Socket F motherboard previewed

IT MIGHT only be a preview but what preview it was. The Tyan Tiger K9HE S3970 is an LGA1207 socket F motherboard. Now that's the next generation platform for AMD Opteron Server chips and will be the one used for Quad Oppys. The board is built around a Serverworks chipset and supports up to eight DIMM sockets full of ECC Reg DDR2 modules. Storagewise, it can accommodate four SATA devices while up to five PCI devices can be connected to it. No PCI express here. It uses the XGI volari Z7 as video controller and two Intel GbE ASICs. No benchmark though as Michael did not find any Opteron 2000 for now.

Xbitlabs delivers an all important message to Intel, AMD has yet to give up. They review the Energy Efficient Athlon 64 x2 CPU. They are all equipped with 1Mb shared L2 cache and while the EE Athlon x2 consumption falls to 65w, the SFF version, which runs at only 2GHz, goes all the way down to 35w. The processor does not overclock better though and Xbitlabs tells us more about how Intel and AMD treat Vcore measurement differently. The reviewer is less than enthusiast about what is going to happen next as the curse of the EE strikes AMD after having plagued Intel.

ITreviews tells us more about the Dell Inspiron 640. Well, it bears all the features of what looks like a midrange laptop that would only two years back would have rivalled desktop PCs - at least when it comes to pure performance. There's that Core Duo T2300 running at 1.66GHz, 512MB memory, a 14-inch screen, a DVD writer and a few bit and blobs more. It performs well though and can provide with exceptional battery capacity if you put the price. Speaking of price, it is not as expensive as you would think.

Overclockercafe plays a bit with the Foxconn C51XEM2AA AM2 SLI motherboard. Board is based on a nForce 590 SLI chipset, has dual GbE Ethernet, 8.1 HD Audio support, up to ten USB ports, SATA2 compatibility, Firewire and much much more - that includes quite a few accessories that Foxconn bundles with the board. The C51XEM2AA might be more expensive than others but at least you don't need to buy anything else. The nVidia nTune combined with the Foxconn Liveupdate are welcomed bonus and so is the stability. Just check whether your heatsink might be too big or not.

More motherboards, this time from Neoseeker which tests the Asus P5B Deluxe/Wifi-AP. If I am not mistaken, there was a P5B a long time ago, when the Pentium/Pentium II was still around. This one is aimed at the Core2 platform on top of other LGA775 models. Built around the P965, it has six PCI-xx slots, six SATA2 ports and does support eSATA as well. Two things sets it apart from other boards though. First, it uses an ADI HD audio codec, rather than a Realtek one, secondly, it has an integrated WiFi Access Point which is 802.11g compatible.

Adrian Rojak Pot tests the Gainward Bliss 7300GT PCX Golden Sample. In Gainward Jargon, Golden Sample means overclocked and the card itself is heavily but passively cooled. ARP managed to get it overclock the memory modules from 500MHz to 719MHz, which helped the card to perform close to a standard 7600GT. Now one can ask what would have happened if the passive cooler was replaced by an active one. Well, you would probably be better buying a more expensive card with the money. Still the card run smoothly on most games at 12x10. µ