The great western headset roundup

HEADSETS ARE GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED. They’ve saved our bacon more than once in-game, whether it was that sneaky engineer in BF2142 podding down on you, or that walker firing ominously at anything that moves, it’s helped us get our arse out of harm’s way. Oh, not to mention that teamspeak is increasingly popular (and skyping and keeping the noise down so your parents won’t get P-O’d). So there are plenty of reasons for you to read the following article at Extremetech. Yeah, you guessed it… it’s a headset roundup. Now if only our headsets wouldn’t die on us that often.

ThermalTake’s got a new product in the CPU cooling end of business, the MaxOrb EX, that Legion Hardware is testing. A huge 120mm fan sits on top of the fins+heatpipes. The size doesn’t, however, stop it from installing on mobos with protruding bits. Steven thought it was a great product, but there’s no price to go with the product, so you’d better compare-shop. Read the review, here.

Today there’ve been a couple of articles coming out on the previous generation of graphics cards from ATI. Alexey and Yaroslav at Xbit Labs have done some hardcore voltmodding to an HD 3870 (with the usual disclaimers): they over-volted the GPU to 1.71V and got 1GHz of clock out of it, but stable at “only” 972MHz. Although performance also got a nice jump, it still fell seriously behind the HD4850 and HD 3870 X2 in most benchmarks, in particular at higher resolutions. Geek goodness, just for you.

Ninja Lane provided part 2 of the trip down memory lane. There was a VisionTek ATI HD 3870 X2 OC was on the bench and you can see how VisionTek did their stuff with new heatsink/fans. The card has a slight factory overclock (840/960) and performance is really quite good in CrossfireX-friendly environments. It’s all good, says Ninja Lane, especially when it costs only a bit more than a “standard” HD 3870 X2. Read on.

Hexus is reviewing a full system built by PC Specialist, the Apollo Q260GTX, one of the high-end types that let you play everything under the sun with all graphics settings set to max, and reads both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. The “Q” is for quad-core, the “260GTX” means just that, GTX 260 innards. It’s an “almost silent” proposition for just under £1400. The only apparent con is the chassis that isn’t state of the art. You can find that here.

The guys at Benchmark Reviews are testing what seems to be first fairly affordable SSD kit (the same one we spoke of yesterday): the OCZ Core SSD 64GB. The steel-encased kit (odd, innit?) performs remarkably well, boasts really really low power consumption and has an impressive $4 (!) per Gigabyte ratio… It’s a good move towards making these things competitive. Read it right away… µ