Monday Hardware Reviews

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As the savior for all those consumers with buyer remorse that invested in a AGP based computer, you still have options that will have you gaming right along with even the best of what most PCI Express cards have to offer. If you do not have enough money to upgrade your whole system to the newest hardware, you can easily just upgrade to this AGP card and buy yourself the time to make your computer last and still have an excellent gaming experience..

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When comparing the performance to cost ratio I think you'll have a tough time finding a card that performs as well at this price. It ran all of the current popular games well at the midrange resolutions (1024 X 768 and 1280 x 1024) of course if you insist on running at 1600 x 1200 with max AA and AF you might want to consider looking at a more powerful, and generally MUCH more expensive card.

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Those of you looking for some budget DDR2 modules to match up with that Intel Pentium D 820 really should consider Wintec's PC5400 offering. Featuring good performance at less than $200, you won't be disappointed...

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Today 3DXtreme is featuring two of the latest Memory offerings from our friends at OCZTechnology. These two new products target two different user types and two different price points. For the gamer looking to squeeze every last frame out of their game OCZ has created the OCZ EL PC-3500 Gold GX Dual Channel Memory kit. The PC-4800 product is targeted towards the true enthusiast looking to run their Memory 1:1 with high HT overclocking primarily on the AMD64 platform. PC-4800 is rated to run DDR600 (300HT) with the memory timings of 2.5-4-4-10.

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Ultra Products has proven itself as a quality provider for a number of products. While they are still relatively new, their reputation has grown exponentially with the success of their X-Connect power supplies. These memory modules have certainly put Ultra Products on the map for high speed, low latency DDR kits. The quality of the product does comes at a reasonable price. This 2*256MB kit retails for 95 dollars at Tiger Direct. At this price, you won't find very many other 2*256MB kits at this clock speed. In addition, Ultra Products guarantees performance of PC4200, which is something not all competitors will do.

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Abit has done another solid job with the K8T890 chipset in this case. The AX8 is certainly the top board with the VIA chipset for overclocking, and has a good feature set. The only question is how many will opt for the VIA based board, and will not rather pick up a nForce 4 solution. If VIA is your chipset, and overclocking is your game, this the Abit AX8 is your board.

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Working with the Neo4 was a very enjoyable experience with tons of options in the BIOS that allow a multitude of tweaking, in some ways almost too much. I found that this board was pretty picky in some regards (referring specifically to BIOS settings), and it required a significant amount of tweaking at times in order to reach overclocks that I desired with the utmost amount of stability, but after finding out the appropriate settings performed very solidly.

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The AN8-SLI Premium board is based on the popular nVidia nForce 4-SLI chipset. I think most people know that Asus is among the world biggest supplier of motherboards, shipping 40 million in 2004. That’s a very impressive figure. Asus builds their motherboards with top quality parts and they tend to be very overclocker friendly.

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With the "Extreme" name one would expect greater options for the hardcore overclockers and fewer legacy components (although, the additional memory settings in the BIOS are a good sign that ECS is listening to feedback). With respect to the FSB, speeds greater than 250Mhz are quite attainable at the very high end; perhaps a future BIOS upgrade will allow for greater overclocking. Also, the options for older components (FDD, LPT1, COM1), really should not be present, and could better have been sacrificed for board space, extra cables or dual Gigabit. The KN1 just does not seem so Extreme in this regard. Consideration in nuking all of the legacy components may be a step in the right direction. Now that would be EXTREME!

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Today, PCStats will be checking out the econo line Foxconn WinFast NF4K8AC-8EKRS socket 939 Athlon64 motherboard. This motherboard is based on the vanilla nForce4 chipset and it seems like the only difference between this and the Ultra version is Serial ATA II (this version supports standard SATA). Other onboard features include a PCI Express x16 and two PCI Express x1 slots, an integrated 7.1 channel audio codec, Gigabit LAN and IEEE 1394a firewire.