-tasking, multi-threaded applications, and multiple simultaneous applications much better than a single core chip.