SIS makes late return in AMD chipset war*

AMD ZONE checks a product that's bound to gather some interest in a near future. The MMgear headphone and 5.1ch amplifier aims at improving sound quality at a cheap price. The headphone actually includes four speakers. It is quite cheap and does perform very well even though its bass is a little weak, the cord extends to only 1m or so and the finish is plasticky.

SIS gets a comback on the AMD socket 939 with the SIS756. Anandtech gets the chance to compare it to what nVidia, ATI and ULI have to offer. The board sent to Anand was unfortunately quite disappointing. At the short side of the stick as they say. Overclocking is not good and you won't find SATA2 and SLI. ULI is the new scarecrow of entry level chipset as it stands.

Motherboards.org has a deep look at the Epox 9NPA+SLI motherboard. Hard to beat motherboard with only a few issues with the layout. It is up there with the best motherboards on the market. Not that much competition from ATI and most importantly, it is available now and at a quite affordable price.

It might just be what the doctor ordered. Tomshardware tests the Asrock 939 Dual SATA2 motherboard which is available right now in the UK for under £50+VAT. The board uses the award winning ULI 1695. TH concludes by saying that it is a bit slow. But you would probably forgive its shortcomings when you learn that it comes with a SATA2 port, a host of interfaces, voltage converters, good overclocking options and an upgrade path to the M2 socket from AMD.

Hardwarezone has some photos of the first NEC water cooled PC launch. NEC is not known for being a bold manufacturer but then no one expected Dell to launch a gaming platform. The water cooling technology has a decibel rating well under that of mosquito buzzes. The Powermate DL T800 is a Pentium only beast for the time being but a very special and powerful beast indeed.

XYZcomputing gets to test the new Western Digital Caviar RE - Raid Edition? - SATA 320GB HDD. It's big, its huge and it is fast. Might be slightly overkilled but not if you are a serial downloader. A 7200rpm model, optimized for RAID use and with a relatively steep initial price. µ

* APOLOGIES for totally messing up the original headline which had no relation to anything in the above. Ed.