SLI Mode tested on an ULI based motherboard

OCWORKBENCH looks at the ULI M1695 again and reckons that the chipset manufacturer might have a nForce 4 killer at hand at a killer price. Not only that, OCworkbench uses a riser card, the ULI EV9567 to connect two Geforce 6600GT together à la SLI. Performance was strickingly similar to an nForce system which bodes very well for ULI's future.

Trusted Reviews tests the Evesham Acumen DC10 workstation. Inside you get an Asus K8N-DL motherboard with a pair of Opteron 275 Dual core processors. Also in the bundle, eight SATA connectors and two IDE connectors, two 250B HDD in RAID-0 mode. Performance is exceptional as you can guess and so is the price at £2999+VAT.

There's the battle of AMD PCI-Express chipsets at 3DXtreme where the Albatron K8X890 Pro II is challenged by the VNF4 Ultra VE, much cheaper than its opponent. If you are a non-enthusiast, go for the albatron. It has an onboard Envy24PT sound chip, much better than what you normally found and a four phase power. As for the Chaintech board, it is a much better overclocker and costs much less. Motherboards.org puts the new AMD FX57 VS the Intel 670. Single core processors are almost on the verge of becoming history. Intel wins the workstation/multi tasker contest while AMD as usual gets the gaming gong. Couldn't have been otherwise. As for overclocking, the FX57 is much better at that job than its intel counterpart. French website Presence PC presents a PC buying guide - you actually have twelve configurations ranging from entry level to extra high end. Don't forget that the prices are in Euros. They also have a useful logs of products that they have upgraded. Might be a good idea to do something similar for UK. Many French reviewers seem to have a very peculiar sense of humour that you won't get from English ones. PC Impact is one of them. They review the Shuttle SD31P which is the first one to support the Dual Core Pentium D. It is based on the 945G and ICH7R. The SFF has already got its cable laid and even includes a SB Live onboard, not unlike some MSI motherboards. But they do complain about the hike in price and the lack of any real innovation from Shuttle. The Abit X800XL Fatal1ty graphic card with 512MB memory is on test at Hexus. The card comes with 1.6ns GDDR3 RAM and comes with a power switch which when toggled sends the card into XTurbo mode with 420/550MHz sppeds - core/mem. Will it be a giveaway success in terms of performance and price? Nothing is sure about that. Boxgods looks at the Hauppauge PVR 500MCE TV Tuner which as you can guess supports Microsoft's Media Centre Edition. It integrates two125-cable ready TV tuners each with a Nicam decoder as well as two high quality MPEG2 video and audio encoder. On top of that you get FM Radio receiver and a whole lot of connectors. Quality and performance is excellent for such a card. µ