INTEL WILL UNLEASH its 9000-series CPUs any day now. Quads, as you might have guessed, and Yorkfields to boot. XBit Labs has one of these - the Q9300 - under the hammer and have noticed some particularities with this chip that raises some ‘brows – first off they come with half the L2 cache a “standard” Yorkfield would come with (ie: 6MB). Secondly its speed grade is 7.5 times 333MHz, making it 2.5GHz. There's that weird 0.5 multiplier again. In the end XBit Labs doesn’t think the chips are very overclockable, although they do perform brilliantly at the modicum of OC-ing ability they possess – even climbing ahead of the QX9770 any many-a-benchmark. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t complain about a $260 CPU not being able to overclock very high when it’s already neck-and-neck with a CPU of the Extremely Expensive gender –a QX9770. Read the nitty gritty here.

Frosty Tech is all about the cooling and they have something of a treat for HTPC’ers. Low-profile, high performance, is what Scythe is aiming at with their new Shuriken CPU cooler. Targeted at the low-profile of Media PC’s , the Scythe Shuriken is just 65mm tall. We’d figured a low-profile fan/heatsink would actually blow sideways or front to back so it could get airflow moving horizontally, rather than vertically... seems the Shuriken does the trick vertically. Get your downdraft here.

Oh Canada, how big a wallet do you carry? And a Patriot? How much does one cost? Well, the Canucks cherry-picked what is likely to be one of the most expensive DDR3 kits around – the Patriot Viper Extreme 2x1GB PC3-15000. As they put it “ridiculously high specifications” and a lifetime warranty make it one o f the better DDR3 thingies around. $499 Canadian bucks (which nowadays is almost a dollar). It also makes for a very expensive comb. Go for bust here.

PC Perspiration has a Visiontek HD 3850 on review today (actually it was posted Friday). Pretty standard bundle and performance for a below-average price. PCPer faces off a silent 8600GTS with the HD 3850 and the latter gets all-round better everything. Overclocking put the card almost 100MHz over the default clock. For the $169 price tag, PCPer thinks you can’t go wrong in the mainstream. Read it here.

TechARP has an editorial on the virtues of the G45 and G43 chipsets from Intel. These are both DirectX10 parts to be released in Q2, and the main difference will be memory management and hardware decode for VC1 and AVC, in other words, your G45 will be fluent in HD video while the G43 part will be require an interpreter (ie: CPU-assist) to do the decoding. That’s about it – you won’t be gaming Crysis on these parts (at least not as you’d like it) but you’ll have some decent firepower for a really hush-hush HTPC. Read Adrian’s editorial here.

The very German editors of Hotcases.de are reviewing a beastly Tagan BZ-ESA Series 1300W PSU (we do think they mixed up that names as on the the Tagan site you can find both ESA and non-ESA 1300W PSUs). Nevertheless it’s equipped to handle the most extreme power needs like quad graphics, and even has useful carry-case for the cabling and tools. Hotcases.de lists a USB cable somewhere in there, that leads to believe there’s more to it, but we couldn’t find any r eference elsewhere. Click here if you speaketh Deutsch. If you don’t, try this Yoda-like translation here. µ