AMD riser board pictured

HKEPC website has pictures of the next generation Asrock AM2 riser board. As most of you would probably know, Asrock has future proofed its AMD motherboards by giving a Future port slot in which you can plug a card to upgrade. Well, the card is already out there. It is pictured on a 939SLI2-eSATA2 board from Asrock. It can accommodate up to four DDR2 DIMMs.

Phoronix tests the ECS PF5 Extreme motherboard based on 945p chipset. It introduces ECS's new overclocking technology, ECSonic II, Dual core support, and some intereting features like Doctor LED, Top Hat Flash and the cooling accelerator. The motherboard is compared tot he Abit AW8 and the Asrock 775XFire-eSATA2 motherboards. There's a support for eSATA2, six SATA2 RAID ports, the ALC880 audio module, Firewire and two LAN controllers. Good value for money although performancewise, it still plays catching up.

Behardware has a roundup of twelve 4-inch by 6-inch photo printers which are on the rise - as dot matrix and monochrome laser printers are on the decline. Vincent, the reviewer, mentions the fact that high store photo labs are becoming cheaper and that even photo printers do not provide the quality at the - high - price they command. The Samsung SPP-2040 came on top of all tests and was the cheapest printer.

French website VTRhardware reviews the Aopen G325 which is going head on against the Aspire X-Q pack. With the Antec Aria, they form a trio of not-so-small casings, larger than SFFs but smaller than the smallest ATX cases. Dedicated to mATX motherboards only, they are far better than most would expect. The Aspire wins hands down, it is better at cooling, comes with a thermal probe and a handle.

AMDreview checks the XFX NVTV TV tuner which is a good introduction to TV Tuner from Nvidia. It is a smallish low profile card with a rather big remote control with loads of green buttons and an antenna. Software wise, you get the Videostudio 7 from Ulead as well as the Ulead DVD Movie factory. Not bad. Great TV Tuner performance, works on your standard Windows OS. Now the only question is when will some manufacturer combine both to get a competitor to the AIW range - if ever.

Hardwarezone tests the Leadtek Winfast PX7300GS TDH 256MB DDR2 entry level video card. 112m transistors burnt using a 90nm process, with three vertex and four pixel pipelines. The core/mem speed being 550MHz/810MHz, Dual DVI and mini DIN. It is in a low profile card with a white heat sink fan. Overclocking is quite poor but it is definitely a winner because it has a low price and a rather good entry level performance. µ