Remember to vote early and vote often - Old Chicago proverb
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Q9550 and Q9450 benched
WE DON'T KNOW how we missed it (well, we do – it was published on 9800GTX launch day), but over the weekend our unrelenting search for reviews led us to this article here. Hardware Zone has an article – exclusive as far as we can tell – of Intel’s Q9550 and Q9450 CPUs. These little ones are made of the same stuff as the “extreme edition” QX9650 – a Yorkfield at heart – however, a QX9650 will run you almost twice as expensive as the younger Q9550. Regardless of what Intel calls them, they are identical in every aspect, except the slightly slower clock speed – and if you consider the implications of the TDP in the bigger picture, the QX9550 seems to be an excellent proposal. We wonder how well it’d overclock?
Diamond, a name that hails from a long long time ago in graphics terms, has been tinkering with an HD3870. According to this review at Nordic Hardware, they’ve gone and slapped 1GB of GDDR3 on the card (although it’s been more or less established anything over 512 will do little or nothing in games, right now). However, they’ve also bolted a 512-bit bus on the memory... care to see the result? Read on...
While finding Core 2 Duos of the E8xxx kind has been difficult for many, some cunning runts have discovered that Intel’s new Xeons are basically Core 2 Duos in disguise – and that availability and pricing are basically the same. Well Madshrimps got hold of a Xeon X3320 – the equivalent to a Q9300 – and put it through its paces. Now, the 45nm process allows for some tomfoolery with the speeds. The FSB was upped to 480MHz meaning the original 2.5GHz got kicked up to 3.6GHz... A more conservative approach would be to stick to 3GHz (7.5x400MHz) where you’ll find a wider availability of components and a little less stress on the system. Check out the numbers here.
Hot Hardware has another go at the 780G chipset, with a different mobo: the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI. Apparently Chris didn’t find the board very... uhm... how should we put it? Sensible? Considering that these boards usually fit the HTPC bill perfectly, some odd choices made by the mobo maker, compounded with limited overclocking ability, limit its value. But the good news is that the combo 4850e+780G mobo draws less power than Intel’s G35 with a Pentium E2200. Good price for an Asus, too... only $89. Read the review here.
There’s some eeePC action going on at Benchmark Reviews. Jos got hold of the 8G version of the... uhm... sub-subnotebook. It’s one of the first articles we’ve seen that actually measures eeePC performance with benchmarks – albeit very light ones – but they do make short work of the 800MHz bastardised Celeron M. Battery life is very sucky, but it seems no one resists the geeky appeal of having a full computer in an under-1Kg gadget. Read Benchmark’s Review.
George at Hillbilly Hardware ordered something special from the menu, something called Top Deck Tech Station, from Highspeed PC. If you’ve always got something on the workbench (literally) and your constantly tearing apart your machine, this is a great thing to have. It’s essentially a skeleton to setup a mobo on top and some drives underneath, keeping everything in the open and accessible. We should get a couple of these one of these days... read on. µ
Tags: Intel
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Intel,AMD,Nvidia at this point seem to talk a good game , but where is the beef . Funny they seem to miss due dates and then strangley become very quite. I find it odd that no 9450 r seen anywhere but up pops the x3350 and it is available . Maybe they should do a higher price gough like they have done with their x48 or the 790 ultra. I wanted beef but all I got was blah,blah,blah
If you check out the datasheets for the memory chips used, you can see that it's still only using a 256-bit memory bus. I assume some wires got crossed somewhere between the engineering department and the marketing department.
..on the 9X50 Intel chips? Or did you simply say well the 9650 has a TDP of 130 and the others 95Watts, therefore there must be a large ACTUAL power difference.

Well if you bothered to READ the review, at idle the 9650 was identical to the 9550 and under load it consumed a MASSIVE 1 Watt more! (Yes folks that's 1 Watt, and not a typo)

Please, if you are going to do analysis, at least READ the article... so please inform your readers what the 'implications of TDP in the bigger picture' means again? Of course cost is a different story, but please don't start cooking up excuses to support a preconceived notion.