Intel Pentium D 805 gets its second of glory

THE BOY WONDER turns to the Intel Pentium D 805 for a Dual Core Budget thingie. Was it interesting, well, read for yourself. That part is a 2.66GHz model with a 533MHz FSB and 1MB cache. It is cheap, cheap at $132 but the P D 820 is only $30 more expensive, is quicker and has 4MB cache plus a 800MHz FSB so it should be a no brainer. Anyway, the tests include nine Intel and AMD processors. The results, well; well, gamers should look elsewhere it seems except if your game has SMP support. Anandtech is also preparing a separate article where they will overclock the P D 805 to the max.

IT-reviews tests the Acer CU-6530 digital camera. This lightweight, ultra-compact, camera is relatively affordable at under £200. With a 6MP resolution and a 3x optical and 4.4x digital zoom, it is on par with others as far as specs are concerned. Add to that a magnificent 63mm screen, that nearly 2.5-inch and you get a great candidate for the best ultra compact mid range camera. Quality was within expectations and is more than adequate for consumer use. The camera also comes with a docking station and a 64MB card.

Tweaktown examines the Sapphire Pure Crossfire PC-A9RD580 motherboard. Yes, it comes with the Xpress 3200 chipset and yes, it has a white PCB. It is compared with a Microstar SLI x16 model. It has only one GbE port but ten SATA and PATA ports and eight USB ones. Its Southbridge storage connectors need some tweaking but performancewise, it should be more than enough for most. There's some good overclocking at hand and it will definitely appeal to ATI's lovers if the price is right.

Pocketlint checks a wonderfully designed 8.1MP digital camera. The Ricoh GR Digital has a magnesium alloy body with a large screen. It is not cheap at £400 and the pop-up flash might not be to everyone's taste. It is no ordinary camera though giving you full control over your snapping manoeuvres - you can change from automatic to full manual shooting options as well as fine tuning everything else. On top of that you get quite a lot of accessories that will come handy for professional photographers looking to migrate to digital.

Sapphire's CEO, K D Au, speaks to Hexus in an exclusive Interview, next to a nice in page advert of the Sapphire X800GTO2. Kudos to David Ross for pulling this one, the first interview of the man in four years. He hints - a number of times - at a potential move to Nvidia to cover grounds but doesn't say anything about Ageia or other GPU manufacturers. KD wants Sapphire to become a multimedia company; that's great guys but please don't become another Guillemot/Hercules. Don't ever forget where your strengths lie.

Tom's Ware goes after SAS - serial attached SCSI - technology. SAS is SCSI's answer to SATA in a nutshell. It is compatible with SATA as well for good measure and requires far lesser connections as compared to parallel solutions. A number of SAS solutions are examined, going from 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard disk drives to SAS RAID adapters and SAS in SAN solutions. Over 28 pages, Patrick Schmidt shows you what it takes to build the most effective hardware storage solutions out there. µ