Gift giving deity of your choice comes to town

IT LOOKS AS THOUGH the world+dog has been pumping out the reviews lately, what with the lead up to Christmas and the lid finally off AMD's new quad core stuff I guess it makes sense.

We'll start with motherboards. Bjorn3d has reviewed the mid range ASUS P5B-E. It looks like another solid product from ASUS with a good set of features, but only a single PCIe x16 slot.

Rbmods has reviewed the budget MSI K9N Neo-F Socket AM2 motherboard, which shapes to be a good performer a an excellent price.

Elite Bastards has reviewed the Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H motherboard. The model number may be longer than the feature set, but it certainly looks like it does the job.

The last motherboard on the list is the Intel Bad Axe 2 Motherboard reviewed by Tweaktown. Well laid out with some new overclocking features compared to its predecessor.

On the video card front, AMDZone brings us the Asus EAX1950 Pro Review, while Lost Circuits has reviewed the Sapphire RADEON X1950 Pro, both with impressive results.

Tweaktown has written up a showdown piece on Gigabyte call on Zalman - Radeon X1950PRO vs. GeForce 7900GS and IT-Review has pitted a VGA trio: EVGA, Leadtek & Sapphire against each other.

Virtual-Hideout has been powering up a Enermax Galaxy 1000W Quad-SLI Power Supply Review, although there can't be too many people out there who need a 1KW PSU.

On a more reasonable front PureOverclock has created a Mini Roundup: FSP FX700-GLN Epsilon & Thermaltake Toughpower 650W to give you some options if you're in the market for a new power source.

If you're in the market for new speakers you may want to have a gander at IT-Review's Point of View Turbulence G21 review which, according to the author, will blow your socks off.

Virtual-Hideout has reviewed the awesome looking Thermaltake Armor LCS Liquid Cooled ATX Chassis. Obviously aimed squarely at overclockers, this rig will help remove a lot of the hassle that comes with water cooling, and it looks good to boot.

For the more reserved amongst us who may want to add just a bit of extra cooling, you'll want to check out the Noctua 120mm Fans Review from Rbmods and possibly Bjorn3d's review of the Antec SpotCool.

It seems that Razer have come up with another winner according to XSreviews review of the Razer Krait Gaming Mouse providing high performance, good looks and an excellent price.

Tweaktown has reviewed the X-Micro X-VDO MP4 F610 - Portable Music Video Player, giving it a highly praised 9/10 and 'Must Have' award.

AMD's quad core is finally here and along with our own coverage here and here, you check out Hardware Upgrade's Quad FX: The First Quad Core AMD Platform and AMDZone's Athlon 64 Quad FX74 First Look and PC Perspective's AMD Quad FX Platform Launch: An Editorial for more coverage of the launch. µ

* SEND YOUR hardware news to Ian Williams.