Asrock brings AMD M2 mobo to life

ONE OF the very best Gigabyte socket 939 motherboards is on review at Bona Fide. The Gigabyte GA-8K8N Ultra-9 motherboard comes with all the goodies that you may expect from a high end part. From the Nforce 4 Ultra chipset to two GbE parts, with the 7.1 channel sound card and the ten USB ports. But that doesn't stop here. While you don't get extra hardware like the DPS or any wireles adaptor, the 8K8N should prove quick enough for most people to boot from.

As 2006 nears, products bearing its marks appear. The Intuit Quicken Premier 2006 gets an editor rating of excellent from PC Magazine. Hailed as the ultimate Quicken, this mature software package - 22 years already, introduces more innovations than it did ever before. It beats MS Money 2006 as PC Mag's preferred choice and brings some needed competition to the sector.

After everyone else, Extremetech reviews the AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. If you are a shallow pocket genre like most of us, then this might be your processor of choice if ever Longhorn/Vista turns up with 64-bit dressings. The main difference between this part and its elder A64 3200+ brother is the amount of cache. Performance difference between the Celeron and the latest Sempron is huge to paraword Extremetech.

Asrock launched what appears to be the first ULI M1695 motherboard. Reviewed at OCworkbench, the 939Dual-SATA2 ULI which is upgradable to the future M2 socket. Sources confirm that it should sell for less than £50+VAT. The board comes with one SATA2 and four SATA/PATA connectors. You also get one 10/100 Ethernet and one 7.1 Realtek Audio codec. Extensive overclocking features are available and Native PCIe/AGP support is a boon. There are some problems with the current BIOS but the ability to have six displays is what sets it apart.

Legitreviews checks the Antec V Cool Expansion slot VGA cooler. Some might not like it simply because it blocks the adjascent slot. But it does provide with fresh cool air for your VGA card. Moreover its blue colour, lighted case will be appealing for those looking for case modding components.. But does it perform? Well, see for yourself.

Xbitlabs has a review of the AMD Athlon X2 3800+, a full 1000 points below the top of the range 4800+. Now AMD Athlon has five SKUs featuring dual core technology. It overclocks nicely to 2.4GHz which is equivalen to a 4600+ and it fails just behind a 4800+. Now the X2 3800+ is one third the price of the 4800+ and nearly $500 less than the 4600+. As Xbitlabs puts it, the 2005 Summer hit. µ