Intel Atom measured, weighed

THERE’S SOME INTERESTING news on the web today, with some numbers that may keep some Intel marketing beings up all night thinking what to do next. Fudzilla has posted its preliminary review of a pre-production Atom. Eliot (that’s one “L”, one “T”, people...), well, Eliot put the platform through its paces, and like it or not, the benchmarks are showing something you’d expect from a C7 processor rather than an Intel product. Yes, an incredibly lame FPU. We haven’t seen something like this since the days of the original Pentium 4, which begs the question: are the products somehow related? Eliot didn’t have nearly enough time for a thorough test, but you can draw your own conclusions right here.

XFX is known as a Tier One AIB partner to Nvidia. They usually get all the good stuff out the door first and leave the competition choking on their trail of smoke. Well, with the 9600GT they haven’t been as fast (at least review-wise). Here’s one review from TweakTown where the Alpha Dog shows its slightly muscular build compared to an 8800GT (1GB) and a reference 9600GT. The XXX branded card is probably the highest clocked 9600GT around at a default 740MHz, meaning that it really is performing above and beyond.

If you’re finding it hard to stuff a CPU that requires a large amount of cooling in a little ol’ HTPC case OCC has some aspirin for you. Scythe’s Shuriken low profile CPU cooler promises to bend the rules of physics by beating both low-profile and full-sized coolers, and it doesn’t even carry a heavy price tag. You can find the review here.

Acer’s been polishing up its line of laptops and desktop PCs, and that Gemstone Blue is looking very attractive (guys and gals, huddle up). The new 6920G is on review at InsideHW, and it’s promising a great deal in the multimedia department. Spec-wise there isn’t much to look at. It’s a T5750 (ie: 2GHz), it sports 2GB of DDR2 but... - and here it gets interesting – it uses a mobile graphics part of the GeForce 9000 family. Acer’s also added the CineDash console to the laptop which allows you to control multimedia by touch. It look neat. Read the review here.

PC Perspiration has something for the AMD fanboys out there. They’ve gone and run some numbers to figure out just how better (if at all) is the new Phenom processor when compared to its older brother, the X2. Many will argue that Phenom will only come into its own when it moves to a 45nm process (just round the corner, according to AMD), but AMD brought it out on 65nm so proceed to this plaice to find out how much progress there was from the Athlon to the Phenom. µ