Overclock your Opteron CPU

GAMEPC ROUNDS UP four 500GB hard disk drives and has a go at them all. Everyone except Fujitsu and Samsung is present. The worst performer was the Maxtor Diamondmax 11 which for some strange reasons gave very awful benchmarks despite having the same kind of specs as the rest of the competition - SATA2-300, 7200rpm, 16MB cache and four platters. The best buy has to be Western Digital with its Caviar SE16 followed closely by the Seagate Barracuda.

Speaking of hard disk drives, HDDsaver has a write up about when and why to use an external hard drive. Good reading but definitely not essential, a good introduction but some more details would have been more interesting.

Pureoverclock checks the Arctic Cooling Accelero GPU coolers X1 and X2 which both GPU coolers for Nvidia and ATI respectively. Impressive features and specs. Both of them appear to be way better than the competition right now with cooler temperatures and much less noises plus they do not cost an arm and a leg - although some of you might be concerned by the air flow inside your casing.

Austrian website Hardwareoverclock has a guide showing you how to overclock your Opteron 148 processor. Actually it seems that it is the second part of that guide. The geeks over there have been able to push it right through to 3060Mhz, a gain of 860MHz, not bad for a server chip, although, they had to push the voltage to 1.65v and the DDR memory to 612MHz.

Viaarena discusses the various merits of single and dual core. For me, it appears to be a non-issue. Moving to Dual core or dual processor is quite a change in itself and it is not financially painful at all. Viaarena compares the X2 3800+, the 3200+ and the 3800+ processors. Whether you are a gamer or not, try to DC if you can, you won't regret it afterwards.

Anandtech reviews the Asrock 939SLI32-eSATA2 motherboard and makes use of two M1697 and M1695 chipsets. Now, I know quite a few of you will curse me for giving top thumbs to Asrock but apparently, those guys at least deserve recognition for innovating. Cheap, provides x16 SLI features for half the price of the Nvidia x16 and is extremely competitive with what's on the market right now. And it IS available. Hardcore gamers need to look elsewhere though. µ