Keeping cool while the Sun shines

WITH ALL THE HYPE surrounding Intel and AMD with the recent launches of their quad core systems, it would easy to believe they are the only two companies in the market. For most of us they are, but if servers are your bag then check the article by Hardware.Info on Sun Fire T1000 and Sun Fire T2000 with the UltraSparc T1 which have eight processor cores in one chip and can manage 32 threads simultaneously.

I also find it somewhat ironic that while the northern hemisphere plunges deep into winter there seems to be so much talk about PC cooling, must be something to do with all that global warming people are harping on about.

Rbmods has reviewed the Vizo Ninja Notebook Cooler Review and Bjorn3d has looked at the Vantec Piano 101 Notebook Cooler, but everyone knows that a ninja would beat a musician in a fight any day of the week.

XSreviews has been tinkering with the rather odd looking, but apparently high effective Sytrin KuForumla VF1 Plus Cooler which looks to me more like a paddle wheel than a cooler, but there you have it.

Meanwhile Madshrimps has reviewed the Swiftech H20-Apex Ultra Watercooling Kit Review for those folks who absolutely have to stay cool.

ATI's X1650 chipset seems to be flavour of the week, with Virtual-Hideout reviewing the ASUS EAX1650XT 256MB PCI-E Graphics Card Review and Legion Hardware putting the MSI Radeon X1650XT through its paces. In both cases it seems to be a top choice for the majority of us on a mid-range budget.

BIOS magazine has reviewed Diskeeper 2007 Professional Premier Edition which tackles the problem of ever increasing disk capacities and massive files, helping to boost performance with efficient defragmentation and improved program loading times.

TweakPC has been grooving to the sounds from the Altec Lansing 2.1 Soundsystem FX4021. As usual I have linked the automatically translated version as my German is next to non-existant, so don't expect the review to read smoothly. µ

* SEND YOUR hardware news to Ian Williams.