Early Bird catches the 9600GT

NVIDIA'S GEFORCE 9600GT part is in the spotlight today – although the card won’t see the light of day until February 2008 - Expreview has early benchmarks on the card. It performs on par with an 8800GS (but 32 less SP’s), according to their tests, but these are early benchmarks on modded drivers. They’ll be doing a follow-up on this later on, but the numbers look promising for this mainstream part. If the 9800 series is derived from the same architecture, we can expect some decent headroom for GTS, GTX and Ultras...

Frenxperts at LesNumeriques have come up with a novel way of doing side-by-side comparisons. This page here will let you face-off any LCD in the whole universe (almost) against another LCD of your choice, comparing graphics rendering, text rendering, power consumption, colour space, viewing angles, contrast and basically anything you want – through images – so you get to SEE what the differences are, rather than being told. Good show, chaps!

Trusted Reviews.co.uk dissects a TVMax+ from Miglia. It’s an add-on box that humps your Mac Mini and lets it tune into analogue TV signals. The keyword being “analogue”. The TVMax+ will do what most USB TV Tuners do with the aid of an inbuilt video encoder – saving your Mac Mini some precious processing time. It will also let you export video to, let’s say, the iPod, Sony PSP and Apple TV formats. Interrrresting. Yours for around £130.

If you have $100 bucks burning a hole in your trousers, then wibble this way. Razer, manufacturer of gaming accessories extraordinaire, has released its Tarantula Gaming Keyboard and it’s on review at CPU3D. It’s got it all – headphone and mic jacks, USB ports, onboard memory to store profiles, 10 programmable hotkeys, media keys, and Anti-Ghosting (it’ll let you press 10 keys simultaneously and won’t tell you to stuff it). CPU3D loved it to bits.

Hottie Hardware has the details on Hybrid SLI – it’s not a review, really, but a preview of the inner workings of the technology as presented by Nvidia. It’s similar to AMD’s Hybrid Crossfire, but in two distinct manners – the ecofriendly Hybrid Power mode and the gas-guzzling GeForce Boost. The article also covers some specs on the 700a series of chipsets from Nvidia. Interesting material available here.

In the Land of Oz (or is that Auss?), OzHardware looks into the specifics of two Inno3D cards – both 8800GT-based, but one is a standard clock whilst the other is out-of-the-box overclocked. Interesting to see that SLI blurs the difference between the OC and non-OC cards – which means less value in SLI-ing OC’d 8800GT. µ