Jetway motherboard reappears

WE HAVEN'T SEEN a Jetway motherboard for some time now. OCworkbench sends us news about the Jetway 775GT2-LOG. That's a pretty rare review actually - the motherboard is based on the NF570 SLI edition coupled with the MCP 430. The board supports Core2 Duo and has only two DIMM slots. Other interesting bits and bobbins include GbE, HD Audio, three x16 PCIe slots, the fact that the chipset uses a smallish passive heatsink and the weird yellow colour of the connectors. It's a good board... really.

PCStats sends us an article about the Asus EN7600GT Silent /2HDT/256MB/A which based on the Geforce 7600GT GPU. Ah, those weird looking Asus silent cards, you have to love them. This one has a pair of dual link DVI connectors, component outputs and a SLI bridge connector. The passive cooler is huge to say the least and most importantly, it is quite inexpensive, something rare for everything Asus. The card is overclocked by default and is therefore even better value for money.

MVKTech reports on the Powercolor Radeon X1950XTX 512MB HDCP video card. The R580+ core waited till the arrival of GDDR4 to show its full potential and boy, are we impressed. The memory runs at 2GHz while the core goes up to 650MHz. The card is also one of the first to support HDCP. The HSF is one of the more elaborate cards around, especially considering that it is the reference model. Overclocking though is almost nonexistent. The reviewer had to apply home aircon system to get a miserly increase. Power consumption is still high and although it is the fastest single GPU around, there are a few rough corners.

A few days old - Flexbeta sends some photos of the Windows Vista Ultimate Build 5536 Pre-RC1 screenshots - 13 in all, a 2.5GB ISO. Images are gorgeous but still lack the kind of sleekness that you would find on OS X. You will need a fairly recent computer to be able to run Vista even without the eye-candies like the transparencies.

Some things always happen to others. Take for example the Maxian M800 reviewed by Chinese website Beareyes. It is a cross between a PSP and an iPod and is actually a portable media player. It can display up to 480x272 pixels in a 16:9 format. Compatible with several open source and closed formats, it even comes with a remote control and looks very good. The M800 is quite small by itself and would be a great gadget for those who like me commute a lot.

Phoronix, the server motherboard specialist reviewer, tests the Tyan Tempest i5000VF and the i5000VS motherboards designed to accommodate two Xeon processors of the 5000/5100 series. The boards come with a XGI Volari video controller which is nipping ATI's market share over here. There's six SATA ports and much more in terms of expandability. Michael runs a few benchmarks test but that's not where you will find the winner as the Tyan boards are within a few points of each other.

If you want to send in reviews, hardware or software, don't hesitate, just bring them in. I am particularly fond of exotic hardware that you won't find elsewhere. Even if the review is not in English, as long as it is interesting and entertaining. Send it in. Also I would be glad if someone could point me to a recent directory of hardware websites. µ