Brothers in Arms

26 Mar 2008 | 16:10 GMT

By Paul Taylor

INTEL’S FINEST ARE HARD to fathom. Quads are relatively mainstream (unless we’re talking 45nm), and Extreme Editions – although equipped to deal with the most massive of application demands – are obscenely priced. We haven’t awarded them the humorous moniker of Extremely Expensive Edition CPUs for nothing. Well, injecting common sense into the enthusiast masses, Techware Labs does a rundown of Core 2 Quads vs. Core 2 Extremes that might make you think twice before blowing your wad on a $1500 CPU (or not). All we can think of right now is, with the weakening dollar, we could get on a plane and fly to the States, pick up a Core 2 Extreme, fly back and still have money left for a night at the pub. Get sensible, here.

Although GX2 all but discarded HD3870 X2 as a runner in the GPU performance race yesterday, the truth of the matter is you can pick up the latter for a decent price and still have really good performance – without causing a brown-out or having to invest in a new PSU. TweakTown has the Asus HD 3870X2 on review and more performance numbers on the dual GPU. With prices on the GX2 topping the X2 by around USD150 the sensible choice seems to be going for the HD3870 X2... or you could flip heads or tails on these cards. Read the review.

Brit reviewers at IT Reviews.co.uk have given a poke at the Compro Videomate E770. It’s a low-profile PCIe x1 solution that sports dual DVB-T TV Tuners and comes with an IR remote. Now there’s a little bonus if you plug in the thing the right way – you can actually program it to switch on your PC from Off (or from Standby) and have it record shows at scheduled times – but like IT Reviews says – you’ll have to handle Windows logins somehow. This kit sounds just right for an HTPC kit... read on.

Want some German perspective in the QuadFire vs. GX2 SLI question? Well, the very thorough editors of Computerbase.de have published the site’s official take on the matter. Well, it seems Ze Germans were mightily impressed by the GX2 SLI scaling, which seems to be superior to ATI’s CrossFireX. Most games they tested scaled to 4 GPUs quite well... which is quite an accomplishment – for both ComputerBase and Nvidia... German here, English here (“the ultimate blows” sounds wrong in sooo many ways).

If you’re into mobile devices, and the original Black Jack in particular, you’ll be happy to see what Samsung’s been up to in order to manufacture the Black Jack II (or i617). DevHardware has a sort of compilation of info on the device. It’s been seriously re-worked and is zippier, even under Windoze Mobile 6.0. It actually has a dual-core ARM 9 processor inside, plus 256MB of ROM and 128MB or RAM. Read the compiled article here.

Although this piece hardly qualifies as a review, we thought we’d include it as it affects your hardware purchasing decisions to a greater extent – the Windows Vista SP1 Core Performance analysis done at Bit Tech. I’ve never seen a service pack that takes longer to install than the OS itself, but here it is... 77 pages of hotfixes and security updates that impact the way your hardware and software performs. It’s the first of a series, so start reading.

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007