Competitor to the Raptor appears

PC PERSPECTIVE tests the Western Digital Raptor X 150GB SATA HDD. The best SATA drive out there. It is so good that Rahul Sood said in his blog that this drive - or rather that family of drives alone - was the reason why Western Digital is so much loved by enthusiasts. With a rotational speed of 10krpm, a 16MB cache, an average latency of 3ms, it costs much more than your average hard disk but boy is it quick. We'd like to see a roadmap of the Raptor family by the way,

The Samsung SP2504C hard disk drive is a 250GB SATA 300 monster. It is on test at Hardwaresecrets. It has a relatively small buffer - 8MB, a 7200rpm rotational speed, support for NCQ, two 125GB platters. This Samsung is one of the fastest out there - it hasn't been compared directly to the Raptor yet to my knowledge. It is 75% faster than the Maxton Diamondmax 16 250GB, which is a contemporary model. FYI, they were using Diskspeed32 as benchmarks tool. It is more expensive than most, but it is worth it.

There's a long list of motherboards - socket 754 motherboards - on review at hardspell. It is in chinese with a translation here. You will have never heard of most of those motherboards brand, but chances are that they are marketed in the rest of the world under other names. The review is divided into PCIe and AGP platforms. Loads of photos and the cheapest of them is the Xiangsheng NF3250N mobo. Five PCI slots, a nice layout and an ATX format for a price under £30.

Thetechzone reviews the ECS KA1 MVP extreme motherboard. Loads of flashy colours - each PCI and PCI x16 are of a different colour - for this socket 939 motherboard. It is based on the RD480 chipset with SATA II support, RAID, 8-channel audio, Firewire, Dual LAN - not GbE. Firewire and so much more. The KA1 also comes with a steel board with its name on it. Posh, but really a lost of precious space. It is inexpensive but the name ECS by itself does not inspire trust. Unfortunately. Like Gigabyte, ECS might do well in launching an altogether different brand.

Techreport sheds some light on the Abit AN 32x motherboard. Will it help Abit catch the likes of DFI and Asus? It is a socket 939 motherboard and is no Fatal1ty branding. It is feature-heavy, with some passive chipset cooling, great overclocking potential, and great speed control. You get Abit's own technology like Silent OTES and uGuru. For the rest, the usual high flyer featues - plenty of USB and firewire ports, 8-channel sound channel but the competition seems to be already ahead of it.

Gamepc checks the Geforce GT and the Geforce GTX, 7900 of course. They've got models from XFX and from Asus. The 7900GTX is the beast with a dual slot format while the 7900GT is slimmer. You've got dual DVI slots and a single slot copper cooling for the 7900GT - and as you might expect the 7900GT is by far a better overclocker than its big brother. No slam dunk win, but the 7900GT family will certainly bring down prices as well as introduce some goodies like hardware H.264 decoding. µ