Crossfire, Physix shape up

THE FELLOWS over at HardOCP have taken a gander at the Abit AB9 Pro motherboard featuring Intel's P965 Express chipset. With support for Intel's legacy Pentium 4, Pentium D, and the newest Core 2 Duo CPUs, it starts off looking quite promising but sadly it appears this board doesn't live up to the Abit reputation.

According to both Dan and Kyle, this offering falls far short of the mark with driver setup issues, poor layout, poor stock stability and poor overclocking. Interestingly, ViperLabs has tested the same board and didn't encounter nearly as many problems, in fact they recommend it.

If you have a few hundred quid lying around and you're not sure what to with it, you may want to wander over to FiringSquad and look at its performance preview of the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro CrossFire. It looks like ATI's Crossfire is starting to offer some competition to Nvidia's SLI dual card systems.

AMDZone has had a play around with the Asus Ageia Physx card. The review makes for interesting reading and gives a good feel for where the PPU (Physics Processing Unit) is today and what we may see of it in the future.

If you're tired of your drab old PC case, or your dual graphics and PhysX cards are taking up too much room then the next two links are definitely worth your time. If tall and imposing appeals to you then SYSOpt has just reviewed the NZXT Zero PC, a hulking case with more than enough room for all your add-ons. If you yearn for something more sublime and curvy then check out the Spire Pininfarina SP-ATX-PALU Silver Case reviewed by MVKTech.

Next up is the Fujitsu LifeBook C1410. This, according to VR-Zone, is a fairly average notebook with its place in the world defined by its good image quality, durable package and good battery life. Scoring 65 VRMarks this doesn't look like it's going to make us green with envy, but as a middle of the road option it certainly looks like it has its niche.

Tech ARP has just updated its Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide, so if you're tired of settling for poor performance because you were nervous about fiddling around in BIOS of your PC, check out the guide to help you find your way through the perilous chip level wasteland.

FastSilicon has also striven to put our collective minds at ease but producing this Watercooling 101 guide so now you can find out how to put water into your computer without blowing it up. Perhaps Sony's battery department should have a look. µ