RAM is the Guinness in our PCs

EVER SINCE reviewers got their hands on the X38 and X48 chipsets, they’ve been handling some real interesting RAM goodies. Lots of these sites also saw fit to publish some benchies on these highly specced pieces of kit, something we’ve put together for you right here:

XSReviews, TweakTown, Legit Reviews, Overclock 3D, Big Bruin, Virtual Hideout, ProClockers,

Overclockers Club, OCTeam (in French)

Consider yourself and your mates to be serious OC’ers? Then check out Hwbot.org and join the Overclockers League. HWBot has a lot going for it, they are an independent OC’ing site that focuses on keeping track of benchmarks for CPUs and Videocards alike. They’ve got some pretty interesting tools on-line, worth a look.

French site Les Numériques (Gurgle translation) explores the RAM requirements of 3D games. Apparently 2GB of RAM does have an impact (over 1GB) on gameplay and framerate under Windows Vista (32-bits), needless to say, loading time is also particularly influenced by the amount of RAM in Vista. Pity about the games they chose, we would’ve loved to see BF2142 – a notoriously RAM-hungry game - running under Vista.

If you’ve blown away a small fortune on an 8800GT card, you can might as well go all the way with this baby here. Expreview shows us the Thermalright HT-03 GT, a replacement heatpipe/heatsink combo for your stock 8800GT cooling system. Just add a quality fan and you’ll reduce both temperature and noise. Effective but bulky.

When it came to be, Powerline technology promised a great deal but at the end of the day the verdict was in: powerline was all too unreliable. Now with the latest iteration of the HomePlug AV standard, HotHardware believes you can get very decent performance for your home network – superior to an 802.11g and just shy of hardwired 100Mb ethernet. Latency gets a kick in the shins, tho’.

Dropping a C-note for a keyboard seems wild, but it just might be worth it if you’re a gamer – at least according to Modders-Inc. and their review of the Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard (Version 2). It’s got its own LCD and backlit, you know…

Is your laptop audio intimidated by the BBC Symphony Orchestra? Well, plug in an ASUS Xonar U1 USB Audio Station and go buy a “Last Night at the Proms” CD. Like most USB Audio devices, its sound range falls slightly short of a full-blown discrete sound card, but in this case it’ll blow your laptop audio to smithereens. Check out Techgage for the review.

Apple is apparently churning out great laptops these days, at least they don’t come equipped with the Amazing Exploding Battery™ feature that Dell owns the patent on… Trusted Reviews gave the new Apple MacBook Pro 17-inch a spin and a 9/10 score to boot. Errmmm… “Wil Harris”… now where have we heard that name before? µ