Monday Hardware Reviews - Last Day For Contest

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When Corsair collaborated with Asus to supply memory for their A8N32-SLI Deluxe/WIFI and A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboards any of use that have or had plans on purchasing a NF4 motherboard, were given some new memory to play with as well. Now thanks to the availability of this memory we expect to extremely fast benchmarks thanks to the ultra-low latency timing of 2-3-2-6. So come on as we test the 3500LL Pro and see just how fast it we can get it to clock.

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The OCZ EB PC-4000 is another great product worthy of the Editor’s Choice Award. If you haven’t yet moved up to 2GBs of memory, consider this product for any system - its fast, stable and pushes the boundaries of what is possible with two 1GB sticks of memory.

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There are but a few names that come to mind when you mention quality memory, even fewer when you mention high performance memory. There are many companies out there now that are making it or trying to get into the high performance memory market. One name that stands out when you think of high quality, high performance memory is Corsair. Corsair is one of the top makers of reliable, high performance ram. Today for review I have an entry by Corsair that promises to deliver something we haven't seen yet, a CAS latency of 2 at speeds of PC3500.

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Corsair, in a partnership with Asus, recently released a 2GB low-latency PC3500 kit. The company doesn't plan to stop there though, as it is also releasing a 2GB PC4400 kit, which happens to be the focus of this article. The kit won't be on shelves for at least a couple more weeks, so consider this article a preview of what you can expect from the TWINX2048-4400PRO.

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Lastly is the price of the RAM, a rather large question especially since there isn't a lot of difference, performance wise to PC5300 RAM. As of this moment its around the $200 (US) mark, which puts it around the other PC6400 RAM around. The upside is that it has tighter timings than the competition, at least at the moment, at 4-4-4-15 rather than 5-5-5-15.

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What can I say, this is some serious RAM, you can find it online for less than $100 for a 1GB kit. With some mild tweaking you got from some decent priced PC 4200 value RAM to some REALLY decent priced PC5400. Every once in a while a product comes along that gives you WAY more bang for the buck than you expect, like the ti series NVIDIA cards, the JIUHB XP 1700 and the ABIT NF7-s motherboard. You mention any of those products to an enthusiast and it brings a smile to their faces.

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But they assured us, times were changing. Starting with some flashy purple boards that were a nice start, but failed to impress. Now they have the PF88, featuring their very own bus type and a highly portable SiS chipset allowing the board to support both Intel and AMD processors (and potentially more!).

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Foxconn is one of the first manufacturers to release an GeForce 6100-series motherboard, and the 6150K8MA-8EKRS specifically uses the best of class nVidia GeForce 6150 iteration and nVidia nForce 430 Southbridge. The Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS mini-ATX motherboard which supports all Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 X2/FX processors on the market, as well as up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. In terms of goodies, the motherboard incorporates onboard analog video, a 7.1-channel Azalia audio codec, a single Gigabit LAN port and IEEE 1394a.

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Today we've got a brand new motherboard on the chopping block from ASRock, a sub division of ASUS who produce value orientated motherboards. The ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard is based on ULi's new M1695 chipset and offers many innovative features. It has many features such as PCI Express and AGP support and upgradeability to upcoming AMD processors - it's an upgrader’s dream

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Foxconn is one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers of computer parts and only recently has started to enter the enthusiast market. Overall, the brand appears to be well-received, even though the naming conventions are somewhat counterintuitive. Enthusiast boards on one side, OEM boards on the other side, there is still ground to play and it appears as if the red tape was lifted at least for once to let the engineers and designers play their hearts out. The result is a true oddity in the conformistic world of motherboards - a dual chipset motherboard for a single - server class - CPU with two 16-lanes PCIe SLI slots that promise to deliver uncompromised bandwidth to the graphics adapters while in the background some super RAID configuration is on a rampage and the entire system talks to the intranet via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Needless to say that the latter are protected by nVidia's own Firewall.

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When DFI launched the LanParty line of motherboards they targeted at a very narrow though highly vocal sector of the hardware market with one purpose in mind, to get DFI known in the enthusiast community. The marketing and products were solid and as a result DFI and the LanParty series are household names.

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We've looked at a couple of PowerColor X800 GT cards and have come away with the feeling that whilst both offer something new in the marketplace, the respective asking prices takes away much of their shine. Novel, exciting products? Yes. Value-for-money? Not quite.

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By now, there is no need to question the power of the 7800 GTX, whether it comes with a factory set overclock or not. Everyone knows that it is the card to get if you want the best gaming performance available. When you care about raw power though, a factory and warrantied overclock is a big plus. In fact, XFX only offers overclocked versions of the 7800 GTX. If that's not catering to enthusiasts, then I don't know what is!

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Lastly, the performance of the card in games puts it at the top of the X8xx line, right behind the 850 and 850PE. While it isn't the speediest card it is also much cheaper than it's bigger brothers and you can overclock it quite easily to those speeds. Given that the X800XT AIW offers many features for a great price and still gets it's game on at a great FPS, it is a great deal for the money if you are looking for everything it offers.

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With all the hype surrounding the new generation ATI graphics cards, there are people who don’t have that kind of money to spend. Sapphire is one of ATI’s partners doing the X800GTO chip and they’ve recently released two new graphics cards based on it - the Fireblade Edition and the other being the GTO² Limited Edition. One of these suckers might be just what the doctor ordered if you’re budget doesn’t extend to around $500 USD for a graphics card.

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The GT model is quite similar to the 7 series flagship model, known as the 7800GTX, having 1 less vertex shader and 4 less pixel pipelines. The GT also has slower stock clock speeds of 400MHz core and 500MHz memory as compared to the GTX's 430MHz core and 600MHz memory. Seemingly minor differences but we shall see what the benchmarks have to say as we pit the Gigabyte 7800GT against the BFG 7800GTX which comes pre-overclocked out of the factory.

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While ATI is busy showing off their new products it is easy to forget that they still have a pretty nice line-up already out. The X800-series has grown a lot and today I am testing the X800GT and X800GTO cards from HIS.

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The stock versions of the HIS and Sapphire cards perform well, of course being of the same core, clock, and memory speed they perform almost identically. The true value of the cards comes out with the overclocking, the HIS card automatically improves 8% with some headroom to go a bit further. HIS states that it can go up to 540 and probably further. The Sapphire card performs great once you unlock it's full potential with the extra four pipelines, as shown there is a massive increase in many cases, up to 50% in a few. Sapphire definitely has an edge with the unlocking ability.

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Power for the X800 GT Xtreme is provided by ATI's R480 chipset running at 500MHz. This is 25MHz faster than the standard X800 GT. The Xtreme achieves this higher core speed with a better cooling solution. The normal X800 GT use 256 Meg of 2ns GDDR3 memory running at 980MHz. The Xtreme version use 1.6ns memory running at 1050MHz. All together, it adds up to a faster video card for just a few dollars more.