Quasi-Silent 8800GTS nudges GTX

8800GT/GTS CARDS have been in the news more often than not for the heat they generate (at stock speeds). BFG has taken the bold step of factory-watercooling their cards, calling them the OC2 Watercooled Edition. Guru3D has a go at them. These things pack a serious punch and have actual overclocking headroom to work with, meaning they can reach 8800GTX levels. With the added bonus of being single-slot, coupled with almost silent operation, you could actually consider a SLI rig with a few of these bad boys. Oh, and did we mention it’s only $429?

Following up on yesterday’s link to Tom’s Hardware Guide, we’ve been receiving input from readers either refuting or supporting the idea that Phenoms are supported in older mobos. Thorsten from Planet3DNow.de has been kind enough to direct us to its own page where there is a listing of supported mobos, by brand, as stated by the manufacturers. Let us know your thoughts on this.

Hothardware has a sneak peek at Intel’s D5400XS mobo, aka Skulltrail. For those of you who lost track of Skulltrail since IDF, it’s the enthusiast-grade mobo based on the Seaburg chipset plus dual MCP100 chips from NVIDIA. This would allow for dual-Xeon/Quad-SLI joy and a bleeding expensive computer/workstation! Gaze here.

We think budget gear doesn't get near enough coverage in the mainstream press, and that's why we think you should be reading this particular article here. Techpowerup reviews an ECS A770M-A mobo. This uses an AMD 770 and SB600 north/south chipsets and is AM2+ socketed. It also supports a massive 32GB of RAM and Phenom CPUs, which, according to the author, makes it the cheapest AM2+ mobo on the market... that'll be $70, thank you.

Zotac has released to reviewers their AMP! version of the 8800GT. Tweaktown’s got it here for your perusal. The vendor went to some lengths to cool the card but kept it single-slot which is quite an accomplishment for a GPU running at a +100MHz overclock. The card even has a sort of "SB Header" to plug into your mobo or soundcard so you can re-route sound to your phlat panel via HDMI. They think it’s good performance+value for $400 Australian, which is about $350 US.

If you own a GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA Windows Mobile smartphone, then try this little trick here. Uneasy Silence gets some serious kudos for pointing towards WMWifiRouter, which as you’ve likely guessed, is a tool to transform your smartphone into a WiFi Router. Just remember you probably contracted a limited amount of traffic on the cell network, so don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Asrock is in the reviewer’s scope today, too. This time XBit Labs tests its 4Core1333-eSata2 motherboard, which runs on a P31 chipset from Intel. Although the P31 isn’t rated for 1333MHz FSB, Asrock’s got it up and running. XBit aren’t thrilled about the mobo, however, as it offers few features for enthusiasts. However, P31 performs very much like the P35 mobos.

We’re just curious about the "Crossfire support" that Asrock lists under the features - is that a combo PCI Express x16 plus the "AGI" x4? What say you, XBit? µ