Zap your 9600GT into shape

FOR THOSE WHO FEEL their skills at soldering are up to scratch, you might want to give this article here a read. It’s TechPowerUp’s guide to voltmodding the Nvidia9600GT. This is NOT for the faint of heart as you can potentially damage and ruin your card. On the other hand, it seems there’s a lot of performance to be squeezed out of the card (but you’ll need extra cooling). The guide doesn’t provide before-and-after performance numbers, or OC’ing results, but it’s interesting as-is.

Although we have little doubt which CPU maker is currently dominating the laptop scene, Tech Radar ordered out a couple of budget (sub £500) laptops from Dell and had an Intel v AMD showdown. TR tested five aspects of each laptop: battery, graphics, gaming, boot time and price. Although Intel’s machine is what everyone’s money is riding on, things aren’t as plain as you’d think. Read Tech Radar’s review here.

Anandtech had a go at Asus’ U2E ultraportable with its 11.1-inch screen and cow upholstery. It comes in two flavours – SSD and non-SSD – the SSD carries a $600 price premium over the mechanical HD one, FYI. Contrary to most manufacturers, the U2E includes an optical drive, which, like it or not, is quite useful and reduces the excess crap that you can lose or break while traveling. Overall it’s quite an improvement over its U1E predecessor. Jarred thinks it might be one of the best ultraportables currently available. Read the rave here.

[H]ardOCP or [H]enthusiast – whichever you prefer – has a review on MSI’s Platinum Combo P35 mobo. The Platinum Combo it supports both DDR2 and DDR3 through its 6 DIMM slots (which in all honesty is a standard feature in the chipset, but not in its usual implementation). Some issues arose with the DDR2 implementation and left Daniel wandering how much effort did MSI put into it. Kyle posted his own thoughts on the matter, saving MSI some face. Not for enthusiasts, possibly for upgraders, wethinks. Read it here.

Hexus.net has run a full bang4buck analysis on the AMD 9850 Phenom and finds that €uropeans get a better deal on AMD than Americans. However, the Intel Q6600 is still a better buy, thinketh Parm. However, that isn’t the bad news for AMD… the bad news is getting through its crisis of faith within the AMD fanbase – performance matters and bugs aside – Hexus lays down the cold, cruel truth on AMD’s situation. Read it here.

XSReviews.co.uk armed itself with a CyberSnipa Stinger mouse and went off to hunt some noobs. The mouse looks eerily like some older Logitech models in design but, don’t be fooled, it’s pretty well specced for its price. A 3200dpi laser sensor (with four different settings), removable weights, onboard memory (for story macros) and a speedy 1ms response time seem to have caught everyone’s eye. It looks comfy without being too smooth to slip out of your hand. However XS found the accuracy was off sometimes... very high scores overall. µ