Thursday Reviews

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I have in my hands yet another NVIDIA 6600 GT's. This time I have a GV-NX66T128D's from Gigabyte. I did my first 6600 GT review almost a month ago and I have yet to grow tired of these cards. I have reviewed 6600 GT's from Asus, eVGA, and now Gigabyte. If you haven't read any of my other 6600 GT articles you might not realize how awesome the NV43 GPU really is. For around $200 you get a video card able to play games so well it even rivals the ATI X800 in some benchmarks.

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Today we take a look at the first retail Intel 925XE based motherboard to hit our labs and it comes from ASUS. The newest Pentium 4 chipset from Intel increases FSB to 1066MHz and removes ECC memory support. The ASUS P5AD2-E Premium motherboard provides a stack of features but how does it perform against the Intel reference board? Read on as we investigate this 925XE retail board and what it’s all about.

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The P5AD2-E Premium is based upon the P5AD2 Premium motherboard. In fact, both boards have the exact layout and you will be hard pressed to note any major physical differences. Many may taunt that this new motherboard is nothing more than a P5AD2 validated with a 1066FSB. However, the friendly PR guys at Asus ensured us that there were a few minor changes on the board. In addition to this, there have been rumors going around that this motherboard is second to none in its overclockability. For the purposes of this review (since the P5AD2-E only has minor changes over the old P5AD2), we will be focusing on the overclocking department but will still touch on the other most relevant aspects of this motherboard. Read on to find out exactly what this extra "E" will mean to overclockers?

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Overall, if you're not much of a gamer and you're looking for more than just a "video card" without breaking the bank, the AIW X600 Pro is a good choice for you. If you are a more serious gamer who is also interested in multimedia, you may want to wait for ATI's AIW X800 XT flagship to arrive.

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When it comes to products with a 'cool factor', Corsair's XMS Xpert memory definitely has a lot going for it. An LED display on your RAM? Which can accept custom messages of your choosing? That's beyond cool, and entering the realms of genius. Putting that to one side, there's also a practical use for this product too, particularly for the keen overclocker who wants to keep a close eye on all his system components - What better way to keep tabs on your memory than through the display seen here? Even in an enclosed case, there's still Corsair's Memory Dashboard to monitor all the vital statistics of your precious RAM modules.

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The Foxconn WinFast 755FXK8AA-8EKRS motherboard is based on the SiS 755FX chipset supporting the latest Athlon64 & AthlonFX Socket 939 processors. An update to the previous SiS 755 chipset, the FX adds new features such as dual-channel memory, 1GHz HyperTransport, and of course socket 939 support. Foxconn has loaded this motherboard with all sorts of features like Gigabit Ethernet, 8 channel audio, four SATA-150 connectors, USB 2.0, Firewire, and more.

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For our overclocking tests, we achieved a maximum core speed of 544MHz and maximum memory speed of 547MHz (1.094GHz effective). We ran a 3DMark03 game test loop for 30 hours straight at these speeds, and saw no artifacting throughout or after the test loop.