Velociraptor logs achievements

THE 3D PROFESSOR has published his take on WD’s new Velociraptor drive in professional apps such as 3D Studio Max and Solidworks – together with the usual host of synthetics. The professor is breaking in his new Skulltrail platform at the same time, so the platform itself won’t hold back the performance on the drives. Gobsmacking is the word for it. The Velociraptor performs consistently 50% above the Professor’s 1TB WD drive, and well it should. The article has a total of 3 parts, but the first two are already online here and here.

Talk about a paradox: “Reducing the Power Consumption of Overclocked PCs” is the title of TechARP’s latest guide to messing with the insides of your PC. Although overclocking your PC isn’t the “greenest” thing you can do, there is a lot you can do to keep things down when it comes to power consumption... and your electricity bill will appreciate it. A bit of common sense is required, though, so most overclockers will probably disregard this guide. Catch it here.

NAS units are pretty popular these days, creating storage without the fuss of a full PC behind it. Well, Trusted Reviews picked up Netgear’s ReadyNAS Duo and took it for a spin today. This unit comes stock with a single 500GB drive, although it has an additional bay available for expansion. As it has become standard, these NAS also carry a USB host controller that’ll let you plug in 2 additional USB 2.0 units. The SlimServer feature will let you stream directly to Squeezebox digital players and the home media streaming server will basically put all your goodies on the network, at the distance of a mouse click... and they didn’t forget the backup software either. Seems to be working for TR, catch it here.

Motherboards.org has a quick look at ECS’ A780GM-A Black Series mobo. Built on the 780G chipset, this motherboard doesn’t support the higher-end thermally-handicapped 125W Phenoms, so stick to the basic Athlon Dual Cores or Sempron combo match-up. From Ben’s tests, this isn’t the highest performing 780G mobo on the market, but it is one of the cheapest, with a price tag of $80. That makes for quite a cheap (and powerful) computer system if you are on a tight budget. Read on.

Yes, we know you’re tired of mobos, but there’ve been more mobo reviews than anything else lately, and X48 promises a great deal of performance. In this case, TweakTown’s playing around with DFI’s new X48-based LANParty board. LAN Party mobos have been the matter of some fanboyism amongst party-goers, and these same people can now ogle this baby here. The only thing that Intel hasn’t really favoured with their latest chipsets is power saving features. DFI’s board layout doesn’t favour big coolers, either, which seems to be the mobo’s only serious snag.

Bjorn3D has nailed a Foxconn 9800GTX Extreme OC edition card. Extreme OC means it’s running out of the box at a “meager” 780MHz clock speed, and that translates, roughly, into a 10 per cent gain over the reference 9800GTX. The components used are high-quality, and the card is very quiet, think Victor and Gregg. Not bad for a big hunking piece of metal plastic and silicon. Read it here. µ