HD3870X2 Crossfired

HERR DOKTOR’S franchise in Formosa has boggled the minds of enthusiasts everywhere by benchmarking not one, but two HD 3870X2s in Crossfire. Hey, if you’re doing something naughty, at least do it in a big way! Well the benchmarks don’t really reveal much except that the drivers aren’t really all that great right now. The scores on this Crossfire system aren’t really anything to write home about (compared to what they should be), but for the sake of the photo alone you should go there and bask in its combined airflow. Er, here.

On the lighter side of graphics computing, Computer Shopper has an HD3450 on display: cheap, full-featured, low-profile and absolutely no chance of running Crysis at a playable framerate – that’s what they figured. Not that you’d expect a $50 card to do that, but the card’s virtues sink in when Denny says “flawless playback of 1080p HD content on a 1900x1200 24-inch monitor”. Get your cheap thrill here.

The former bovine-imitator, Gateway, is on the path to greater glories with the FX7020 budget gaming PC. You can imagine evil enthusiasts mocking Gateway for actually using “budget” and “gaming” in the same product concept, but it seems to work well for them, says Digital Trends. They’ve done a review on this machine – and although it won’t be up there with the Blackbirds, Falcons and XPS’ of this world, it will provide gamers on a budget with the right balance of technology and price. Get your fix here.

XFX and Palit 8800GS cards are under the magnifying glass at EXPReview. This has become a staple of the website and once again they’ve trumped everybody else. You get to see what stuff the 8800GS from Palit and from XFX are made of. In the case of XFX its made of slightly faster silicon than the competition, clocking in at 680MHz, and a bit more of backbone – literally a length-wise strip of metal to avoid bending the PCB. As a stop-gap solution for DAAMIT’s HD 3850 the 8800GS performs quite convincingly in most benchies except Crysis and Call of Juarez. Sounds like a decent mainstream graphics solution, give it a look.

Hardware Logic has been quite busy these days. Their newest article is on the Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D, ie: 2x1 GB of DDR2-1142 kit. Apart from combing your hair, you can use these particularly nifty modules to man your computer’s memory slots. HL thought these was an extremely good out-of-the-box kit, pricey, but good. Oh, and long after you’re pushing up daisies, this kit will still be under warranty... click mouse button here.

Les français de BHMag.fr test a LiteON LH-20A1L(here in English). It’s a SATA superdupermultidrive with 2 megaoctets and LightScribe technology. SATA will remove the ribbon cables from your PC’s innards, as well as removing any limitation a PATA DVD would impose by being on the same ribbon as an IDE HDD. The bundle includes Nero Essentials 7 and you can pick up this drive for about €49. This reminds us: if installing Windows from a SATA DVD, make sure the BIOS has native SATA support, otherwise you won’t be installing Windows from that drive anytime soon.

And finally (a little envy here), AppleInsider points out that 3 very specific media were sprayed with Macbook Hair: the WSJ, the ubiquitous USA Today and Newsweek. The AppleInsider page gives you access to their reviews of the skinny fruit-themed notebook. Fanbois beware, you may be confronted with statements that actually reflect some truths about the MacBook Hair. Put on your reality distortion goggles and click here please. µ