150GB WD Raptor beast reviewed

STORAGEVIEW gets its hands on the fastest SATA hard disk drive currently available. The Western Digital Raptor WD1500 just came out and already impresses. With a 10Krpm spindle speed and a 16MB buffer, the Raptor, as it came to be known is now the fastest drive for non server use. Put two of those in RAID0 and you will notice a substantial improvement in Windows Load time. The WD1500 is faster than even 15krpm SCSI drives which speaks volume on their performance.

Legionhardware overclocks a cheapo Intel Celeron D 336 CPU to incredible lengths or heights. With 256KB L2 cache and a 533MHz FSB, it is a potential candidate for overclocking especially when it costs $70. It is 64-bit compliant and overclocks to almost 3.6GHz, although being 10% to 30% slower than an equivalent P4. While it will still not match a Pentium 660 which costs six time its price, it will be a good start for your powerful and yet cheap gaming system.

This is probably the motherboard that will ornate my next system. The Asrock 775i915P-SATA2 is not only cheap - as with most Asrock products - it boosted impressive stability as well as compatibility out of the box with ATI's Crossfire. Overnight, ATI's dual card solution suddenly becomes more viable. Overclocking options exist and while they are not up to the best of the bunch, they are more than sufficient for the entry level segment. You won't find SATA II, RAID, HD Audio or GbE LAN.

Now I don't know if you plan to use the above board with top of the range ATI Radeon X1800 Crossfire Edition cards. These noisy but spectacularly quick cards are now available in mass, just a few days before the R580 cards come out. The X1800XT Crossfire version still lags behind the GTX 512MB but the latter is not readily available and when it is, demand far outstrips supply resulting in over inflated prices. For now though, as GamePC puts it, ATI has the upper hand when it comes to availability and pricing. Don't forget the AVIVO and the GB of memory onboard

Anandtech checks the latest nForce 4 SLI motherboards from Asus, Foxconn and Albatron. The latter two are probably bargains compared to the A8N-SLI. All three though come with all the delicacies that you may expect from mid-range and high end products. After all, they are made up with the Nvidia SLI chipset and therefore pack almost the same punch. SATA2, RAID, Firewire, dual GbE, 8-channel audio, you ask it, you have it. These SLI x16 mobos do not overclock to the level of the cream of the cream but can nevertheless manage to stay on top.

You might wat to check on this Asus Motherboard A8N32-SLI Deluxe which is arguably one of the best Athlon SLI motherboards under the sun. Over 25 pages of benchmarks, information and more, Xbitlabs dissects tests and evaluates the formidable fire power of that solution. That motherboard was not featured in Anandtech's test but you might want non the less to have a look at it.