Overclocked Conroe reaches 4GHz

THE TEXAS GAMING Festival kicks off the summer Lan Season this forthcoming Saturday. Sponsors of the event include Tekrepublik, Coolermaster, ECS, Thermaltake, Dell via Alienware, OCZ and many more.

Gamers will get their hands on the latest rigs available with AMD Opteron Processors, no FX60/62 here. Video cards will be 790GT for everyone. Games will include Counter-strike Source, Battlefield 2, Quake 4, FEAR, and UT2004. Amongst the various prizes to be won is a wonderful top of the range super duper Acer Ferrari Laptop. More details here.

Now compare that to the overclocked E6600 Conroe that Xtremesystems resident overclocker, Fugger, has managed to overclock to 4GHz. OK, it is an Engineering Sample, it was done using Vapochill and an unmodded 975X Intel motherboard, with no BIOS mods. The FSB was at a sky high 445MHz and the multiplier, a mere 9x. It is expected to do SuperPi in less than 13s, that more than twice faster than the FX62 above. You have to bear in mind that Engineering Sample are effectively worse performers than the final core - anyone remember early Clawhammer performance. AMD better bring the K8L quick.

Xtremecomputing reviews the ThermalTake Purepower 600W PSU. TT is known for its superior products and the Purepower is not to be underestimated. Comes loaded with features that you could expect. SLI, Crossfire ready, dual core support, four SATA connectors, 120mm fans, honeycomb design and much more. As usual, for all the PSU's that have been reviewed in the last few weeks, this PSU gets full points, can't-find-any fault scenarios. PSU's have come that far.

The UK version of Tomshardware gives us a Buyers' Guide of Video cards. They have rounded up 19 video cards spread over 61 pages. The list includes only one AGP model - from Nvidia and a whopping 18 ATI models. Tomshardware has a few more pages concerning power consumption and heat dissipation of those ATI cards - and two Nvidia cards. TH gives a few conclusions for Sapphire, Powercolor and HIS video cards; all this for 61 pages. Who said page views?

ATruereview tests the eDimensional Audio FX gaming headset, a rather old article but still worth it. The headset delivers real vibration with Tri-Color LEDs that glow in the dark. The Audio FX is not as expensive as one could expect and comes with a microphone on the left as well as a volume controller that acts as a bass controller as well. Seems that there's even a USB port on it, although the use is somewhat obscure. Gamers might appreciate it although at the end, it's only a pair of headphones.

Eclipseoverclocking reviews the Teamgroup Xtreme 2GB memory pack also known as Cronus. This is I am afraid, a completely unknown memory group and the part reviewed is a DDR500 model with a mirrored finish heatspreaders. They used a DFI motherboard and an Opteron processor for the tests as well as a water block and a 120mm fan. The article ends with the conclusion that 1GB DDR modules are still not the best for overclocking. Better leave this to 512MB models. µ