Phenom X3 conquers mainstream

IN CASE YOU’RE planning an upgrade soon and you’re on a budget, you might want to read this article here (it’s the English version of a Chinese article published at it168.com, courtesy of Expreview). The article itself is a match-up of 4 CPUs that might be considered by many the lower end of mainstream CPUs: Intel’s Core 2 E4500, E7300, E7200, E8200 and AMD’s X3 8600. Some strange numbers – the X3 8600 either crushes the opposition or lags behind a bit... definitely worth looking into.

Feeling the pressure of deadlines, Nermin at Fudzilla, reviews the Asus eeeeeePC (4G). Small keyboard and screen don’t offer the greatest browsing and typing experience, although we assume you know what you’re buying into when you get a 7-inch laptop. Enjoy computing smallness here. Oh, never mind the Cyrillic characters, we hear Asus ships them in local languages too, fnarrr.

Hardware imps at Hardware Logic have landed a couple of sticks of Mushkin’s Redline XP2-8000 – 4GB total. These are rated at 1GHz with 5-5-5-12 timings, and although they wouldn’t budge at stock speed, Daniel managed to lower them to 4-3-4-10@800MHz – which sounds pretty tight. They didn’t get them up to 1066MHz. Lifetime warranty included, it scores pretty high. Read on.

Deutschland is becoming ever more the adopted homeland of AMD’s processors, as you can figure out with this eleven-way 100% genuine AMD CPU shootout. It’s phenomenally large, with 32 pages of AMD on AMD action and from what we garner, writes-off X4 Phenoms under 2.3GHz – as underpowered. Available in German and English (the review, that is).

Although external HDD technology is always on the move, sometimes you’ll need to plug new stuff to old PCs. By this we mean plugging eSATA enclosures to a USB 2.0 plug - which is what the USB Fever 3-in-1 eSATA, SATA and USB 2.0 Combo Hub does. Dragon Steel Mods has the skinny on this lil’ peripheral right here. It’s a one size fits all solution, a USB 2.0 solution.

Big Bruin takes a shining to an ECS mobo equipped with Nvidia’s GeForce 7100 chipset, the aptly named GF7100PVT-M, micro-ATX mobo. It’ll let you run Intel quads at 1333MHz for a measly $65 (that would be about fifteen eurocents at the speed the dollar is deflating). It’s role is first and foremost an HTPC rig, as Jason found, but a little extra features would definitely put this on someone hitlist. Read the review.

Chile Hardware has an Antec case on review right here (English, here) – the Antec Nine Hundred. Chile took this opportunity to test out their new case rating system. CH is taken aback by the case’s looks – “sober yet gamer”. But the real jewel is the integrated water plumbing – all you need to do is hook up a few more cables, waterblocks and the pump, and you’re OK for watercooling. No good for LAN parties, though, as it weighs a solid 3 metric tonnes. You’ll also find it hard to match long graphics card with a side vent in the windowed panel.