The new GTX 260: now with extra SP

THE CARD FORMERLY KNOWN AS GTX 260 is now known as… wait for it… GTX 260, but its different on the inside. Still built on a 65nm process and a staggeringly complex 14-layer PCB, the new GTX 260 sports 216 Stream Processors (that’s 24 over the previous 192), which is a mild improvement that brings it a bit closer to the HD 4870, performance-wise, and some might say (pray?), closer to Nvidia’s rebirth. Still, the chip is marked differently (G200-103-A2) but the branding remains the same - GTX 260 - as opposed to some clever willies (like us) who believed it’d be called the GTX 260+. Get ready for a right old mess. Or in the words of an anonymous airline pilot… ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’.

Here’s a list of reviews from around ze Web, no order in particular.

Hot Hardware

Firing Squad

Hardware Canucks

Tech Power Up

Hexus

Guru3D

PC Games Hardware

(Mr Baxtor must be on vacation this week...)

Still, some less confusing kit is out and about and making the rounds. We’ve got a nice lil’ Xigmatek Red Scorpion S1283 HDT (120mm) CPU cooler over at Tweak Town. Based on Heat-Pipe Direct Touch technology, it’s one of those new manfangled coolers that do very much with very little. This particular piece of kit not only does great cooling, but at a low price, says Chris.

TechSpot has a review of … *drum-roll*… a Creative Labs sound card. Let’s just say it’s pretty rare these days, as the add-in card market for sound is pretty much dead in the waters. This piece is one of those “Fatal1ty” branded thingies (X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro to be precise) that tries to pitch a sound card based on the argument that a guy with good eye-hand co-ordination has his face on the box. It looks slightly different from the average card as this one is shrouded. It’s a bit on the pricey side, thinks Julio, but you can always buy the card sans Johnathan Wendell’s face on it for 40 bucks less… get it here.

We like gaming, we like laptops, but we haven’t had a great experience on one so far. PC Perps might convince you otherwise, Ryan thinks the Dell XPS M1730, with its X9000 CPU, SLI’d 8800M GTX and Ageia PPU is the One. Spare no expense, no component and you get a mean gaming machine. That’s what the M1730 is.

HP made some noise with its Dragon notebook a while back (the fact that they gave away 30 of them was by itself remarkable). Now they’ve shrunken the screen but kept the formula: HD resolution, TV tuner, BD-drive, 16:9 aspect and more features coming out of the cahooey. Laptop Mag reviewed one of these, and was thoroughly impressed. µ