Saturday Hardware Reviews

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NVIDIA’s new GeForce 7800 GTX clearly has been received very well by the hardware sites on the Internet. It is a very fast card. In fact, in some cases, it is as fast as having two GeForce 6800 Ultras in your machine. Considering how fast the card is alone, I was very curious how fast it would be in SLI-mode. I’ve spent one month playing games just to get a feel for what two GeForce 7800 GTX's in SLI-mode can do. For our testing, I used two Leadtek GeForce 7800 GTX cards. This article should give you an idea if it’s currently worth going with two GeForce 7800 GTX cards or not.

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With the introduction of PCI express only a few high end VGA cards were available, now that we have low/mid range it's time to see how they stack up to their big brothers. The 6600GT is a mid-range card, let's find out if it is worth the asking price. Be prepared, because here comes the Gigabyte 6600 256 Mb Turbo Force !

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Well most of us know about the new Nvidia card that was just released on the market so we thought it's time to check out the 7800 card and see how it does performs vs the 6800 and some ATI cards. We have taken this unit and thoroughly tested it in gaming, overclocking, and overall performance to see what it really can do.

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Today we're looking at Sapphire's X850XT PE, or Platinum Edition. Not only that, but we’ll be testing it in the AGP format since many of our readers have perfectly serviceable AGP motherboards and haven’t felt the dire need to move on to PCI-Express as yet. So kick up your heels and relax as we take a tour of the latest and greatest offering from ATI in the form of the X850XT and we’ll see how it compares to its smaller brother, the X800XT!

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Performance like this doesn't come cheap, but you get what you pay for. In this case, the Albatron 7800 GTX will provide lightning quick performance with the image quality to match. The bundle is nothing to boast about, but nobody usually cares about that anyway.

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With over 2,000 memory products in their portfolio, Kingston Technology can provide memory solutions for just about anyone's needs. The company's depth makes it easy to see why it is a leader in the memory market. The products in its extensive line-up cover everything from the basic, entry-level memory modules for system builders to the high-end, high-performance modules the PC enthusiast crowd has grown to love. Kingston's high-end system memory products are given the HyperX brand. Of course, Kingston offers HyperX products featuring the latest memory technology, DDR2. DDR2 is supported on most of the recently released chipsets and will eventually supplant first generation DDR as the dominant memory type in the PC industry. It is an evolution of the DDR specification that features lower power consumption, higher speeds and better thermal performance. The main disadvantage of DDR2 right now is its CAS latencies are higher than those of comparable DDR modules, but it's only a matter of time before DDR2's CAS latencies reach parity with DDR's.

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The Abit MAX series of motherboard represents the epitome of motherboard design. Everything about an Abit MAX motherboard screams "This is the best there is." And indeed, the new Abit AW8-MAX is the best MAX motherboard to date. The AW8-MAX is the latest addition to Abit's revolutionary MAX Series, and the first to feature Silent OTES cooling technology - creating a MAX motherboard that's not only provides maximum performance, but is dead silent as well.

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Tyan Computer Corporation is well known for their servers and system boards and rightly so. Their line up of products is quite extensive in the server market and while their offerings are slightly less in the home consumer market they have kept their products up to date with the latest technologies extremely well. Today we look at their latest Socket 939 motherboard, the Tomcat K8E (S2865).

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The KN1 Extreme brings together the dominance of AMD's socket 939 processors and NVIDIA's nForce 4 chipset in an extremely affordable package. Coupled with a top notch bundle, the KN1 Extreme definitely makes the list of top budget boards.

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All things considered, this AOpen i945Pa-PLF is a pretty rockin' board for a $130 bucks. The included bundle is a bit lacking, but the board showed solid performance throughout the testing. Coupled with a nice color scheme and roomy layout, I'd have to give this board two thumbs up. It's only downside is really the lack of RAID and small bundle. And it's high point has to be the overclockability of the board. Surpassing even our i955 based motherboard here, we were genuinely impressed.