Content and news by Rob Williams

Old games of yesteryear look primitive compared to the stunning games of today and visually it’s hard to go back and play those old favorites. Today, if you want the best videocard on the market regardless of price, it’s definitely going to be something based on the nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX core. The GV-NX78X256V-B is backed up by 256MB of GDDR3 memory and supports VIVO as well as component output, and is fully SLI compatible. Included in the package is also a pretty good software suite which includes two full version games and some multimedia software.

Yet another 7800GTX review, but Gigabyte this time. Check out the full review at PC Stats.

Each package on test has merit when judged via a wide range of criteria. Leadtek’s is the cheapest and slowest, comparatively speaking. The bundle is good and a custom BIOS adds a bit of extra oomph to the already-fast card. Speaking of which, it’s strictly a reference design. BFG’s effort sits in the middle, both in terms of performance and price, and wins out in the warranty and bundle stakes. XFX’s, as is evident through our glut of benchmarks, is quite simply the fastest single-card solution that we have ever tested. Fast enough to attract a £65-£85 premium over the Leadtek, well, you decide.

Leadtek came out with the best $/FPS, making it a great value. Check out the full in-depth comparison over at Hexus.

Cooler Master has been providing solutions for the enthusiast market for quite some time. They have an established name and presence in the market when it comes to cooling, cases, and power supplies. Most of their fame, however, is mostly from building quality cases, like the CM stacker and the Wavemaster. Today we have the Cooler Master Real Power 450 up for review.

Head over to Phoronix for the full review!

OCZ’s PC2-5400 Gold series have to be among of the fastest and most tweakable available on the market. We gave it a pretty good run for it’s money and basically we really worship this memory, however our CPU simply halts at ~4 GHz or a 275+ FSB. The best way we could push our memory was to lower the multiplier of the CPU and then raise the FSB. On this Intel platform we then reached a memory bandwidth that was amazing. Quite snazzy considering the combo of a (4×200) 800 MHz FSB based CPU :)

Wow this is great memory! Just when I thought I didn’t want DDR2, these scores come along. Check out the full review over at Guru 3D.

The Spire SP792S12-U is a compact light weight small air cooler heatsink intended for AMD processors. Its aluminium construction with a copper insert gives very respectable cooling performance as we can see here in our graph.

Head over to A1 Electronics for the full review!

The Spire DiamondCool LGA775 cooler looks to be able to provide great performance with the all copper fins and 4 heatpipes. It
already performs well but can do better with a better fan.

Check out the full review over at InsaneTek!

Chances are that you have already made a VoIP call without even realizing it. The major phone companies already use VoIP to route thousands of long distance calls through a circuit switch and into an IP gateway. This is then received by a gateway at the other end and then routed to another local circuit switch. More and more companies are installing VoIP phone systems, and the technology will grow and grow until it finds its way into every business and household across the globe.

VoIP is getting amazingly popular, so even you are not interested in it, check out the article at Big Bruin so you at least know what’s going on!

Performance takes a few forms. If your are a fan of synthetic memory tests than this RAM is significantly better that DDRI and overclocking helps quite a bit. However most of us don’t run these tests continuously so we look to the real world results. For the most part there is no significant increase due to DDRII memory. The exceptions are TMPGEnc which shows a 4.5% increase by moving to DDRII, and the game tests which show a 3-5% increase in frame rate (3-4fps) also by moving to DDRII.

Not the greatest overclocker, but still solid memory. Check out the full look at this memory at Viper Lair.

ATI recently released the Theatre 550 Pro digital audio/video processing chipset which adds several image quality-related features, possibly making computer-based media centres a little more viable. We’ve already reviewed one Theatre 550-based product and found it to be the best TV-tuner we had yet looked at. Today we’re looking at another, the MSI Theatre 550 Pro.

If you are in the market for a great TV-Tuner, definitely check out the full review over at PC Stats.

OCZ has geared their DDR2 Value Pro towards “mainstream desktop users”. We had the DDR2 PC2-4200 Value Pro modules on our testbench and were surprised by how far we could overclock this memory. Close to DDR2-750 at stock voltage is certainly not mainstream. Timings could also be tightened from 4-4-4-8 to 3-3-2-4. Great results, especially if you consider the price of $120 for a 2x512MB kit.

This looks to be a great set of memory for an awesome price. As with usual with OCZ, it’s also a great overclocker. Check out the full review over at techPowerUp!

Completely automated, Google News searches the top news sources around the world (HEXUS included) and then presents the latest news stories. It is capable of finding thumbnail images to go with a story, along with grouping together the same story if it is being covered by various websites. You can search Google News for a particular story or subject, or you can choose a category, such as “Sci/Tech” or “Business”. Better still, now you can customize Google News. So let me show you how to do it.

This is a great article if you frequent Google news! Head over to Hexus to check it out!

While flexibility is the name of the game in the software world, the computer hardware realm is a lot stricter. AMD and Intel technologies are completely different from each other, so it’s impossible to use one product in the other’s platform. Or at least that has been the general rule until now… The ECS PF88 Extreme Hybrid motherboard is on our test bench for a thorough examination, and in the configuration pictured it works with either a socket 775 Intel Pentium 4 or socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 processor. Intrigued yet?

There have been a lot of ECS mobo reviews lately. Gotta love the purple! It turns out to be a great performer as well though. Check out the full review at PC Stats.

Zalman is well known for its silent cooling products, today I’m gonna have a look at the Zalman VF700-Cu cooler to see what it is capable off. The nice thing about this cooler is that it cools not only the VGA chipset and VGA RAM, but all other VGA components..

Head over to HardwareXL for the full review!

Mushkin recently announced a radically new heatsink design for their top memory modules. They claim it offers greatly-improved thermal dissipation capabilities courtesy of a larger surface area, a new aero-efficient design and an advanced thermal adhesive. Check it out!

At first glance, I have to say I like what I see. It appears that the memory chips will have more breathing room, and if you have a memory cooler, it looks like that could have a great affect. Check out all the information at Rojak Pot!

TCC5 is not a brand new replacement for TCCD, it is simply the same chip speed binned to DDR466 instead of DDR500 and has been available for as long as TCCD. The performance of your TCC5 product now relies heavily on the binning process used by the memory manufacturers (OCZ, Corsair, G.Skill etc) but if they do a good job you should get identical performance to current TCCD.

Head over to Pure Overclock for the full review!

If you are one of those people that hate any little bit of noise
and want your computer as silent as possible, than this review is for you.
We all know that dust increases a fan’s noise over time. Put that new quiet
fan in, and a couple of months later it is a little louder than it used to
be. That is why AcoustiFan has developed a dust free fan. It is designed to
eliminate that gradual increase in noise over time of a fan. Quiet PC was
nice enough to send us a couple for review.

A dust proof fan? My fans especially pick up dust far too quickly, so this would be great. Check out the full article at A True Review.

The case market these days is saturated with cases of all varieties. The most popular ones are flashy modded cases, or high quality aluminum cases. However if you’re just looking for a very sturdy, well-built case, Foxconn’s TV-544 or TP-544 might be the perfect case for you.

I don’t recall ever seeing a Foxconn tower before, but both of these look pretty good. To see how great they are, check out the full review at Phoronix.

There is only one week left in our OCZ Gold PC3500 GX contest so be sure to hurry up and join before it’s too late. It’s your
chance to win some great memory for your gaming or overclocking system.

As always, head over to the InsaneTek forums for all the details!

INTELLIGENTLY REORDERING I/O REQUESTS in order to minimize the performance impact of a hard drive’s mechanical latency—otherwise known as command queuing—is unquestionably the right thing to do. However, though command queuing has long proven to be a valuable asset to SCSI drives faced with multi-user and enterprise-class workloads, the performance benefits of Native Command Queuing (NCQ) in desktop Serial ATA drives have been harder to illustrate. Unfortunately, most commonly used hard drive benchmarks don’t play to NCQ’s strengths, and those that do involve server-style workloads that are hardly indicative of desktop environments.

If you don’t know what NCQ is, this article is worth a look. Head over to Tech Report to see the in-depth view.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is a term used to describe the transmission of telephone calls using a data network, rather than over traditional phone lines. It is a simple concept, but one that is having a very significant impact on the world of business communications.

It’s no doubt that VoIP is getting more and more popular. It’s almost something everyone should look into. Check out the full article at Bona Fide Reviews.