DDR3 is on the move

DDR3 IS SLOWLY COMING down in price and increasing in availability and performance – at least if you’re in the States. Benchzone thought it’d be best to gather some up and put them to the hammer on their test rig. They bunched up A-Data, CellShock, Corsair and Super Talent in several rounds of testing, at different memory timings. Exhausting stuff. One thing does come to mind after reading this: right now, pricing in Europe isn’t at all nice to consumers – it’s really worth going out of your way to stock up on components. For example, the A-Data kit tested by Benchzone costs you $419 in the States, but it’ll cost the equivalent of almost $600 in Europe...*sigh* Hop on a plane, quick.

The Nvidian 9600GT is starting to show up on shelves and populating the mainstream of graphics processing. It’s faced with some strong competition from AMD, right now, so if you want to cherry-pick a 9600GT card, you might want to read this article here, at Hardware Zone. Eight cards in total, most using the reference design – but some original ones with aftermarket cooling solutions. Get your shot of 9600GT right now.

We’ve always been intrigued about how versatile VIA’s Pico-ITX design could prove. Now Hexus.net has done us the favour of testing this tiny contender (contender to what, you ask?). Well, “XP Embedded” would be the correct answer, according to Jo. The C7 processor is no power house, but when it comes to creating small appliances and running stuff like XP Embedded, it’s got what it takes.

The very legit crowd at Legit Review is adding up the cost of components on a Tri-SLI rig. It’s expensive, insanely expensive and will shortly be outdated, but if you have a 680i, 780i around you can consider blowing your college fund on this. Power and heat are brutal with Legit’s gaming rig pulling up to 700W of power at a given point. Brian thinks it’s a great match for a 30-inch LCD with 2560x1600 resolution. We just think it’s not for our wallets...

Acer might not be your favourite laptop manufacturer, but they do a good job of getting out there and putting product forward. IT Reviews.co.uk has the AS5633 – yes it’s budget and you won’t run Crysis on it, but it’ll fill the huge gap that is created every time a parent considers buying their child a laptop. It’s got Vista Home Premium, a T5500 CPU, 2 gigs o’ RAM and an integrated graphics chip. For £449 you can’t expect much more.

Memory, DDR2 in particular, has never been so available as today – tons of ram at bargain basement prices – so each manufacturer tries to fiddle and tweak the tech to eke out a little bit more performance. That would be the case of Mushkin’s HP2-6400 on review at Ninja Lane. They ran some numbers, comparing them to A-Data and Patriot’s offering. Good results for Mushkin... (actually we’ve never seen RAM impact framerate as much as this case). Get it here.

Finally, OCC has a case on display – the Apevia X-Supra G Type. Yes it sounds like a car (or a Japanese arcade game) and that’s intentional. It’s tool-less which is pretty good in our book, you can just snap stuff into place, while it also comes with an integrated fan controller – ideal to keep it shooshed when in office or home environments (not for LAN Parties – they’re just noisy). Read the review here.