Midrange Nvidia Quadro debuts

THE 3DPROFESSOR reviews the Nvidia Quadro FX3500 video card. Its little brother, the FX3450 has a much lower memory bandwidth but has a higher power consumption. Surprisingly, the FX3500 is thin - as compared to the dual slot 7900GTX, although very large. It comes with two DVI ports and a heat sink fan, but strangely does not has any heatsink on its memory modules. The card is SLI compliant. The FX3500 matches the FX4500 and 3Dprofessor is soon going to test the V7200 as well.

Bit-tech reviews the Foxconn 975X7AA motherboard. It features the Fox One overclocking technology with Foxconn's BIOS rescue technology. As you can guess, it comes with a 795x Chipset plus a RealteK ALC882 HD Audio. The rest is fairly standard for high end. Dual GbE, Firewire, SATA2 with eSATA ports etc. Oddly though the board is more expensive than Asus creme de la creme. A good effort but I feel that you might as well look elsewhere.

One of the potential competitor to that Foxconn motherboard is the Asus P5WD2-E premium motherboard which is based on the 975x chipset. It has Asus's patented AiLife silent computing heat pipe solution with 8ch audio, dual GbE, and Crossfire compatibility. Again, eSATA, loads of USB 2.0 and Asus's own proprietary technology form part of the bundle although you are paying a premium price for that technology. Viperlair compares it to the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme BTW.

Laptoplogic investigates the HP Pavilion dV1000t. The laptop comes with a Core Duo T2400, 100GB HDD, 1GB DDR memory, a DVD writer and a wireless card. It is not expensive at all and HP has thrown in a few nice addons like a 14.1-inch screen, altec lansing speakers and express card compatibility. List of hooos include the fact that it runs very hot and has no discrete graphics options, i.e. won't be a good gamer.

Overclockers Online tests the Spire Verticool II and the DiamondCool II which are both coolers. Spire make cheap but yet performing coolers which both make good use of heatpipe technology and aim at being as quiet as possible. Both the Verticool and the Diamondcool cost the same thing and differ only through their designs. OO singles out the Verticool as the against its bigger brother winner as the Diamondcool performs worse and only wins on easy installation. µ