Overclocks for X2 4800+ and 3800+ compared

BELGIAN website Matbe.com confronts the Zalman CNPS 9500 LED to nine other cooling solutions including Thermalright, Thermaltake, Asus, Intel, Scythe and Gigabyte. While its performance is almost beyond reproach, its price is almost double that of the Thermalright XP-90 which is apparently a better product.

Hardware.fr has an excellent article comparing the different costs of computer products in France, USA and Germany. 16 categories, each with three products have been earmarked. UK has not been included for obvious reasons and the conclusions are worth reading.

Insanetek checks the Abit AL8 motherboard, a 945P based product. Not your overclocking champion a nd from the author's point of view seems to be a rushed product. It is sufficiently devoid to be different from the AW8 but it still have interesting features. Old remnants of the 90s like that serial and parallel ports live on the same panel as the SPDIF, Firewire and USB ones. You do get a 7.1 sound codec and some more.

Gamepc pushes the G70 to its limit with the XFX 7800GTX OC which of course is factory overclocked. The card is pushed to 0.49/1.3GHz speeds using a surprisingly compact color reactive GPU cooler. One of thoese babies easily bests a couple of 6800GT and do get the best of dual 6800 Ultra in most scenarii.

PCStats brings yet another Athlon X2 4800+ to the eyes of its readers but this one was built in week 17 and bears the stepping ACBWE. Overclocking this CPU with a Prometeia Mach II GT produced one of those great moments in computing. 3.14GHz - from 2.4GHz - of pure pleasure.

Legithardware, for its part, overclocks the X2 4800+ little brother, the X2 3800+, to 2.7GHz, making it speedier than the stock 4800+. Running at 2.0GHz, one must admit that a 35% increase is nothing to be sniffed at. Using the DFI Lan party and quality memory, some quite spectacular benchmarks results were produced even if your enthusiast should be dampened by the fact that LH was testing an engineering sample. µ