VR-zone goes extreme with X1950XTX

VR-ZONE GOES with the ATI X1950XTX in an extreme overclocking session, using cold cascade cooling. The article uncovers a few of the secrets of extreme overclocking like nail varnish. Shamino managed to push the push the card's speed all the way up to 927MHz/1134MHz yielding more than 17000 marks on 3DMark 05. Bear in mind that he was using a X6800 clocked at a cool 4.5GHz.

Bjorn3D reports on the Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H mobo, which like one colleague puts it, has a name that comes out from an encryption application. That little baby uses the nForce 590 SLI, which is the senior of the family. It has great performance, a lot of overclocking potential, full nTune support and is backed by one of the sector's giants. However, it is definitely expensive, especially when compared with the likes of Gigabyte and Asus, there's too few fan headers and it is not newbie friendly.

Madshrimps produced an article on a product called Clever Power VGA Booster and CPU Stabilizer. It targets a specific section of the enthusiast market, those who understand how electrical power is important in overclocking and in improving your computer's performance. There's graph that shows that the finer the manufacturing process, the more the power density, right now, we are dangerously approaching that of a nuclear reactor. That said, unless you use an oscilloscope, there's little chance you will find out exactly how your system will improve.

Speaking of money, if you are on a budget, you might want to buy one of those Asrock motherboards which perform well without the cost of premium brands. I know some people hate them, but I reckon that Asrock mobos are slightly better than PC Chops - remember those? Anyway, OCW has a VDimm and a VCore mod guide for the Asrock ALiveNF4G-DVI which is a cheap motherboard that is Live Compliant, comes with a DVI and a D-Sub port, is HDMI ready and runs on Nvidia's 6100 chipset. The mods make the board an even more impressive contender.

OCModshop.com reports on the Verbatim Store'n'go USB HDD. It is small and quite inexpensive, easily fitting in your back pocket. It is pre-loaded with Mobile Launchpad, which is a start menu application from Ceedo for USB drives - think portable apps. You can even browse from it directly, thereby shunning all temporary Internet files. Problem is that the drive is very very slow, up to half the speed of a typical flash drive. The problem is compounded by the drive's size.

Futurelooks.com reviews the MSI NX7600GT-VT2D256E video card which is slowly replacing the 6600GT everywhere. The card is a dual slot model which is SLI compatible, running at 560/1400MHz core/mem. The card performs very well for a mid range model, overclocks well and the software bundle from MSI sweetens the offer. The main problem arises as the cooling solution used makes it difficult to have a SLI rig without having some air flow problems.