Diamond back in the graphics market

DIAMOND Multimedia's latest business graphic card is under scrutiny at Consumer Electronics. The BizView BV300 has dual DVI and TV Out capabilities. It is based on the TV515LE GPU from ATI and comes with 256MB GDDR2 memory and goes into a PCIe x16 slot. John Virata, the reviewer, however points to the dilemma that ATI customers on Intel platform. What will happen next. The card though is almost perfect for the segment it is aiming at.

Cooling your PC efficiently can do three things - reduce heat dissipation, reduce the noise inside your PC and lower your bank savings. Firingsquad has a roundup of some after market video card coolers. Manufacturer's cooling solutions can be quite noisy which is why the likes of Zalman, Arctic Cooler and Thermaltake have offered products to improved the way your video card sounds - pun intended. The Accelero X1 comes out first due to its performance, price and six year warranty.

French website TT-Hardware tests the CoolerMaster Xcraft Combo. This external enclosure is crafted by a master of Cooling - so to say. It comes with USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces. Made up of Aluminium with a black anodized finish, it looks better built than many far-east enclosures that I've seen inthe past. The Xcraft was tested with a Hitachi HDD on a A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Comes with a rudimentary backup software and is a tool less model. Not cheap but you get what you paid for.

Hardwarezone reports on the Shuttle XPC X100 which is a Core Duo based barebone. It is as slim, although not as small, as Apple's Mac Mini. The one thing that is striking is the fact it looks like the forthcoming Nintendo WEE. Jokes aside, it is an innovative design for a desktop PC. The test system is based around a T2400 processor with 512MB memory, Windows XP Home and a i945PM chipset. The graphic card used is an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 while storage consists of a slot in DVD writer and a 250GB Seagate HDD. For the rest, I leave it to your eyes.

The Corsair Twin2X2048-8500C5 memory modules are lab-otomised at Sysop. Got words that they are actually the cheapest 2GB modules that the reviewer found on the market. They come with black heatsink spreaders and the performance they deliver is first class. Corsair provides with a lifetime warranty on this product and throws in some fantastic overclocking experiment; guaranteed to run at least 1.066GHz data rate. Just don't burn yourself with the price.

More memory test, this time at PCStats. The OCZ DDR2 PC2-7200 Platinum XTC SLI Ready 2GB memory modules will make you happy. OCZ also packs in Enhanced Performance Profiles - which comes handy for overclockers. OCZ also has special heatspreaders which has holes rather than honeycombed design. Like the Corsair bunch above, you get what you paid for, in this case, some insanely fast memory that you can overclock to 1.1GHz and still want for more. Wicked.

If you want to send in reviews, hardware or software, don't hesitate, just bring them in. I am particularly fond of exotic hardware that you won't find elsewhere. Even if the review is not in English, as long as it is interesting and entertaining. Send it in. Also I would be glad if someone could point me to a recent directory of hardware websites. µ