XFX’s monster OC GTX 280

CRANKING UP THE CLOCK on a GTX 280 can get you some good results, enough to make it look like the Green Goblin has an answer to DAAMIT’s RV770 marchitecture. Fudzilla tested the XFX on steroids, at 670MHz, and you can see here it struts over ATI in the very-very-very hi-res tests. We’ll have to wait for ATI’s OC’d versions to decide who’s the winner here, but right now there isn’t anything out there that can beat this.

Acer has a nice little Aspire X3600 desktop on review at HardwareZone. It’s an interesting mix of desktop and mobile technologies, pooling Acer’s experience into a nice little shiny package that anyone would love to have at the office. We just can’t figure if the gaffe was on purpose “Affordably hoping on to the HD bandwagon”. Hope… hop… it’s a nice involuntary double entendre tho’. However we do think 2000 Singapore dollars (roughly USD $1475) is a bit on the expensive side. Look at the shiny little PC here.

Our Austrian colleagues at HardwareOC have written up a nice little article on taking your E8400 to the maximum possible performance. To find the max overclock you’ll have to determine the almighty max FSB. *That* was easy, but taking the E8400 to 530MHz FSB on air simply wasn’t – so they used watercooling. They reached some very high speeds, but the CPU had to be taken all the way up to 1.575V. A bit too much if you ask us. Anyhow, just make sure you’re buying a C0 stepping CPU if you’re interested in trying this out. Read the original hier, and Googlenglish here.

Sapphire has been a stalwart supplier of DAAMIT wares, and they’re always on the frontline when it comes to launching new platforms. Cartwheel was appointed as the casual gamer’s system, based around a 780G mobo like the Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G. It’s a micro-ATX design that can power anything from a lowly Sempron up to quad core Phenoms – with the usual list of features (hybrid-everything). It’s a clean mobo with a decent price. Expansion is a bit limited though. Read about it here.

JonnyGuru isn’t one of our usual roundup sites, but we found a review there on the monstrous Coolmax CUQ-1350B, 1350W (duhh) power supply. Semi-modular and loaded to bear, you can basically plug your microwave oven to this thing (or three GTX 280s). Efficient too. Apparently Coolmax has been paying attention to the reviewer’s complaints about their previous test samples. Find it here.

Extremetech has the skinny on 4 brand-spanking-new P45 mobos from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI (that would be the top tier, we’re guessing). You’ll learn a bit about Intel’s strategy and how they want to make it hard for Nvidia, as well as what the heck is “teaming”. There’s something in there for every wallet, so take a peek at the review if you’re in the market for a new mobo. Get it here.

On a completely “Hello!” sidenote, Overclockers Pulse has noted that there’s a bit of a tiff going on between Hardware Canucks and 3DGameman. HC is accusing 3DGameman of ripping-off their photos from an HD4870 – something 3DGameman denies. The similarities are there – and HC is thinking about what course of action to take. Read the HC forum thread, look at the pics and draw your own conclusions. We are completely shocked that the Internet would *cough* be used for plagiarism of any kind… µ