Core 216 vs HD 4870 1GB

THERE'S A NICE little face-off going on at Extremetech. Two remakes of ATI and Nvidia’s latest and greatest, the HD 4870 with 1GB and the GTX 260 Core 216, duke it out. These cards are almost identically priced (a possible $10-$20 difference, according to ET) and the benchmarks reveal precisely that. It's a tie most of the way, but Nvidia still has the upper hand in power consumption. Give it a look.

Those PR guys at ECS have been doing some pretty intensive rounds with the press. So intensive they’ve featured on pretty much every European website this past week. Yesterday they paid Hilbert a visit (or the postman did). He got a new A790GXM to play with, check his article over here, the mobo’s loaded to bear.

Fudo and the Fud Squad have grabbed a new Toxic-series HD 4870 Vapor-X from Sapphire and started the tests. As usual, the Toxic series offers better cooling and a decent factory overclock that gets you some extra performance right out of the box. The two-slot design with the rear exhaust for some serious heat dumping is becoming more and more common, you’ll notice. You can find it here.

Big chunk of CPU cooler at TweakTown today. Chris is paying homage to Artic Cooling’s workmanship on the XTREME CPU cooler. He finds it to have a great combination of cooling power and silence, which, let’s face it, is what everyone wants. It’s also darn cheaper than the chips it’s supposed to cool ($50), which makes it a great buy… if you can find one. Get on over there.

HardOCP has done a major roundup of the top graphics cards of today and their respective price/performance combinations. By this we mean the arduous work of breaking down the cards into price ranges (including SLI and Crossfire X) and testing them all. Worth reading for the effort alone.

Foxconn’s Black Ops is making a name for itself at Xbit Labs. It’s got more features than you can shake a stick at and the guys at Xbit were thoroughly impressed. The BIOS is a wonder, and you can tweak every setting there. However, you get a reality check when you try to overclock the CPU… that doesn’t work very well. Read it here. µ