Tuesday Reviews

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With the ATI HDTV Wonder, ATI has once again emerged at the forefront of Multimedia card market. They have released a product HTPC enthusiasts have been wanted for a very long time now, and the bottom line is that this card does exactly what it was made to do, and does it very well.

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It's very hard to recommend the Pentium 4 570J when the competition, AMD, is currently doing so well. I'd either opt for a cheaper 5xx model and overclock it, hopefully, to the 570J's default 3.8GHz clock speed, or go for any number of Athlon 64 CPUs. Dual-core Smithfield can't come soon enough, I say. Up until then, though, Intel's top-end desktop processors' performance won't be giving Dr. Hector Ruiz sleepless nights.

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I believe that this board fits well within the market space it is aimed at, mainly the budget builder market. While not a stellar performer, it does support many of the newer technologies that many older boards with similar prices may not. The ability to use the 400MHz front side bus Athlons is a big plus, as is support for PC3200 memory. I would recommend this board to someone looking to build an entry to mid level gaming PC, but not to the budget overclocker as the lack of overclocking options make it a very poor performer in that respect.

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The latest improvement in Intel's desktop line of processor involves the increase in bus speed from 800 to 1066 MHz. Initial reactions after benchmarking the new against the old configuration ranged from silence to outspoken dismay about the lack of difference. Sometimes, there is more to the story than meets the eye and we started digging and digging and more digging. In the end, we reached the verdict that the current combo of the 925XE is better than originally assessed. However, we also have evidence that the recent platform mislaunch is at least partially a result of poor product planning, resulting in a forced mismatching of the wrong components. We leave that part for last in this article, though.

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According to Mushkin, with the proper timings set, you should be able to push this memory up to and possibly beyond DDR500 speeds. For our overclocking tests we ran this memory up to 250MHz HyperTransport speed with a resulting SiSoft Sandra memory score of 6904/6793 at timings of CAS3 4-4-8.