Silverstone builds a wind tunnel

AS THE YEAR begins to draw to a close reviews a lot of sites are wrapping up for the year and recovering from their company Christmas parties, so today's roundup is somewhat sparse. But there are still a few hardy individuals putting out reviews to help guide the frantic last minute shoppers and help us aim our sights during the inevitable January sales.

Bit-tech has reviewed the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS, the GTS may be the smaller brother of the GTX, but it still packs a wallop and the BFGTech is one of the cheapest around.

XSreviews has done the unspeakable and actually read the manual while installing some PC innards into the Silverstone Temjin TJ06. Apparently the design, including the patent pending wind tunnel, makes installation and cable management quite tricky, but it looks really good when you're done.

LostCircuits has been contemplating the fate of the motherboard industry in the review of the ASUS M2R32 MVP. This rather Spartan board doesn't really have much of bundle to speak of, but it performs and overclocks very well.

Virtual-Hideout has offered up the OCZ 2x1GB PC2-8500 NVIDIA SLI Edition DDR2 Memory Review. The name is a mouthful, but if you're looking for a solid high performance memory kit to use with your new NVIDIA SLI 590 or 680i chipset these sticks get the 'Gamers Choice' stamp of approval.

Rbmods has reviewed the somewhat different Anydrive 3 MP3 Player. Rather than the traditional MP3 player design this is more of a FM transmitter with several input options like SD/MMC cards, USB or line-in. The bid screen is nice but it does have a cheap plastic look about it.

AMDZone has been checking out the Unreal 3 Engine Performance With Rainbow Six: Vegas. The Unreal engine has always been a popular basis for many games, and it looks like this revision is shaping up to offer some very appealing eye candy.

TheTechLounge has reviewed the Razer Tarantula Gaming Keyboard. Razer is probably best known for the range of high performance gaming mice, and it looks like the Tarantula is another great looking product, with some really interesting features like replaceable macro keys, but the price tag is likely to put off a lot of people.

AnandTech has been constantly reconfiguring the DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R. This board seems to have more settings and options than you can shake a stick at. This board is a great choice for serious enthusiasts who will spend the time tweaking the multitude of features to get the mest performance possible.µ

* SEND YOUR hardware news to Ian Williams.