Spew forth your GTX280 reviews

THE DAY HAS COME for the Green Goblin to show off its latest and greatest marchitecture. Come June 16th the nasty NDAs have been lifted allowing enthusiasts worldwide to gawk at all the other reviews.

Yes, coming in at a close second, just behind Charlie’s review, are a whole bunch of reviews from the NDA-restrained world of online editing. Almost everything you want to know about the GTX280 – not only benchmarks but feature sets as well – you can find in this lil’ list. If you look at what our Charlie wrote about availability and look at how many partners actually put forward cards, you’ll notice there aren’t those many. Zotac and uhm… ONE eVGA?

Some articles are promising a follow-up for the extremely foolhardy who are willing to blow their load on three GTX280 cards, like Guru3D’s promise for Wednesday. We'll get back to you on that one, but for now, in no particular order:

Guru3D

Inside HW

Tweaktoons 1 and 2

PC Perspiration

Hardware Canucks

Anandtech

Tom' s Hardware

Technic 3D (English)

TechpowerUp 1 and 2

VR-Zone’s volt-modding article

OCC

Ubergizmo

Hardware Secrets

Driver Heaven

Tech Report

PCGamesHardware.de (English)

However, in the distant realm of computing sanity Xbit has published the sixth part to their 20-inch display roundup – this one dedicated to inexpensive SOHO monitors. Samsung, Viewsonic and NEC make different appearances in this one, to varying degrees of success (or failure, depends on how you look at it). Sammy has some nice displays, it seems, but just how far can you take an “office” display? XBit beat the heck out of them right here.

Madshrimps has been tinkering with the E7200 from Intel. The budget CPU seems to have everyone in awe when it comes to overclocking performance, so – taking advantage of the poor CPU and dry ice, they cooled the little bugger to -68.6 Celsius and then overclocked it way beyond spec – a not too shabby 5225MHz ( 5005MHz stable) - but the trick isn’t really the dried ice, but the mobo and PSU you use, but heck, it’s cooler to talk dry ice. Get your carbon dioxide shot here.

Here’s an interesting article for our American readers – the Samsung Instinct (the “not an iPhone clone phone”) review at Phonescoop. Sprint is throwing its weight behind this model, but it seems to have some serious design flaws (that, or the sample Phonescoop got really sucked). The touch technology needs re-working, as does the reception, but on the other hand it’s got pretty decent “everything else”. Read the scoop here.

MVK Tech got hold of a little treat for us gamers: the Gainward Bliss 9800GX2. Gainward is better known for its tradition of hand-binning their GPUs and choosing only the cream of the crop, soldering them onto “Golden Sample” cards. This silicon usually ran a little beyond spec and had some special features. Nowadays you get Bliss or 700MHz core and 2200MHz memory. Not bad, eh? Taking into consideration the GTX280 performance, you won’t feel left behind if you pick up one of these, now will you? Read it here.

Hardspell has an interesting article on the video encoding prowess of Intel’s processors, from the E1xxx Celerons all the way up to the E8xxx Core 2 Duos (sorry, no extreme edition). As you would expect, the E8xxx (E8400 in this case) knocks the socks off its siblings, but would it shock you to see that the E8400 is “only” 33.37% faster than a Celeron E1200 in video encoding? Look at the pretty graphs, here. µ