Vista's gaming prowess assessed

THANKS TO NXcolumbia for pointing me to a two-month old article from Hardwaresecrets. I simply don't remember whether I covered this one. It shows in details and with pictures what to expect from Intel's water cooling solution, also known as Advanced Liquid Cooling technology. Although it is going to come with a 4500rpm fan, noise is supposed to be 4 dBA only with a system flow of 101 CFM. Much more information on the website.

Extremetech tests Vista's ability to run the latest games. They used an AMD AM based rig with a nForce 590 chipset, a FX62 and a X1900XTX card, the perfect combination for an exquisite gaming experience. Games in the article included World of Warcraft, Splinter Cell, Half Life2, Battlefield2, Fear and a few more. Conclusion, Mr Vista got a B- rather than a full A+.

PCFormat blog reports on the Physx Sham. Apparently, AGEIA's flagship demo of the PhysX technology can be played on a normal GPU by adding a few words to the command line. PCF tested it and found out that £200 is a bit too much to pay for something that doesn't bring much more to the gameplay. There are even more questions unanswered as you will read there.

GamePC reviews the latest Intel Xeon. The 5080 and the 5060 actually perform quite well when compared to AMD's Opterons although to see a Dual Core 5080 running at 3.73GHz getting beaten by a 1.8GHz Opteron is quite something. Being HT-enabled and benefiting from Intel's latest 65nm technology, those Xeons are sure going to give Opterons a run for their money for a couple of months more.

Hothardware gets a closer look at the Alienware Aurora M9700. No it is not equipped with Radeon 9700, rest assured but rather with a pair of Geforce Go 7900GS cards with a total of 512MB memory. The rest of the specs is also very tasty. A Turion ML-44, a 17-inch 1920x1200 pixel LCD, 2GB memory, two 100GB 7200rpm Hitachi disks and a DVD writer. It is expensive. But then, it is a laptop for rich gamers and sod you if you're not one.

PlanetX64 tests the AMD AM2-based X2 5000+ processor. As we found out in many other reviews, the AM2 processor is nothing exceptional, only an evolutionary change. The X2 5000+ was pitched against an overclocked Opteron 170 and a XE840. Bear in mind also that it has 1/2 the cache and a higher latency. Still it is not worth upgrading at least if you purchased a computer this year. µ