Asus demos Trinity, again and again

29 Mar 2008 | 07:00 GMT

By Paul Taylor

REMEMBER A WHILE back we were telling you DAAMIT was giving AIBs freedom to play around with their chips? Well, Asus has certainly been busy. They’ve been doing the rounds with several hardware sites and magazines in Europe, demoing a card called the Asus Trinity. Nordic Hardware got their hands on this mutant first.

There is a bit of jury-rigging with ATI HD 3850 chippery on MXM modules socketed into an extra-large PCB – three RV670 chips in total. Yes, Crossfire X with three 3850s on a single PCB, with watercooling. Weird, huh? Well, MXM had to be good for something... Read about it here.

Following closely on the tracks of yesterdays Phenom 9850 reviews, AMD Zone, Computer Shopper and Firing Squad have published their reviews of AMD’s top CPU. Much more of the same: good pricing, good performance, not an Intel-killer. The makeover is looking good. Remember, AMD quad prices can go sub-$200 now and this is good for every consumer.

Frame buffer is an ever-so important element in graphics cards, as you know. Right now, the sweet spot for most manufacturers and games is 512MB, but there are a lot of 256MB cards going around – ideal for low-res (1280x1024 and lower) gaming. Now, it might sound silly to slap on 256MB on a state-of-the-art 9600GT card, but if you can save a buck (or $20 – as the review suggests), maybe it’ll be easier to buy a second 256MB card and have a powerful SLI rig on the cheap (with a total of 512MB). Expreview has a review of one of these, an even has direct comparisons of 256 vs. 512MB. As you’ll see, the 256MB card takes a serious performance hit when the res goes over 1280x1024 with AA. Read the numbers.

OCC has a review of the Patriot Diamond Viper Fin DDR3 PC14400 2x1GB kit. Diamond Viper was actually the name of the first Riva TNT card, marketed by Diamond Multimedia, back in the daze – but that’s just a coincidence. This kit sports a unique heatspreader and runs at a very fast 1600MHz – but will run very tight memory timings if your CPU does 1333MHz, even with a low 1.76v. Price is still the main issue with these things, getting 2 gigs of this stuff is almost the same as buying a new quad core cpu and a motherboard - $350. Read the OCC review, here.

OCZ is also spreading DDR2 goodness. They’ve gone knocking at OCIA’s door and dropped off a package with two sticks of their FlexXLC 'Hybrid Cooling Solution' DDR2. Rated DDR2-9200, means a 1150MHz effective clock, which is quite powerful for DDR2. The Flex XLC allows for the possibility of watercooling your DIMMs pumping H2O through your heatspreader, although that isn’t needed for standard DDR2-9200 operation. The performance is earth-shattering, in particular when Shawn overclocks the memory to 1240MHz. They recommend it thoroughly, but we’d just like to point out it’s quite expensive for DDR2 memory. Read about it. µ

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