780i is the dog’s nadgers

THE NVIDIA 780I promises to deliver enthusiasts the ultimate platform – at least that’s what Graphzilla is pitching.

The latest 780i-based mobos from ASUS and XFX have been the target of reviews today and yesterday and they look like they're on the right path. Trusted Reviews and Bit-Tech.net have interesting details on these boards as well as the numbers – you’ll notice when you get to the block diagram and add up the PCIe lanes. Bit-Tech figures that the 780i is a hybrid that mixes the 680i, 570i and NF200 chips to build a very powerful enthusiast platform. Move on to these links here and here to get the details and benchmarketing. Pricing is another matter entirely, but if you’re an “enthusiast” you’ve learned to take it and smile.

Hardspell has also gone with some Nvidia wizardry when they benchtested Tri-SLI under the new 780i platform. It’s mostly a gaming comparison of single, SLI and Tri-SLI benchies. Apparently some games scale extraordinarily well, as is the case of Lost Planet, Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R. but UT3 barely notices the hungry beasts within. Get your numbers here.

Guru3D does an extreme makeover on their resident Radeon 2900XT with an Artic Accelero Xtreme 2900 VGA cooler. It’s a massive heatsink fan combo to replace your stock material and hopefully bring down the temps on your power-hungry 2900XT. There’s also a variant for the 8800GTS, Ultra and GTX. For a measly 30 €urobucks you can make your card quieter and cooler, not a bad idea.

PCWorld has in their hands – literally – Logitech’s new baby luxury keyboa rd, the diNovo Mini Keyboard. Truth be said, no-one’s had a serious go at making a quality keyboard/remote system for the HTPC market. The diNovo Mini Keyboard is a thumb-typing device with an integrated touchpad. It works over Bluetooth and you can even have it run your PS3... It’s an eyeful.

TBreak has a couple of microATX mobos from ECS and MSI on the test bench. These particular mobos are based on the Nvidia MCP73V chipset (nForce 630i+7100 IGP). These are mature chipsets with what the reviewer believes to be a high HTPC potential thanks to the HDMI output. Give it a go, it won’t bite.

Zalman ZM-VFC2 Multi Fan is a fan controller product that will attract hardware enthusiasts everywhere, and OCModshop has the skinny. It’s a 5.25-inch unit with a LED display that reads-out the speeds and temps on four fans, as well as controlling their speeds through the jog-dial. It supports 3 three-pin fans and 1 four-pin fan. It also reads out system power usage (no idea how accurate that is). Pretty cool stuff.

GPSandCo is a French website dedicated to the mobile market and we haven’t spoken of them before. We tripped across a nice review of the HTC Touch Cruise (also known as HTC P3650) – it is, as the name implies, a touch-screen smartphone. If you’re looking for a PDA/phone combo with a ton of features to boot, you might have found your grail right here. µ