Budget VIA chipset powers mid-range mobos

BRITISH WEB SITE Hexus reports on the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Intel P965 mainboard which is Conroe2 Duo compatible.

The board is a high end model boosted by a strong spec list. Seven PCI/PCIe ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, three Firewire, 10-channel audio HD Audio and 10 SATA/PATA ports. Surprisingly though, there's only one GbE LAN port. Coming from Gigabyte, it does offer good BIOS options and had no problems matching the i975X chipset in almost every benchmark. But there's no Crossfire support. Although with the ATI/AMD merger jettisons that.

The same board is also on review at Overclex. where we find out that there exists other less endowed models like the DS4 and the DS3 which have less features. Gigabyte did bundle quite a few things with the motherboard, including accessories which allows up to four SATA2 ports to be converted into eSATA2 ones. The board itself feels cramped though with the chipset heatsink growing in size every generation. The cooling system has been made passive and the board continues the trend of decreasing number of PCI ports.

Another motherboard cropped up at OCworkbench.com. The Asrock 775Dual-VSTA is build around the VIA PT880 Pro chipset. Asrock with a handful of other motherboard manufacturers are banking on VIA and SIS chipsets to improve their bottom line. The board supports both DDR2 and DDR memory and supports all LGA775 CPU including the Core2 Duo. That's not all, in addition, it is also compatible with AGP and PCIe video cards, a HDMI_SPDIF connector and comes with a 7.1 HD Audio codec. It will sells for cheap and you can bet that it will be a killer.

Madshrimps has a roundup of Nvidia 7900GT's video cards; Club3D, MSI, Evga and Sparkle are amongst the competitors. Madshrimps also threw in a reference card as well as a 7900GTX for good measure. Three out of those cards are factory overclocked, with the model from eVGA reaching almost GTX-like speeds. We're glad to see a model from Sparkle, which has been absent from HWR for quite some time now. Interestingly, the reference card is also from Sparkle an dis on sale at only Eur 259. Depending whether you want maximum overclock, guaranteed silence or cheapest price, there's surely a card in there for you.

Digital Trends tests the Nike+iPod sport kid which is on sale for around £20. DT calls it the get-off-your-duff gadget of the decade and it is easy to see why. The product is geared towards those who would like to break away from they keyboards but never get the push to do it. It is actually a device which help you burn out your calories using the iPod nano and a Nike shoes to accurately measure how much exercise you did. Although the initial investment was high, the reviewer found it to be well worth the pain.

Bjorn3D checks the Verbatim 4GB Store n Go USB drive, which is actually a hybrid kind of drive since it is actually a small HDD encased in a plastic enclosure, think of it as a mini USB Enclosure - this means that the cost of the drive is half that of a comparable Flash version, although it is twice fatter. The Verbatim drive even comes with its own carrycase, how cute. Bear in mind though that since it is a true hard drive, it is more prone to mechanical failures and to data losses after a fall. On the plus side though, you will be able to format it to NTFS file format. µ