MSI memory lover mobo tips up

THERE’S A REVIEW of the MSI P45-8D “Memory Lover” motherboard at MadShrimps. As you can imagine, it’s a motherboard with memory in mind, or memories, rather. It’s got four DDR2 slots and four DDR3 slots making it an ideal motherboard for those trying to build a cost-efficient system and then moving on to DDR3 as prices tumble. Very colourful, believe us.

To those of you building up an HTPC based on Phenom processors – even the high-end 140W ones – you’ll enjoy reading this review here on Think Computers of the Asrock A780GXE/128M. The motherboard, despite the odd BIOS, gives some decent overclocking results (but nowhere near Intel), and if you really really enjoy gaming you can even do SLI on it. Great product if you consider it costs $85…

Nvidia might be chopping away partners (or not) but in the meantime everyone wants to put out the best in its class. In this case it’s Asus and its EN9800GT Matrix, over at Hardware Zone. It comes with some odd software (iTracker) that, according to Kenny, is pretty useless. The conclusion to the card’s review is pretty much that the card isn’t worth what you pay for it, not by a long shot. Read it here.

CyberPower, down under, builds gaming PCs and they’ve shipped a low-cost one off to Chris at TweakTown. A sub-AUD$1600 rig, the Gamer Xtreme XE comes with an overclocked E8500 running at 3.9GHz, a Radeon HD 4870X2 and lots of interesting bits and pieces like a liquid cooling system and a BD drive. The tremendous firepower under the bonnet blew Chris away. Read about it here.

The GTX 260 is the poor cousin to Nvidia GTX280 and for some reason not many sites have tested these cards. This worsened as Nvidia scrambled the “Core 216” variant onto the market and left a half-decent product orphaned in the warehouse. Inside HW’s testing revolved around the 1680x1050 res and came out with some good results. Unfortunately, you can buy a much cheaper HD 4870 with a lot more performance very easily. Check it out.

Overclock 3D is testing Aeneon’s XTune DDR3-1866 solution (2x2GB). This kit comes XMP and EPP2.0 compliant, meaning you should have no trouble at all configuring the right settings in Intel- or Nvidia-based mobos. It’s also a prime candidate for Core i7 chippery as it sports an ultra-low (for DDR3) 1.5V operating voltage. Timings are a bit lax and pricing is nowhere to be seen. Read about the kit, here.

PC Games Hardware has a look at Intel’s processors, or more to the point, their cache. Testing seven different dual-core processors is a bit tricky, but they did it. They tried leveling the playing field to get a better picture of cache performance… and it worked. Equally clocked E8600s and E1400s will show a 47% performance edge of E8600 over its sibling. Get the conclusions, here. µ