For your eyes only: HD 3870X2

23 Jan 2008 | 07:40 GMT

By Paul Taylor

APPARENTLY UNFETTERED by the limitation of NDAs, Inside HW and FPS Labs (in that order) have presented the English-speaking world with their reviews of AMD’s Radeon HD 3870X2 (1GB). Although not compared to the GeForce family of GPUs, the X2 absolutely trounces its bro’, the HD3870. They expect the next driver iteration to boost performance considerably. However neither got round to measuring power, but estimates place it a little over 200W. Click here and here for zwei-GPU fun.

If your uncles and aunties, grans and gramps stuffed your stocking full of dosh this Yule, you might be interested in investing in a new rig. Ars Technica has published their January 2008 Ars System Guide, which will navigate you through the dire straits of acquiring a new computer and getting the most bang for your buck. It’s $USD-based but we are confident it’ll be easily localised for the UK and €uroland. God box... *grin* sounds good, doesn’t it?

Guru3D plays around with the Sparkle GeForce 8800GT Cool-Pipe3 512Mb. As you might guess it is another designed built around heat-pipe technology that is supposed to keep your card fresh and quiet. The reality is that you’ll need to overcome a couple of obstacles to get the card running as you’d expect – one is airflow inside your case, the other is actually distance between the cool pipe system and your northbridge. After that its fun all the way up to 1600x1200 with all the tricks turned on. Read it here.

Did you know that 60 per cent of Americans received gift vouchers for Christmas? We didn’t either, but that’s just fuel for Anand Techie’s latest Ipod vs. Zune dissertation (squeezed into 10 pages). It’s a bit of a one-sided argument with iIpod coming out smelling like roses and Zune always the close-secnd-but-never-first. Get your Apple-certified endorsement here.

PCOnline has produced an article by popular demand. Yes, they’ve gone out of their way to provide their readers with a nice piece facing off the AMD 780G and the Nvidia MCP78. Although it’s in Chinese, Hardspell apparently is sharing their content to the English speaking world, so you can either read it in the original version here, or the Hardspell English version here. Quite the interesting bit of literature.

DDR2 is quite the bargain today, given the ample availability of modules and the slow move to DDR3, Hardware Logic has a review of the Patriot Viper 4GB DDR-800 (2x2GB) kit. Armed with a lifetime warranty a couple of these will fill your PC with 8GB of “low” latency 4-4-4-12 DDR2-800 RAM for as little as $260. Not the best of overclockers they think. Click this way, please. µ

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