Content and news by Rob Williams

“For many gamers, choosing a game to buy is a simple matter. Easy answers like “I like the franchise, so I will get the game,” or “This developer makes great games of this genre,” or even “I played it at a friends house and I liked it,” all tend to rule our Comment (0) -->

“Today we will review the Neo Power, Antec’s newest power supply on the market. It has many good features such as Dual 12v rails, which makes its ATX Ver. 2.0 compliant. When we test voltage rails, we test both 12v rails separately, as well as the 5v and 3.3v rails. We will run the system at stock speeds and at overclocked speeds and run Prime95 tests at each to ensure we put enough stress on the system.”

Head over to Guru Hardware for the review.

“With the success of the XBL Performance DDR400 using the Samsung chips to achieve 2-2-2-5 timings, ram manufacturer Patriot is following up with their new PDC22G5600+XBLK DDR2 memory. Boasting 3-2-2-4 timings at 533mhz, this new part has been tested to hit 700MHz at 4-3-3-12 for a PC5600 rating. This was achieved in PDP’s labs. This should be some of the fastest ddr2 available today.”

Check out the review at Pro-Clockers.

“Overclocking your PC for increased performance has its obvious benefits, since a faster PC will make your tasks quicker. Perhaps you encode a lot of video, are heavy into the Folding@Home scene or have some other CPU intensive task that you perform on a regular basis. Maybe you are a gamer and every fps counts. Perhaps you simply want to see how far you can push the limits of your system you have painstakingly put together. What ever your situation, when it comes to overclocking the first obstacle you will need to overcome is heat.”

Read more at Viper Lair.

“VIA had their K8T890 chipset announced for the Athlon64 platform quite some time back. If we remember right, it was announced before nVidia’s nForce4 as the first PCI Express solution for the AMD platform. However, boards based on this chipset are yet to make an appearance on store shelves. Today, we take a look at the first K8T890 motherboard we’ve received and its from Soltek which was one of the very few companies that impressed us with their previous generation K8T800 PRO chipset board. Lets find how this new Soltek and VIA solution compares to the other nForce4 based motherboards.”

Check out the review at T-Break.

“We will be testing it against our latest memory we reviewed the Corsair Xpert ram. We have several benchmark programs that we will test this with and also some overclocking for you to take a part of. Our latest Mushkin memory reviews have turned out really well as it is stable memory that overclocks well so lets check out what we can do with this kit.”

Check out the full review at Red & Blackness.

“With Winbond no longer manufacturing BH-5/6 RAM ICs, the days of running 250MHz with 2-2-2-x timings, in a brand new system, is only a faint memory (no pun intended) overclockers continue to share. As BH-5/6 is non-existent with memory manufacturers now, one of the new alternatives is TCCD from Samsung. Samsung TCCD chips can’t scale linearly with voltage at 2-2-2-x like Winbond chips of a generation past; which means more voltage doesn’t mean more FSB on the TCCD chips. However, TCCD is still a good alternative and has its own advantages. The memory up for testing in this review is Corsair’s new XMS XPERT TWINXP1024-3200XL.”

Check out the review at Phoronix.

“The GeForce 6600 cards (on both interfaces) use cheaper DDR1 memory and are clocked far lower than the GeForce 6600 GT cards. In terms of feature support, both are identical, sans the SLI link for the PCIe version. MSI being NVIDIA’s close add-in-board partner, they were naturally among the early birds to push their cards out to end-users first. However, we are not reviewing MSI’s normal GeForce 6600 cards in this article, but a higher-class Diamond edition.”

Check out the review at HardwareZone.

“NVIDIA’s latest chipset, the nForce 4, has gained a lot of attention mainly for its support for 2 NVIDIA PCI-Express card in SLI-mode. The chipset is available in three versions. SLI, Ultra and non-Ultra. Those who want to save a few pennies and do not need the SLI feature can get motherboards using the cheaper nForce4 non-Ultra chipset. Today I am testing one of those cheaper motherboards, the Foxconn Winfast NF4K8MC-ERS, the little brother to the Foxconn nForce 4 motherboard Shane reviewed a few weeks ago.”

Check out the review at Bjorn3D.

“Intel’s BTX form factor. Re-read that for a second and absorb its full meaning. Intel’s BTX form factor. See what I’m getting at? If you visit Intel’s current BTX website, tied as it is to their Pentium 4 processor, you’ll see the following: “Intel has collaborated with the desktop computing industry to create an evolutionary step in the desktop computer form factor”. I’m 100% certain that’s true, don’t get me wrong; I’ve been part of correspondence with the companies Intel has collaborated with to define BTX. It’s the level of collaboration that bothers me. I’ll return to that thought, so keep it in mind.”

Check out the full article at Hexus.