Daily Reviews Summary 08/07/08

AMD has finally released the AMD 790GX chipset for enthusiasts around the world. The AMD 790GX chipset is designed for performance gamers and multimedia enthusiasts alike, and promises to deliver outstanding gaming as well as full HD video performance. With the AM2+ processor in mind the AMD 790GX Chipset along with the ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics core provides awesome gaming compatibility and fantastic multimedia capabilities right out of the box at an ultra competitive price.

You can see all manner of designs and technology these days on CPU coolers ranging from the weird and wonderful, to the more conservative and stylish. But it is the technologies behind the cooling that matters the most to any hardware enthusiast. One technology that has offered impressive performance in the past is the HDT design, where the heatpipes actually touch the CPU. This should deliver greater and faster dissipation due to increased contact between the heat transport components, in this case the heatpipes and the core.

One product that has this tech and wishes to use it to create some hopefully great results, is the Sunbeamtech Core Contact Freezer. Lets take this one for a spin and see how its does.

Ultra Portable laptops have reached new levels of usability and even shrunk in size recently. What Asus started with its introduction of the EeePC other manufacturers have continued and introduced their versions of the now popular "Netbooks". We take a look at one of the nicest designs on the market right now with HP's 2133. This all aluminum masterpiece would fit right in on the show room floor and gives its owner just the right asthetics and feel. But we test out the engine under the hood in addition to the fit and finish of the 2133. Find out what our inspection showed.

Lexar's new entry level 8 GB SDHC card is quite unique. It is both reasonably priced and offers really good performance for a "Class 2" card. Actually the card surpasses the Class 2 requirements in our testing. At around $50 quite a nice achievement.

In today's CPU cooler marketplace, there's some enormous air-cooling solutions. Which is all fine, except many won't physically fit in some cases. Well Scythe has come out with a 3 heat-pipe CPU cooler that is only 64mm high! The question is, at that size, will it perform? We're going to drop one in and check out the results.

We’ve literally loved everything about the HD 4850 since its release. The only thing that worried me was the high temperatures coming out from behind the card. While the stock single slot cooler is an excellent choice, it simply isn’t going to do as good a job as dual slot coolers with bigger fans.

Sapphire has not only chosen to include aftermarket cooling on the card, but also to take it a step further by overclocking the bad boy. With two in hand today, we will be looking at both single and Crossfire performance. Before we get into that, though, let’s have a quick look at the package and the actual cards.

On air with no voltage mods, it seems that the maximum clock speeds that can be achived are right in the neighborhood of 766MHz on the GPU cores and 1105MHz on the GDDR3 memory. I say this after benchmarking two reference design cards from different manufacturers that basically overclocked identically. The difference between the two cards clock speeds can be counted on one hand. The 166MHz overclock on the GPU core offers an increase in performance in many of the game benchmarks tested. Keeping the cores cool by manually increasing the fan speed to 100 percent does help in achieving a higher overclock, just not more that 766MHz on the core in this case. 166MHz on the core and 105MHz on the memory are respectable overclocks when it comes down to it. When the CPU speed is ramped up the 9800GX2 takes off. This card from Palit performed almost identically the the XFX model I looked at several months ago. Scores of close to 19000 in 3DMark06 with the CPU at 3.6GHz show the potential of the card. While you can always hope for more ultimately what you get on air is what you get.

I'm sorry but that's just a heck of a lot more value than the 9500 GT will offer gaming performance wise. And next to that, as this review will show .. the product has a few surprises ready under it's sleeves, it's passively cooled, overclocks like a beast and looks drop-dead gorgeous !

Today we have the IP35P motherboard from abit, this board is one of the lower entries in the abit’s P35 chipset range but still has enough features to make a solid machine from it. In my experience though budget boards tend to fall at the wayside, let us hope the IP35P will change that.

You can't really put a label on this motherboard or designate it for any particular kinds of users. There are far too many useful features that you don't find on your typical budget motherboards. And while many professional motherboards also tend to offer the bare essentials, that's not what you get here. At this price, you can't go wrong if you're on a budget and really want a good quality motherboard. It's going to be really tough topping this one with anything else.

The BlueAnt Supertooth 3 handsfree Bluetooth speakerphone provides a safer, legal alternative to talking on your cell phone while you drive. Voice prompts provide assistance to help you connect the device with your phone and upload your address book. With up to 15 hours of talk time and a charge time of just 3 hours is this Bluetooth speakerphone right for you? Read on to find out!

We've got the low down on exactly what AMD's new "performance-leading" integrated graphics northbridge offers, in addition to its latest southbridge which is apparently primed for some super-overclocking. Has the AMD platform finally come good again?

As it stands though, the EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked, while offering a superb warranty and Step-up program, is going to struggle in the already congested market. EVGA can want its brand to carry a premium but at the end of the day the overclock on the card is minor and only translates to a one or two frames per second advantage over a stock card, compared to the four or five frame per second advantage of the higher overclocked cards, which can now be had for less money than EVGA are asking for the superclocked. It's very hard to justify the price of the EVGA.