HD 4830s retested

WITH THAT MESS surrounding the mis-programmed firmware on the 4830 and the consequent slaughter of 80 shaders, Driver Heaven is doing another take on the cards. They’ve got one card from each of ATI’s manufacturing partners’ retail brands: HIS, Sapphire and PowerColor. They all get compared to the 9800GT in this test, but things aren’t as black and white as on other tests we’ve seen. Get a move on...

TweakTown wrote up a beginner’s guide to water cooling. If you’ve always been afraid of getting into this sort ofthing, here’s your opportunity to learn it from someone in the know. Andrew takes an EP45-Extreme mobo from Gigabyte – one that already has waterblocks installed on the northbridge – and plug in a ThermalTake BigWater 780e unit. Self-explanatory, really. Get it here.

Still in the liquid cooling theme, you can find the ThermalTake ProWater 850i at Hardware Logic. Very similar to the 780e we mentioned above, you can stick this on the inside of your case, and the performance is second, in the test, only to the Reserator XT. It’s a big improvement over the previous kit from ThermalTake, says Matthew.

Kyle’s Crew is giving Evga’s 790i SLI FTW mobo a thorough once-over. The motherboard comes packed with everything in Nvidia’s bag of tricks. Daniel’s testing revealed some nicks in the green armour – overclocking was limited and you get very much the same (except tri-SLI) on a much cheaper 750i SLI FTW. Good, but not great, would sum it up... Read it here.

If you’re on a strict budget, DAAMIT’s HD 4650 and 4550 might tickle your fancy, as you can see at AMDZone. As long as you don’t take the 4650 into high resolutions you actually squeeze some decent frames at good quality out of the card. The 4550? That’s another story, let’s just say you might want to keep it away from most modern games. HTPC duty is fine we guess. Read it over here.

Antec has joined up with Delta Electronics to build power supplies. The first fruits of the partnership are on review at SilentPCReview – they’re called the Antec Signature-series and come in 650W and 850W flavours. SPCR takes you through the new PSU and shows you just how good the electrical specs really are. Read it over here.

Hardware Canucks has a review of the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard. This particular item brings to the fore some pretty wild things like DDR2-1366+ support together with some more businessy-type features. You’ll find a TPM modu le, DES Advanced, dual Gigabit Ethernet and the Viagra of motherboards: Ultra Durable 3 tech. Needless to say our eyes popped at the mention of DDR2-1366+. If you’re a Gigabyte fanboi, you’ve come to the right place. µ