TG Roundup: HD 5770’s in CrossFireX, HDD Encryption, Virtualization for Free

Given the amount of content we’ve posted since our last roundup, I’m a bit behind on things here. But, as I always say… well, never mind, I don’t often say anything worth repeating! So, let’s get right to it. At the end of November, we posted a review of a board that helped finish off three different P55 motherboard reviews within a two week span, and unfortunately, we didn’t save the best for last. Intel’s DP55WG isn’t a bad board, but for the price, I was expecting a lot more.

But this past week, we took a look at is ASUS’ P7P55D-E PRO, also known as the first sub-$200 P55 offering from the company, which offers full S-ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0 performance. And thanks to the inclusion of a PLX chip, your primary PCI-E 16x slot won’t have degraded performance like is common on some other solutions. In addition to that though, the board is feature-packed, overclocks like a dream, and is well worth its price-tag of ~$189.

From a components standpoint, we also posted our look at AMD’s latest Athlon II models, the X2 240e and X3 435. Both proved to be quite the good contenders, delivering great performance for their price-point (sub-$100). What was cool to see was that the 240e beat out Intel’s more expensive Pentium E5200 in almost every test. AMD works hard to dominate the budget CPU market, and it’s doing a great job at it.

On the GPU side of things, I decided to pit two Radeon HD 5770’s together for some CrossFireX action, and I’m glad I did, because the results surprised me. When you picture CrossFireX, or multi-GPU in general, you never expect to see performance that outperforms a higher-end card that costs twice as much, but that’s what happened here. In most of our tests, the CrossFireX HD 5770 configuration either matched or surpassed the performance of the HD 5870 just slightly. The best part of course, is that taking this route saves you money, and unlike the HD 5800 series, it’s a lot easier to equip yourself with two of these cards.

Continuing our Radeon HD 5770 theme, we took a look at Sapphire’s Vapor-X model earlier this week, and as expected, it was an impressive card. Not only does it run with lower temperatures, but thanks to its improved chokes, it also uses less power than the reference card, despite the +10MHz to the Core clock. The card also happens to include a voucher for a free copy of Dirt 2, so there’s not too much to dislike here, if anything.

Here at Techgage, we don’t often post content that focuses on security, more specifically encryption, but in the past two weeks, we broke from our mold to deliver a look at two products that deliver similar goals. The first was Kingston’s 16GB DataTraveler Locker+, a thumb drive that actually requires you enter a password in order to access data. Unlike some solutions, the entire drive here is encrypted, making it an ideal solution for those who don’t want to take chances with their sensitive information.

The other encryption product was from Addonics. Called the CipherChain, this internal hardware solution goes in between your hard drive and the motherboard, and it will essentially encrypt all of the data on the fly. The best part is that this happens without much slowdown, and there’s absolutely no drivers at all that need to be installed on the PC, so it doesn’t matter which OS you use. Even better, no password is needed, but rather a key that plugs into the device.

We wrap up our round-up with a quick look at two different software articles. The first was published last Friday, and is focused around a completely free virtualization solution, Sun’s VirtualBox. If you are new to virtualization, or aren’t quite sure what it is, I highly recommend reading through. Or better yet, first check our our Introduction to Consumer Virtualization, and then read our newer article.

Lastly, just today I published an article that looks through ten different tips and tricks I’ve discovered in the time I’ve been using KDE 4. I still love the desktop environment, and use it daily, and with these tips, it’s made even more enjoyable. Even if you’re not a KDE user, or Linux user in general, check it out. You might be impressed by just how cool some aspects of Linux are!