Intel's last hope reviewed

IT'S the last hurrah for the Netburst. This is how GamePC entitles its article on the Pentium D 940 procesor. This 65nm monster is the first one to come with the new Intel logo as well as the VIIV compliance. It also supports Virtualisation and has four MB cache in all. The core runs at 3.2GHz. Intel has also bundled a new quiet stock cooler which has surprised the reviewer by its efficiency. Still AMD seems to be better in every quarters. Even with four times more cache and a 60% increase in speed, the D950 for example can't beat the X2 3800+ in the Apache bench.

Legionhardware pits the Geforce GS against the Radeon X800XL card. They are both built using 110nm processes and have 12 pixel pipelines. The games benchmarks were almost a true draw. But X800XL supplies are quickly drying up but the X1600XT does not seem to be capable of competing with the 6800GS and what's worst is that the 6800GS is much cheaper than the X800XL or the X1600XT. Reminds the reviewer of the 5900XT.

Meanwhile Neoseeker checks the ATI Catalyst 6.1. Actually, the driver gets reviewed and compared with the old 5.13 version. And guess what, there are some notable increase in FPS in DOOM 3 and Far Cry as well as in 3D Mark. Overall this free bit of software might, on its own, win ATI's day over Nvidia. Download and install while you can.

Bytesector reviews the OCZ EL DDR3500 Gold GX XTC memory modules. They are called Gold because the heat spreader on top of them is golden in colour. They run at 433MHz with extra low timings and the heatspreaders are actually honey combed shaped which helps dissipation. The parts overclock very well, and their relatively low price means that they are the obvious choice for a budget PC if you want to overclock.

Xbitlabs has a personal laser printer roundup. They test nine monochrome laser models from Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Konica Minolta, Lexmark, OKI, Samsung and Xerox, most are entry level models. Essential stuffs like speed and printing are tested. Unfortunately, the review does not consider things like noise, power consumption as well as consumables price. Brother and OKI come on top of the bunch.

The Western Digital Raptor WDS1500ADFD hard disk drive gets covered at hothardware. The fastest SATA drive ever produced has a new heir. It has a 150GB capacity, a SATA interface, two platters, a spindle speed of 10krpm and 16MB cache; this is not your usual HDD. I wonder though whether a RAID-0 consisting of two 8MB 7200rpm HDD can beat this one. It also supports NCQ as well as some proprietary technology. On top of that the Raptor comes with five year warranty. Performancewise, it smokes everything in sight, including U320 drives. µ