Linux gets Phenom-enal

IF YOU'RE A hardcore penguinite, you might be interested in knowing that Phoronix has posted their review of a 790FX Phenom chipset under Linux. In this particular case, it’s (once again) a Gigabyte kit (is it our impression, or has Gigabyte achieved an almost unquestionable control over review sampling?). It’s a “first looks” article, but they seem to be confident about the mobo’s compatibility on the other hand it sports a SB600 southbridge (not an SB700 as you’d expect).

We must confess, Cizmo isn’t a brand we’ve heard a lot of. Their business is the notebook gaming market, akin to State-side Voodoo PC and Alienware. They’re latest offer is the C1730, now on display at Laptopspirit.fr (here for silly English persons) – a 17-inch monster equipped with none other than a Core 2 Duo T7800, a GeForce 8800M GTX and a 1920x1200 hi-res screen. If that isn’t enough to get you salivating, let’s add in the HD-DVD drive and TV-tuner (with remote). It looks like the lovechild of a Qosmio and a Voodoo PC to be honest. A bit noisy, thought the French. The price? A bargain at €3100…. Kachingg!!

PCMasters.de takes a fresh look at nine high-end CPU coolers from all over the place. These things take a lot off your stock cooler and they’re all 775/AM2 compatible, which means almost all of you will be interested. Read it if you know what’s best for you (hier für Englisch).

More of GeForce 8800GTS exposed at Gamepyre. It’s an XFX 8800GTS Alpha Dog edition. This card sports a smallish overclock to 676MHz (memory is OC’d too). It does show some odd results in Bioshock, falling behind its bench-mate, a stock eVGA 8800GTS 512MB. However, Chris gave it a Silver Award. Read on.

DFI is back on the saddle with their LANParty series mobos. This one at Ninja Lane is actually called the UT 790FX-M2R. It’s been online for a couple of weeks, we know, but we hadn’t gotten round to covering it. No Phenoms here, though, they used a BE X2 5000+ as the test’s CPU and the OC’ing results were pretty decent – 3.3GHz (300MHzx11), +700MHz over the standard clock. Oh! Did we mention it’s also Tri-‘Fire? Get your info here.

BTW: Yesterday's wiible was struck by a severe case of foot-in-mouth, or foot-in-aperture to be more precise. We mentioned “graphics aperture size”, when thinking about an entirely different generation of tech... Apologeeks.

Happy New Year to every single one of you (unless you celebrate chinese New Year, in which case we'll repeat our wishes down the line). µ