Monday Hardware Reviews

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Many of you are thinking �what can a budget VGA card possibly do for me?� Aside from it pricing out at a very reasonable $69 as opposed to something north of three or four hundred clams, the 6200A is a passively cooled product. You home theater guys are already all over this. Here in the days of HTPCs, having a single slot, silent video card solution being paired with say a Hauppauge TV-PVR card to run a media center is very desirable.

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The first thing we did was set the memory to run at a full 1 GHz and it had absolutely no problems running at that frequency. Playing nicely, we then raised the memory speed in 4 MHz intervals and 1.01, 1.02 and 1.10 GHz fell by the wayside. The maximum speed we got the memory to was 1.11 GHz, very good for an ATi Radeon X800 XL class videocard!

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Although the Geforce 7800GTX from Nvidia saw its official release mere days ago, it doesn't spell the end of the former generation, in fact it is arguably at this time that the former generation sees increased attention due to (usual) appropriate pricing adjustments. The 6800Ultra represents the paramount of Nvidia's now former generation, and it was really the first highend Nvidia GPU to gain some performance ground back from ATi ever since the release of the 9700Pro. Well, today we double the pleasure and throw two ASUS Geforce 6800Ultra PCI-E videocards together in all their SLI glory. Is there an advantage in doubling the cost of your graphic upgrade, or is one enough?

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Memory is arguably the most important and most scrutinized component in all high end computers. While computer enthusiasts search for low latency and high quality components, one type of chip comes to mind... Winbond BH5. BH5 memory is known by enthusiasts and gamers for its excellent performance and competitive pricing, which brings us to some of OCZ�s memory modules... The 1024MB EL DDR PC-3200 Dual Channel Gold kit, which utilizes the Winbond BH5 chip.

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EPoX, with its EP-9NPA+ SLI, has taken onboard the chipset's attributes and added in discrete SATA (PCI-Express, which is nice) and FireWire400. What's also appealing is the voltage manipulation available in BIOS. Enthusiasts will be happy to see 3v+ DDR and up to 1.85v available for the CPU. The chipset, BIOS, and features implementation combine to make the 9NPA+ SLI a reasonably attractive proposition. Priced at around �105, the 9NPA+ SLI matches other manufacturers' similarly priced efforts in both features and performance, making it worthy of consideration if you want a fast, stable board that should overclock to 300MHz HTT and beyond.

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Using an Asetek Waterchill system, with only a water block on the CPU, we tested the overclocking potential of the Foxconn 925XE. We would have put a block on the chipset as well, but with the new chipset HSF mounting solution, we have no way of attaching the block to the northbridge chipset. We managed to get our 3 GHz P4 running stable at 3.75 GHz, which is a healthy 750 MHz overclock.

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San Diego brings SSE3 support to Athlon 64 FX for the first time, along with support for mismatched DIMM sizes in its memory controller, more efficient use of memory compared to Clawhammer and more performance from its data prefetcher, which pulls data out of system memory into the processor's caches, in advance of it being needed. A lower supply voltage likely means a BIOS update for the majority of boards and board vendors will likely roll in FX-57 BIOS support with their Venice and Toledo 90nm changes. Basically a Clawhammer at 2800MHz with SSE3 and some memory controller and prefetcher tweaks, using around eight million more transistors to get there.