Monday Hardware Reviews

Quote

Legit Reviews looks at three leading dual core motherboards from Foxconn and see how they handle the latest Intel processors. With the market moving toward dual core CPU's, you need either an i945 or i955 chipset based board to correctly utilize Intel's newest processors. Price points drive the market and LR checks to see if Foxconn's newest boards balance budget and performance.

Quote

It still appears that one of the main problems AMD has been facing in the past, that is, great processors hampered by the lack of chipset support still rears its head, existing platforms are somewhat stale, bordering on obsolete technology. This is where nVidia's nForce4 Professional core logic aims to fill the void. Currently, less than a handful of boards are out there but we have secured one of them, namely the ASUS K8N-DL and run it through the paces. Several BIOS revisions later, we are still not quite where we want to be ...

Quote

With a CAS of 1.5 at 400MHz DDR this is some seriously sexy memory! The complete timing is a blistering 1.5-2-2-5 at 400MHz DDR. While this is brilliant it can be overclocked to 600MHz DDR using a timing of 2.5-4-4-7. It's available in a single 512MB module or 512MB and 1GB Dual Channel kits. Affordable memory that kicks butt! Watch the Video to find out more...

Quote

The Asus A8N-SLI Premium includes IEEE 1394a Firewire, two Gigabit NICs, 7.1 channel audio and an additional Serial ATA/RAID controller (for a total of 8 SATA headers). In terms of expansion, the motherboard offers up one PCI Express x1 slot, one PCI Express x4 slot and three traditional 32 bit PCI slots to the two PCI Express x16 sockets. Finally, the board can be used with any Socket 939 AMD Athlon64/FX CPU currently on the market, and up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR-RAM can be installed.

Quote

The Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal comes with the ICH7R Southbridge chipset, which replaces the ICH6 on all 955X and 945P boards. The Intel 955X Northbridge supports Intel Pentium Extreme Edition and Pentium D dual core processors as well as any other LGA775 Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processor. Two PCI Express x1 slots and three conventional PCI slots take care of expansion needs and the GA-8I955X Royal can support up to six IDE and six SATA II devices. Onboard peripherals include a Silicon Image SATA/RAID controller, a GIGARaid IDE/RAID controller, A pair of BroadCom Gigabit LAN adaptors and 7.1 channel Intel 'High Definition' sound.

Quote

I was completely amazed. Not only by the margin that the two mid range GeForce 6600 GTs trounced the high end X850XT but the price per pound as well. One Radeon X850XT is priced at approximately $450. Two GeForce 6600 GTs AND the price of the Albatron K8SLI mainboard is about $445. Think about that. Two VGA cards and a new mainboard upgrade for less than the price of a single high end VGA upgrade - not forgetting that the two midrange VGA cards kicked the crap out of the high end Radeon.

Quote

Centon has given us a first look at an overclocker-calibre dual-channel DDR memory kit. The two 512MB GEMiNI PC3200 dual-channel DIMMs we are testing in this review are rated to run at 200 MHz with 2-2-2-5 timings, at a voltage of 2.6V. The GEMiNi memory seemed to like running with 2.8V and it easily passed the 240 MHz mark with 2-2-2-5 memory timings. Pretty impressive! To get past 242 MHz however, we had to dramatically increase voltage to 3.4V!

Quote

The most desirable mainstream graphics board on the market at the time of writing, bar none. Anything slower treads on the 6800 Ultra's toes a bit too much, so it'll be interesting to see how NVIDIA might handle that product overlap in the months to come. We await the imminent arrival of the ATI R520, and friends, that little while longer, but see NVIDIA's timing as just about perfect. In the meantime NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT is effectively the HEXUS 'Editor's Choice' for the high-end.

Quote

With SLI capable video cards, performance levels as high as the 7800GTX, one must wonder why Overclockers Online would have any interested in something like the 6600. Silence is what makes the difference with this card. No longer will we have to listen to any fans with AOpen's silent solution.

Quote

Once you start overclocking with the GigaByte GA-8N-SLI Royal, it can be a bit overwhelming with all of the options and tools you have at your disposal. For CPUs with the C.A.M. enabled, you can lower the multiplier to target higher front side bus speeds. With the independent memory bus speed, you can high side your RAM for even more bandwidth. I have chosen to simply hit the CPU was as much Front Side Bus speed as it would take keeping the multiplier to its HIGH setting to prduce the highest overall CPU speed possible. Since the RAM bus speed is mostly independent, I set the piper on the highest bus speed achievable loosening RAM timings as applicable. Patriot memory has an unofficial rating of 700Mhz as achieved in lab testing with timings of: 4/3/3/12! After some voltage increases and testing the system with different settings, this GigaByte board has met all expectations.