Daily Reviews Summary 01/07/08

The release of the 8800GT chipset from nVidia has seen the market go crazy for what is one of the best bang-for-your-buck video cards available, and many manufacturers are offering factory overclocked versions to give you even more performance, but are they worth the money? We look at the Inno3D's normal 8800GT and their Overclocked version to find out.

Kingston has release their latest version of professional speed Compact Flash Memory with the CompactFlash Ultimate 266X Memory card. These cards are specifically designed for devices that require fast write speeds such as digital SLR cameras. Available in 2, 4 and 8 GB capacities, these cards provide space for hundreds of megapixels of images.

This system is a bit different from other liquid coolers I've reviewed - rather than mounting it outside the case or on the side panel, this system is uses up two of 5 ¼ drive bays, keeping it out of the way of other components. Let's see how this setup works and more importantly, how it performs.

Today OCZ have given us the chance of taking a look at one of there latest Flash drives on the market and that is the ATV Turbo. Available in a number of sizes, ranging from 2GB to 8GB, right though to an amazing 16GB version an probably a 32gb version on the way. Thus giving the consumer more space then ever to store files. And that’s all, the ATV Turbo flash drives main feature is there durable and rubber case housing which OCZ claim to be 100% waterproof and shock proof, so this should be interesting to see how it performs. Today I got my hands on the ATV Turbo 4GB version.

This is the closest that an AMD/ATI-based graphics card has got to competing with Nvidia at the same price point for some time now, but there are still cases where even this factory overclocked Radeon HD 3870 from Asus disappoints me a bit. It pains me to say that because the Radeon HD 3870 is a truly fantastic product that we are big fans of at bit-tech.

The penalty for enabling anti-aliasing is the single most disappointing downside and in particular I'm referring to 4xAA performance compared to what else is on the market at the same price. We're now in 2008 and one would hope that a performance mainstream graphics card is able to cope with 4xAA enabled at respectable settings and resolutions in most games. Of course, / /Crysis is an exception to this rule (and probably will be for some time to come), but there are still times where the performance drop is much larger than what we're used to seeing on ATI-based graphics cards of days gone by.

On the whole though, the card looks to be a great choice as long as Asus meets its suggested retail price and that you also know about the sometimes extreme AA performance penalty. However, our suggestion would be to look at one of the cheaper Radeon HD 3870s on the market, pocket the difference and then dabble in a bit of overclocking. We say this because although the Asus EAH3870 TOP gets close to a similarly priced GeForce 8800 GT, it never really matches it in every scenario.

In essence, Vapour Chamber Technology is very similar to the heatpipe technology we've seen plenty of times before, taking heat and transferring it away from its source to a cooler area. However, with a VCT cooler this is achieved by providing a vacuum chamber, the inside walls of which are lined with the wick you can see above (the vapourisation wick), which is saturating with a liquid (pure water in this case). As heat is applied to an area, the fluid within it then vapourises and moves to fill the vacuum inside the chamber until it hits a cooler surface (the condensation wick), upon which it will condense, releasing the heat it has taken in during the vapourisation in the process. Once this heat is dissipated, the condensed liquid will return to the heat source via a capillary action (via the transportation wick), at which point the cycle repeats ad infinitum to continually draw heat away from its source, thus acting as a cooling solution.

To shed some light on a confusing situation Gigabyte has sent us one of their P31 motherboards for review. P31 hardware is targeted directly for the budget consumer and accordingly can be found for just under $80 in several flavors from various motherboard makers. Intel is not known for cheaply pricing their venerable chipsets, so P31 is unique in that it is a hybrid of the much acclaimed P35 and old stalwart 975X chipsets. For the technically inclined the P31 chipset is composed of the P35 northbridge MCH chip with the 975X’s ICH7 southbridge chip for an interesting combination of old and new. For reference 965 chipsets used ICH8 and P35 uses the ICH9 series of southbridge chips.

P35 has been a popular, if usually pricey choice until late as it has offered tangible performance benefits over the older 975X and 965P chipsets it has replaced, and today we shall discover if P31 can offer the same performance or even a possible performance improvement at a lower price! While there are more than a few motherboard manufacturers with P31 based offerings, these boards are not very common and more importantly all P31 boards do feature some strings attached which we will cover in detail later in the article.