Guru 3D gets its HD 4870

APART FROM BEING a title for a classic heavy metal album from Metallica, the above sentence does have its meaning. All the reviews we’ve seen and read about the HD 4870 just wouldn’t feel right without Hilbert’s hearty assessment of the graphics card – and for our part, we’re quite surprised the candidness he’s given his article in regards to this particular summer of Love between DAAMIT and Graphzilla. We read it through-and-through. You can do the same.

Bjorn3D is looking into the virtues of NAS, or in this case Qnap’s “Turbo” NAS TS-409 Pro. Four drive bays in a fan-ventilated NAS enclosure, chock-full of features (RAID migration, webserving, FTP serving, gigabit Ethernet, etc etc etc) are on the test bench. If you read the feature set and it doesn’t impress you, then let it be known the device is also a power miser, sucking away slightly less than an incandescent light bulb while operating all drives in a RAID 6 migration, shows Robert’s tests. Seems worth a look, if you ask us. Read on.

Crucial’s highest rated DDR3 memory is on review at ProClockers. The Ballistix PC3-16000 two-y-ones have the extended XMP profile, so Tony dropped his “old” mobo and went off to buy a new one just for this review. His tests show that, while timings and voltage are important if you’re an enthusiast, you’re already getting a lot out of this type of memory. Just make sure your motherboard supports it, otherwise you’ll have a hard time with memory settings. Catch it here.

At Madshrimps you’ll find today a bit of research work on the overclocking prowess of the Intel’s 65nm and 45nm chippery. It’s a guide to all things overclockable under most of today’s modern (Intel) chipsets – including the Nvidia ones. There’s a great deal of stats too, like the vast amount of enthusiasts who used Asus Commandos to overclock their Conroes, or how cooling the northbridge is almost as important as cooling the CPU. Go forth and read.

Dustin at Benchmark Reviews has a nice article on his 6-month trek through the world of Crossfire – aptly named “Six Months with Crossfire”. It’s the ultimate Crossfire user experience broken down into a review-like article, and according to Dustin, multi-GPU setups have done a complete 180 compared to last year (for the better) and with these powerful mainstream GPUs reaching the market, it’s definitely a way to go. Catch the article here.

We know this’ll come out as sounding biased, but you chappies and chappettes that are into the UMPC scene might want to visit VIA’s Arena website at this address here. You’ll find a complete breakdown of all the UMPCs built in cohoots with the fab-u-less chip designer all in one place. It’ll also show you precisely the past, present and, eventually, the future of the platform – considering VIA was touting UMPCs years before Intel.

A week or so ago, we mentioned a review of the Silenx Ixtrema IXC-120HA2 CPU cooler. In that review the Ixtrema had fared very well for itself at the time, but today there’s an additional review by Tweak Town. Chris finds the cooler to be a good balance of quietness and cooling power, but unfortunately it’s a bit expensive coming in at $60 (AUD?). Click this way, please. µ