More graphics cards than your girlfriend could shake your stick at

A BUNCH OF SITES – us included – have dedicated Valentine’s day to ... graphics cards. For no reason at all, it seems, hardware reviewers across the world have plotted to keep geeky boyfriend’s minds plugged into graphic content, rather than graphic you-know-what with their better halves. Hexus, for example, decided it was a fine day to publish a “best graphics card for under £50” comparison of an OC’d Sapphire HD 3650 and a (also OC’d) HIS IceQ HD 3650 Turbo. You can get this mainstream duel over here.

Legit Reviews counters with an article on that HD 3850+HD 3870 bastard Crossfire thingie. Well, it seems it works fine from their point of view – really just plugging and playing the heck out of the thing. We didn’t find the version of the Catalysts used, but if it wasn’t 8.2 we’ll see a big update coming from most hardware sites. Get your mixed-up Crossfire test here.

All the while the aforementioned reviewers were mixing and matching, facing off this and that card, Techreport was getting ready to pounce... They picked up 16 cards from different vendors and benchmarked everything. This is usually something that takes place over the course of a few days, so they didn’t catch the latest driver refresh from both Nvidia and AMD. They’re likely to go back to the workbench tonight and feast on chocolate and caffeine to redo all the benchmarks (or maybe not). Read about this graphical orgy here.

Speaking of going to the workbench, OCWorkbench has reminisced over Kingston’s brand-spanking new DDR3-1800. Benchmarking memory is a complicated task, and one that must be done in minute detail, testing timings, benchmarking, resetting, re-testing, re-benchmarking – all the possible configurations – but they’ve done it... Kingston got the grand “you belong in a class of your own” prize, right here. Anyone else noticed OCW was using a 9600GT card in the tests?

Tom’s (occasional [Ed.]) boys are back benching the tock out of Intel’s Wolfdales. This is part 1 of 2, mind you, but it’s got plenty of numbers running to entertain you till part 2 is out. They think the E8000 series CPU’s won’t be around for long, and they’re probably right. They don’t think it’s worth the upgrade from Conroe, either... it is odd that they do talk about Wolfdale being a great overclocking part and that they’ll cover it in part 2 – wouldn’t that be enough to get enthusiasts in a buying frenzy? Read it here.

If you have your mind set on building an HTPC, you’re probably looking for an article like this (or this in English). TweakPC.de did the dirty deed on some mobos with Intel, Nvidia and S3 IGPs – 9 mobos total. We do enjoy their interactive tables, yessiree, makes life so easy... a lot of work went into this roundup, believe us.

Gaming on a laptop has come a long way since the first AMD and Intel DTR’s. With power envelopes decreasing and performance on the rise, we can get a decent gaming experience from the likes of this. Dell has an M1730 XPS laptop on review at Extremetech – as most “gaming laptops” go, it’s a 17-inch monster sporting dual MXM modules in SLI – or to be more precise an X9000 extremely expensive CPU at 2.8GHz with dual 8800M GTX. It’s the fastest thing to game on your lap, it’s also the fastest way to burn a $4500 hole in your wallet. µ