9600GSO 768MB... Oi, haven't we met before?

15 May 2008 | 07:57 BST

By Paul Taylor

TWEAKERS AT TT have procured a Palit GeForce 9600GSO 768MB card and explored the inner workings of this card. Now, reviewers are becoming pretty annoyed at what they see as a Nvidia marketing doing its worst... and reviews are reflecting this. Well this GSO comes with a non-standard cooler, dual-slot, for increased airflow. Being a Sonic version of the card, it’s also slightly OC’d, which means, in the end, it performs almost as well as a 9600GT. Now Shane thinks the 384MB version will throw a wrench in the gears (or just confuse people even more), and rightly so. Nvidia gets the “Crap Naming Scheme” award of 2008, innit? Catch TT’s review here.

In Win has a new case on the market, the Metal Suit GD. What makes the case unique is its “VGA cooling duct” that sucks air from slits cut into the side of the case and sprays it over the expansion bay area. Sleek design, nice blue led and the fans make very little noise. Cooling performance on the cooling duct doesn’t seem to do a very good job, but you should read OCC’s review here.

Every graphics card brand comes up with a nice bit of marchitecture to win a little edge over the competition. Sapphire’s own is the “Toxic” line, of Vapour-X Technology that improve heat dissipation and allow the card to come factory overclocked... the toxic design also has the advantage of keeping the card single-slot. Big Bruin has a Sapphire Toxic HD3870 on their bench and they’re putting it to the tong and hammer. The specs are lower than the Asus HD3870 TOP, but the Toxic cooler made it an excellent overclocker. Jason took the GPU all the way up to 885MHz. Interesting lit, here.

After testing some compact CPU coolers, Xbit has moved on to compact watercoolers. Right. Well, these little coolers don’t really make much of an impact on your system (cooling-wise) but look great and are pretty easy to install, however, they lose on most counts to standard air and water coolers. Sergey does say it’s a first step towards better cooling. Not to be great commercial successes, such are the pitfalls of pioneering. Catch the review here.

The mighty Church of CNET has published a review on the Synology Disk Station DS-107+. Yes, it’s a NAS, but according to the review, it’s also much more. It has PS3 and Xbox media center functionality, is relatively cheap and supports up to 1TB HDs. It’s also smallish, as it’s a single HD unit. If you’re a security freak, you can also network up to six cameras (although you pay extra for each camera license after the first) and use it as a video recording device. Gives us some ideas, doesn’t it?

OCZ Reaper HPC DDR3 is one of many “supercar”-class kits available to enthusiasts with deep pockets. OCIA has tested the 2x1GB DDR3-10666 and taken it a bit beyond spec whilst on the bench. 1500MHz was the top speed, but you pay top dollar too, so it’d be a surprise if you couldn’t play around with the speeds and timings. They gave it a big thumbs up, apparently.

Those zany canucks that fiddle with hardware have benched the Asrock Penryn1600SLIx3-WiFi motherboard. Like everything Asrock, it’s a mix-match of technologies that end up spawning an equally odd name – and as Asrock mobos go – it is quite expensive ($170). This is basically a Nvidia 680i tri-SLI chipset that can take Extreme Edition CPUs from Intel, but sticking to DDR2 memory – th at alone sounds powerful enough to warrant a read. You can’t fiddle around much with overclocking, but the system itself already runs pretty hot. HC says it warrants a “dam good value” award. The “dam”, you see, is a pun. µ

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