Content and news by Rob Williams

“Since competition has always been a deciding factor with mainstream videocards, manufacturers are really pulling out all the stops to differentiate their 6600GT-based cards. The standards are pricing, flashy colours, lights, silent cooling set-ups, or even an occasional software package. MSI has pretty much done all of this.”

Head over to PC Stats for the full review.

WESTWOOD, Mass. – May 4, 2005 – Turbine, Inc., a leading publisher of online subscription entertainment, announced today that the highly-anticipated massively multiplayer online game Asheron’s Call 2: Legionsâ„¢ is available now at retail chains throughout North America. The game will be available in Europe on May 6. The long-awaited expansion pack Comment (0) -->

“Before we warm them up, let’s check them out. The first thing to catch your eye will most definitely be the way these sticks get packaged. A finely finished Mahogany box complete with anti-static foam cutouts to house the memory modules make for a great presentation. (I’ll throw in one more picture of the box, just for good measure!) The only other item packaged with the 2 sticks of ram was a small instruction page to help those that need it.”

Mahogany box? Now that’s classy. Read the full review at Big Bruin.

“With the onboard memory controller on the Athlon 64, it scales in speed along with the processor which means that latency is minimized. The links to I/O and memory are also independent which means there is no bandwidth contention. This has also allowed AMD to keep the socket fairly consistent as there has already been two updates to the memory controller, none of which required a new board. Prior to the Athlon 64, memory controller duties were taken care of by the Northbridge thus the processor communicates with the memory through the front side bus. With the 925XE, Intel has tried to address bandwidth limitations by raising the FSB speed from 800Mhz to the 1066Mhz.”

Check out the full review at Neoseeker.

“What Windows XP Pro x64 Edition is bringing to the table for the gamer is OS support for 64-bit applications and games that can take advantage of 64-bit CPUs like the AMD Athlon 64 and Intel’s EM64T technology. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is unique in that it will also allow 32-bit applications to run on the OS alongside 64-bit applications. This means the games and applications you use now should work with this OS. You do need 64-bit drivers for your hardware components, and we suggest downloading them before installation.”

Check out the full comparison at Hard|OCP.

“As part of its growing antipiracy campaign, Microsoft is testing a program that offers free licensed versions of Windows XP Professional to some customers whose copies are found to be bogus.”

Good stuff! Read all about it at News.com.

AUSTIN, Texas, May 4, 2005— NCsoft® Corporation, the world’s leading developer and publisher of online computer games, today announced its lineup of games for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), May 18-20 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. NCsoft’s games represent the company’s varied offering of massively multiplayer online (MMO) game titles. All…..

“OCZ Technology has just announced the release of the OCZ PC2-6400 Platinum Bandwidth Enhanced series – an extremely high performance line of DDR2 memory. The OCZ PC2-6400 Platinum Bandwidth Enhanced memory boasts 4-3-3 timings at 800MHz! Those are ultra low latencies for DDR2-800 memory! Let’s take a look at it!”

Check out the full overview at Rojak Pot.

“Today ATI is announcing a 512MB flavor of its Radeon X800 XL. The card packs dual DVI outputs, video in and out capabilities, and twice the memory of the standard X800 XL for only $450. But does the extra graphics memory actually improve performance? We’ve run the Radeon X800 XL 512MB through its paces in an array of games and benchmarks to find out.”

Check out the full review at Tech Report.

“The Aspire X-QPACK Case has great looks & excellent features. It’s all aluminum, has 3 windows, a 120mm fan, 420W PSU, removable motherboard tray, plenty of drive bays, USB 2, Firewire ports, mic & headphone jack. It even has a handle at the front. To top it off, it’s affordable. This is, without a doubt, one of the best mini cases around! Watch the Video to find out more…”

Check the full review at 3D Gameman.

Hexus also has a article up of the new ATI 512MB card.

“As we’ve seen time and time again with low-end boards that pack the memory on, but which use asthmatic memory bus widths to talk to it, there’s little point in giving a bandwidth-starved graphics chip more memory which it can’t realistically use to accelerate 3D performance. Here, on-card caching schemes work best to make the most of what they’ve got, especially if you want to use the board for something other than 3D graphics and games. While you might not have the bandwidth on the board to feed the GPU very well (often less than 5GiB/sec on 64-bit memory bus low-end hardware) to render complex scenes, that doesn’t mean you have to leave blocks of memory empty. You still want to upload data to the board even if it won’t be processed for a few frames. Speculative preloading on 512MiB low-end hardware would make some sense, if the driver is able.”

Check out the full review at Hexus.

“Vantec steps up for round three today in the quest for the perfect external drive enclosure. As always, they take a new step in design and innovation and remain dedicated to creating a better product. The NexStar was nice, the NexStar 2 was quite endearing, and now we have the NexStar 3 to look at.”

Check out the full review at Think Computers.

“The card my friends is an affordable and considering the high framerates it can accomplishing in games, one hell of an attractive piece of gaming gear. The little ogre was manufactured under codename R430 and is actually built on the smaller 0.11 micron fabrication process. Somewhat cheaper memory was used making the XL a very competing product. The XL is using roughly 2×500 MHz and that XT PE uses 2×590 MHz. When we go from 256 towards 512 Mb, does that make the product more expensive? Most certainly. And that might make this 512 MB product loose its mojo a little.”

GREAT review that was written in rush, but the reviewer had no choice. Definitely check it out and see if 512MB is needed, at Guru 3D.

Costa Mesa, CA . May 4, 2005 SoftPressRelease.com Xfire ( http://www.xfire.com ) and Planetwide Games ( http://www.ryl.net ) have announced that starting today, they will be offering a free 14-day trial download of “RYL: Path of the Emperor” — the massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. This 14-day trial download offers new online game…..

“This is now the 3rd 550W Aerocool power supply we have had the pleasure of reviewing at 3DXtreme and it seems like they are getting better and better. It’s refreshing to see a company put out products and with each new product put out a better and better products. We were impressed the last time around with their improvements over the original Aeropower PSU and now they have moved into the area of modular PSU. Can they continue to improve on their products with the Turbine? Let’s find out just how well it did…”

Head over to 3D Xtreme to read the full review.

“At stock this cooler is competitive with the 6-heatpipe Asus Ice Star at load – 45C on the Silent 939 versus 40 on the Ice Star – and under overclocked idle conditions it also matches the Asus cooler. When the heat is really turned up though, the advantage of copper fins and 6-heatpipes shows. In fact I had stability problems with the TT cooler if I tried to overclock much more, while the Asus was able to deal well with further Overclocking. This is not really surprising, as this silent CPU heatsink is obviously not a competitor for enthusiast coolers.”

Check out the full review at Xtreme Computing.

“Yup we just started up another contest for your pleasure. This time you can win some great memory! This month’s prize will be GeIL’s new Ultra-X PC3200 memory. This 1GB dual channel kit was recently reviewed here and performed extremely well.”

Check out it out at InsaneTek.

To keep everyone on top of BIOS updates, they have provided a list in their forums.

Realtek has also released a new driver for the ALCxxx AC97 chips, which you can check out and download also in their forums.

“So how well does the ABIT AG8 rate?! Well, I have to say it is probably one of the better ones on the market. Can it get better? YES! But, you say, Turbo, where can this near heavenly motherboard possibly get better?!”

Check out the full review at Lan Addict.

“The Vantec VAN-520A Stealth power supply has a few nice features that should guarantee it a very successful lifespan in the stores. The ability of the powersupply to manage all three fan speeds is pretty good, as this can be a useful way of keeping your overall system noise down. This PSU is not the absolute quietest one we have ever tested, but it does offer pretty good noise levels under the automatic setting. For more powerful cooling, a simple flick of the switch turns the fans up to higher RPM levels.”

Head over to PC Stats for the full review..