Buyer's-guide-a-thons begin

YULE'S ONE THE horizon, so to speak, and some of the hardware sites are revving up their engines for that most fatiguing of events: buyer’s-guide-a-thons. Yes, this caught us completely unawares (not) and has done considerable damage to our sanity. That being said, some sites have broken form and started putting up their guides forthright. You can start reading up on how to gift yourself at Yule, here, here and koko.

Tom’s Hardware has published its own take on the Phenom, errr, phenom. It’s really worth a read, ‘cos we’re sure it’ll come as a surprise that the eminent hardware site has found that DAAMIT has hit the nail (instead of their opposable thumb) bang on. Tom’s took longer, but there’s 42 pages worth of material. If it wasn’t for free, we’d call it value for money.

The web’s been a-buzz with candid photos of 790FX mobos. Well, the chaps at Sysopt.com have pulled a fast one – a Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 review. After the fans have stopped spinning and the dust has settled, they give it a serious thumbs-up, and if you disregard the $270 price-tag on the beastie - and just keep in mind overclocking and quad graphics performance – it’s an enthusiast’s dream.

UMPCPortal.com gets touchy feely in a video review with Packard Bell’s easynote XS, a 9-inch UMPC (with a 7-inch screen) powered by VIA’s C7-M CPU. This critter weighs in at 950g but costs only 600 €urobucks, which makes for a very attractive second PC for the home, according to the reviewer.

The Zalman Reserator XT is a massive watercooling kit for your rig, if you’ve got the money to spare. With a $400 price tag, it isn’t cheap, but at X-bit labs, Sergey says it’s the best he’s seen in watercooling. 9.69/10 points is a dead giveaway, isn’t it?

In the minority reporting department, the 64-bit developers keep on surprising us. DAAMIT has put up their Vista 64-bit 7.11 Catalyst drivers. Give them a spin and let us know what you think.

Overclockers Club has posted their analysis of OCZ’s DDR2 prima donna, the (deep breath) Reaper HPC Edition PC2-9200 2GB DDR2-1150 kit. The Reaper has a unique heat dissipation system which combines heatsinks and heatpipes (that are a major problem if you’ve got limited space in your box). All in all a winning combination at the right price.

Hiper - If you’ve never heard of them, don’t worry, neither have we. Techgage probes a new case manufacturer and their Anubis mid-size tower case. They think its second only to Zalman’s best so give it a serious 9/10 score.

Last but not least , Phoronix has published a survey on Linux graphics systems. They’ve been polling users for a month now, and the results show that AGP is neck and neck with PCIe graphics, but Nvidia dominates the survey with 47.57 per cent of adapters. Also, it appears that Linux has gone down well with laptop users, as a quarter of the polled readers seem to be using integrated laptop graphics on their systems. More info here. µ