Montecito details emerge

David Kanter, from Realworldtech, sends us some information about the launch of Montecito, which is the son or grandson of Itanium. He managed to get hold of Pat Gelsinger and a few other important head honchos from Intel. David wrote on the Itanium systems as well as the platform as a whole. Interestingly, there's a bit of coverage of the relative success of Itanium in Japan and in Emerging markets like Russia, which shows how different the system integrator/customer relationship is in the Western and Eastern markets.

PlatnetX64.com lays its hands on the Puget Custom Computers TJ07, which is built on the Silverstone Temjin TJ07 case together with a stealthed watercooling system. The case has great looks and while some might not say that it is a killer model, the blue LED combined with the almost silky finish will woo many. The cooling system is from Aquacooler and although it is expensive - £1K - you do get a Liang DCC pump, a huge radiator and a few more bits and pieces. The great thing is that the case is already pre-built. You just have to use it to build a computer now.

The ECS KA3 MVP Extreme Motherboard has a metallic purple colour which does not go down well with some reviewers at Bit-tech. Otherwise, it is a sensible piece of PCB, especially coming from a manufacturer that was once loathe out for producing poor products. In comparison this particular model sports the ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200 with the SB600 southbridge, HD Audio, two NICs and two Firewire ports. It might not overclock like hell, but it cost less than most high end motherboards and is AM2 compatible.

Intel's Core 2 Duo gets an evaluation at Lostcircuits. The subtitle used - blinded by the light - gives you a hint at the content of the article. As for every good review, there's a load of benchmarks including some rarer ones like Truespace 5.1. For good measure, the processor is compared to a few other components including two Opteron 252 as well as the P4 820. In some instances, the Core2 Duo core is five times more efficient than the old Netburst architecture, which leaves us to think, whether Intel did not fire that particular team.

Chilean website Chilehardware introduces us to a new kind of hobby. How to change the Condensers of your plate - that's what Google Translator says. For the rest of us, it is how to change the capacitors of your motherboard. This can prove to be a life changer for some of us, especially if the motherboard is expensive and if you manage to explode that capacitor. The writer gives us a few hints how to recognise a bad capacitor like liquid leaking, inflated top, frequent blue screen of death as well as memory failures. They did the test on a Lan Party with lots of photos.

Hitechreviews.com analyses the i-Star USA S8 Storm Series ATX Mid Tower. A rather odd looking case which can take up to ten bays and come with one 120mm fan. The rest is pretty much standard, including a steel body. The front cover is slitted, in order to improve air flow I presume. The rest of the buttons and ports are placed on the lower right hand side of the tower, not the best place for me, but that's subjective. Under load and without fan, inside temperature rose to 53 degrees with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+. Not bad for the price. µ