Athlon 3400e on 780G

THE COMPANY CALLED J&W, which once upon a time promised to deliver us a box filled with motherboard magic, has accomplished this little feat here. Fudzilla reviews their MINIX (nothing to do with Linus, tho’) mini-ITX motherboard that supports just about anything you’d want to stick on it (except high-end CPUs). It’s based on AMD’s 780G and contains an HD3200 IGP. Since it has a PCIe x16 slot you could try Hybrid CrossFire but you can also use a full-fledged graphics card, although the data rate won’t get you more than x4. It also is supposed to contain 128MB of sideport memory. The point of all this is that Eliot tried it out with AMD’s low power Athlon X2 3400e, dual core, 1.8GHz and a guesstimated 22W TDP. You know what to do.

Legion Hardware is going for that holy grail of review sites: the “build the ultimate budget gaming PC” article, and even our curiosity was piqued. How far did they get on a $900 BOM? Well, enough to play Crysis Warhead at pretty reasonable framerates and high settings. Worth inspecting, y’know? Get it here.

XS Reviews here in Blighty got their Xspice Kira 530W PSU on the bench and bunged up a review for us to read. Although you might conside 530W insufficient, it’ll handle most PCs without a problem. XSpice gave it some unique features like the smallest packaging available and 80plus certification, meaning it might be a good option for an HTPC system. Non modular, tho’ which takes up space inside the PC… the rails don’t seem to be the best either… read it here.

TweakTown has a 320GB laptop drive from WD, the Scorpio Black, aimed at the DTR segment of notebooks. It’s a wonder of a kit to stick in your laptop, performance beyond your standard 2.5-inch drive with some nifty tricks to cut down power consumption. The price isn’t at all bad, either… $110 aussie dollars, down under. Get it here.

OCWorkbench has a working Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H mobo. G45 is the name of the game, here. OCW puts the graphics core to the test specifically against AMD’s 790GX. We’re pretty sure benchmarking a QX9770 vs a Phenom X4 9550 isn’t shooting straight, but maybe it was done on purpose to show that not even a mighty QX9770 can save the G45… Read the verdict.

Tech Enclave, the Indian hardware site, has posted a review on Palit’s shiny new HD 4870 1GB Sonic Dual Edition. Factory overclocked, non-reference cooler, 1GB DDR5 pumping 4Gbps o’data. It puts the squeeze on the reference HD 4870 (512MB) and the GTX 260 quite easily. Stable overclocks too… not a bad product, now is it? Read Shirpad’s review, here. µ