ACROSS THE POND, Anand Lal Shimpi got his hands on an Apple Iphone 3G and did his magic. The funny thing is he honestly doesn’t know what to think about it. In his own words: “Many of the features that shipped with the Iphone 3G were also given to the original Iphone courtesy of the 2.0 firmware update. The inclusion of 3G support is great but it kills battery life and in many cases the performance improvement isn’t nearly as great as the numbers would make you believe.” That kinda sums it up, right? Well, there’s a lot more to read, right here.

Hilbert, the Guru of 3D finally got round to testing an aging (it *is* a month old, after all) Inno3D Geforce 9800GTX OC. In terms of pricing and performance, it matches its sibling, the GTX+, but it still fails to impress when compared to an HD 4850 (which, by the way, is cheaper). The bundled CoH: Opposing Fronts is good value and you can squeeze some extra MHz from the card too… Mistah Hagedoorn gave it a thumbs-up.

You wouldn’t believe how much we grinned (nostalgia kicking in) when we opened up this link to a motherboard review on OC Workbench. Those who have never played the classic Star Control II space saga, won’t get it, but those who know the franchise will understand what we mean. We’ll say it in one word: “Supox”. Yellow, green, orangey-red motherboards – shorely not a coincidence… Go on, eat your veggies.

InsideHW is testing an HD4870 from that new brand, Force3D. The maker is still relying on the reference design so technically there’s nothing different from all the other HD4870s out there. Temps weren’t, it seems, an issue, neither was overclocking. Dusan took the card all the way up to 850MHz, where it played Crysis with 8xAA, 16xAF, 1920x1200, high settings at an average 31.7fps… that’s good value. 220 €urobucks seems steep, but we get the short end of the stick every time, here in €uroland. Catch it here.

Hardware Canucks is testing some Mushkin kit, the Ascent PC3-12800 2x2GB, to be precise. These DIMMs are breaking-in a new heatspreader dubbed eVCI, which according to the author, work just great. Overclocking, for example, took the memory close do DDR3-2000 levels, and timings are also pretty tight in normal operating conditions. The price is also within reason, sayeth the Canuck. Read on.

Cameron, down under at Tweak Town, is making an argument for Nvidia’s ecosystem while testing the Corsair XMS3 DHX 1600MHz 2x2GB kit. The combination of the 790i with profiled memory kits is really making it easy to get extreme performance out of the box. Overclocking these things is also a delight, he thinks. 1760MHz was the max overclock, resorting to some active cooling, though. Get his review, here. µ