Sun server a success

ANANDTECH IS GIVING Sun’s Fire X4450 - their new IA-based server - a looksee and depicting precisely how it’ll take the server fight to HP and IBM’s backyard. Sun has done a bang-up job with the X4450 it seems and Johan’s results show lower power consumption and better performance all-round. Factor that into your company’s bills. If you run sites or care for IT maths, breakout your TCO calculators people, Johan did.

Legal issues aside, the spat between Gigabyte and Asus has given reviewers a bit more energy when delving into the DES/EPU issue. OCC, for example, has a review of the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard (with DES, naturally), and they seem to give DES a thumbs-up. Actually the whole board seems to get the thumbs-up, as it beat most of the competition hands-down and still carries a ton of features that you’ll want in your high-end rig. Read OCC here.

Sticks of 32GB. That’s bleedin’ big for a USB interface, but nonetheless, you might need one sometime. Xbit has wrapped up their 32GB USB stick roundup (a smallish one, but important) with Corsair, OCZ and Patriot. Although it isn’t likely you’ll be using these things for Vista ReadyBoost, it does provide some sort of performance index for you to follow. OCZ comes out ahead in the race, but we do prefer rubberized protection over shiny plastic any day. Read the review.

PNY hasn’t been the most PR-active company to date, but they did manage to slip TweakTown a shiny new Verto 9600GT. This card is one of those 'don’t judge a book by its cover' cases, as the cooler is slightly better than the reference design, according to Shane. The price seems to be the clincher here, as you can pick these up for $160, and SLI them for twice as much – and the 9600GT performs great when in SLI. Read TT’s review.

802.11n is hyped. All Wi-Fi technologies are hyped out of proportion, promising to deliver gazillion bits of datarate when they stumble around still trying to be compatible with everything around them. This was true for 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g and now for 'n'. Dual Band Wireless-N routers are the latest of the bunch (and they’ve been around since late last year). Trusted Reviews has a prime example of one such device – from Netgear. Care to figure out how it performs?

OCWorkbench is hard at work with a Diamond in the rough – a Radeon HD3650 with 1GB of GDDR2. Although this isn’t an enthusiast card, OCW managed to take it up to 850/504 (over the stock 725/400) and scored some decent numbers in a variety of games. It also plays back HD video with as little cost to the CPU as possible. What does look odd, is that you can quad-fire it with 3 other cards... so if you’re a slow upgrader... read about it. µ