Celeron D 356 is a devilish overclocker

HKEPC has a whoppa of a chip in there with the new Intel Celeron D 356. It is a 65nm Cedar Mill part and overclocks like crazy. How about 5GHz for a start? It comes with 512kb memory and is clocked at 3.325GHz which makes it, at least on paper as fast as an old Pentium Northwood 4 3.06GHz. At 5GHz, it manages to outclass a 2MB L2 Pentium 4 670 running at 3.8GHz, pretty easily.

Techreport has a thorough article on the Opteron 165 and 180 processors which are arguably the most exciting processors currently available from AMD. TR tested it against A64 processors using the A8N32-SLI deluxe motherboard. The Pentium D 930 is also dropped in as a competitor. They got the Opteron 165 to 2.65GHz while the 180 did not move at all. No contest here as both processors easily outclass Intel's oranges.

Anandtech inflicts GBH - Graphics Bodily Harm - to the X800 as it gets Catalysted. Not only that the Radeon 9700Pro also got its benchmarktdown there. Actually, Anandtech has compared all Catalysts across a series of game and found out that ATI has been probably concentrating too much on 3DMark rather than on games. A forthcoming article will analyse the same thing with Nvidia and Forceware drivers.

Gamepc checks the Asus P5WDG2-WS Intel 975X motherboard which fight in the Workstation category. The board's boasts support for PCI-X devices which is a must for server/workstation camp. It supports Crossfire as well and while it is expensive, it is quite a performer, it overclocks very well plus it has twin GbE ports. Now you'd probably be well advised to investigate the market thoroughly before committing yourself to a particular platform.

Bittech tests the Coolermaster CMStaker 830 casing which looks like a mini fridge and is made up almost completely of Aluminium. At its price though - you might even think that some gold has added to it. Very expensive for a no-PSU casing. That said, the casing itself is very well design and cold well become a reference. USB Sockets are illuminuated and well placed and so is the power button. A very nice product if you can afford it.

Hexus has some interesting views on the Corsair Nautilus500 watercooling kit. Corsair had released a water cooler system three years ago and this time around, the company says that the water cooler kit can be installed in 15 minutes. It is external which might be a good thing. although it means that that the pump will be found outside and therefore alisghtly noisy. It is the simplest way to get into watercooling and gets a recommended from Hexus.