XGI cards are well spotted

Xbit-Labs ponders on the revival of GodZilla AKA the Lenovo of Hard disk drives AKA IBM's storage arm bought by Hitachi. They look closer to the Deskstar 7K400 which is the gigantic 400GB son of the 75GXP series (some of you should faint by now). 60% inprovements in SATA performance recorded.

Phoronix previews the XGI Tech Volari 8300/8600/8600XT based on the XG45. XGI appears to use the same terminology for naming its products as ATI (8X00 series and XT). Don't expect the cards to be powerhouses as they do either run from 64 or 32 bit DDR interfaces.

PCperspective has an interesting interview with three AMD executives at Computex where Ryan and them talked about Model numbers, DDR2 technologies and some more like the redesign of the Opteron 1xxx series.

The Sony VAIO VGN-FS295XP laptop a stylish Sony laptop with a slim lightweight design and a 15.4-inch widescreen X-Black display. Comes with an Intel Pentium M 750, 512MB DDR memory, DVD writer, Geforce 6200 and a huge 100GB HDD. Most laptops are run of the mill models and this one is one of them. Nothing to shout about. Average performance, average looks and expensive price tag.

Xbitlabs also checks the launch of the Intel Pentium D 820 CPU. The lowest priced Dual Core processor yet. Funny though that there is no dual core vs dual processor review on the internet (intel side); would have been an interesting article. They managed to overclock thei Dual Core processor to 3.5GHz

Intel has launched the 945 chipset and HKEPC has a chinese review of it. The 945 has an embedded Intel GMA graphics and share most of the features of its bigger brother the 955X. The motherboard on test is the Asus P5LD2 Deluxe.

That same Intel GMA950 core is tested at Extremetech. With a Core frequency of 400MHz and features like S3TC texture compression as well as anisotropic filtering, it should challenge entry level graphics cards, shouldn't it? See for yourself.

Last test, HKEPC checks the Albatron ATOP 6200AL card. It has 128MB Samsung DDR memory running at 350MHz and a 386MHz core. The ATOP technology allows one to use an AGP card on a PCIe board using a special add on card. They tried to plug a S3, an ATI and a Geforce 2 MX card. All failed. Performance is slightly underwhelming.