Sticks, stoners and reviews

SERGEY OVER at X-Bit Labs, has a fiddle with top-of-the-pile sound card, the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro. It's what we use here in this INQ outpost to turn the office into a reording studio. And very nice it is too, as Sergey will tell you over here.

The somewhat slightly Hexed remain somewhat underwhelmed by their Asus V9980U/TVD experience. This Nvidia FX5950 Ultra-based board, they say, is odd, over priced and over here.

There's also an Asus V9980 card in front of the Firing Squad over here. The guys have relinquished their bullets, though, and have decided to kill it with pure verbosity.

Down in Tweaktown, eyes are cast over Sapphire's version of ATi's Radeon 9600XT graphics card. Performance on a budget perchance? Wibble thisway.

Or for the fatter of wallet, there's Jason's take on PowerColor's $400 Radeon 9800 Pro over at Techwarelabs.

A self-proclaimed hardware guru jojns tehranks of the underwhelmed with his look at Pioneer's DVR-106D DVD burner. S'ok, but where's the software? he grumbles, while photgraphing a nice cardboard box, over here.

The Techreporters consider the merits of Abit's "first stab" at the AMD 654-bit platform with the Maxworthy KV8-MAX3 mobo. It's got the best BIOS they've ever seen. That's here.

And over at Hardware analysis Sander Sasson delivers his review of the newly expired year labelled 2003. Hardware in this case is anything from a hard disk to a space shuttle.

Send your Hard stuff here. µ