Nvidia recommends Windows XP only

THE GEFORCE 8800GTS 320MB makes a strong showing today, with most of the hardware sites reviewing different brands that are now coming to market with the most affordable DirectX 10 cards yet. Oddly enough, it seems Nvidia's reviewers guide explicitly called for reviewers to review the card using only Windows XP, since Windows Vista is not currently supported. Pretty funny, especially when you see all those Windows Vista Ready stickers on the retail boxes.

Anyway, this product was reviewed by our usual bunch of suspects, starting with Bjorn 3D, which reviewed the fastest of the bunch, XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB XXX Edition. The board also featured on TechReport. Ryan over at PC Perspective reviewed a BFG 8800 GTS 320 OC board< /a>, so did guys at HardOCP and Guru3D.

A good friend from Hardware Info, Koen, took the most interesting one for a spin, EVGA's e-GeForce 8800GTS 320MB ACS3 edition, which features a non-reference cooler which shon on previous iterations of the 8800 series. Overclocking capabilities are pretty impressive, so you might take a look.

Our old mate Joshua from PenStarSys reviewed the original 8800GTS with full 640MB of memory from Gigabyte.

Our own take on the board was here, since we filed it on Friday.

Hacks from down under also had a busy day, with Legion Hardware testing the performance of Supreme Commander, upcoming hit-game. This RTS is the first game in genre that features high-def graphics and the differences between the game quality settings are staggering. Seven graphics cards were tested, and results are quite interesting. Second review was Kingston's HyperX PC2-9200 memory, featuring Elpida chips - meaning overclocking results could be limited. Then again, Kingston features 25% more affordable price than its most serious competitors, meaning this could be a best buy memory for the premium segment.

At the same time, TweakTown filed a first fully-fledged review of AMD 690G chipset on a motherboard from ECS.
Also, guys got some interesting info regarding future of AMD and ATI chipsets. It seems that either AMD will continue to ship RD600 and other Intel chipsets under ATi's brand, or someone drank too much of Christmas eggnog.

If you want to exercise your German (after all, CeBIT in Hangover is approaching fast), head over to PC-Treiber to read the reviews of Asrocks' ALiveXFire-eSATA2 and Foxconn's K8T890M2AA-KRS2H (funny enough, KRS2H could be translated as "trash" in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian...). If you don't want to exercise your German, you'll find links to translated versions in both reviews.

Having a secured environment is a must for safe computing, but the need to memorise large amount of passwords can lead to having one password for all. This is less than ideal, so BCCHardware went and reviewed several fingerprint-ID products from Silex Biometrics.

ChileHardware posted a review of A-DATA PD7 1GB USB memory stick, which undergoes a redesign to fit the requirements of Vista's ReadyBoost feature. This helped the company come up with performance of a couple of notches higher, but still way under the fastest sticks on the market, Flash Voyagers from Corsair. Still, this one is several light years faster than an iPod.

All this hardware is nice, but can come to a grinding halt if a virus or a Trojan disables your operating system. BIOSMagazine posted a review of NOD32 Anti-Virus software, which offers pretty good level of protection for your favourite metal pet.

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