Evga kicks off watercooled GTX 280

HILBERT AT THE Guru of 3D is testing the green goblin’s GTX 280 kitted out with a solid copper waterblock. This one heralds from Evga and is called the HC16 Hydro Copper. The most interesting bit of this card (apart from the water cooling) is it’s actually a single slot design. It’s also factory overclocked to 691MHz core / 1458MHz shader / 1215MHz memory, which gives it a pretty good performance boost. Get ready to cough up serious dosh, tho’… $600. Ouch.

There’s some extreme DDR2 kit being tested at Tech Power Up. OCZ has supplied them with some PC2-9200 (ie: DDR2-1150) Flex II 2x2GB units which TPU gladly put to the bench. It isn’t cheap but it’s about the highest performance DDR2 you’ll find on the market. It does a little overclocking too, it seems. Read the review.

Still in the game, the 9800GTX+ puts up a proper fight to ATI’s mainstream, but just how well does it perform when you move into the world of SLI? Motherboards.org will tell us with their review of XFX’s 9800GTX+ in SLI mode. Apparently it’s a very decent combo to own when you want to play, especially in DX9. Cheaper than a GTX 280, too. Read about it here.

Gigabyte has come up with a new 790GX-based motherboard design, called the MA790GP-DS4H, and Legion Hardware has a review. As IGPs go, the 790GX is pretty well endowed, and you can even squeeze some extra MHz out of the graphics core. It creamed the 780a SLI IGP while maintaining the lowest power consumption of the bunch. Ample OC options for the CPU too… and just $140. Read it here.

Sean at PlanetX64 has the scoop on a Gigabyte EP45 Extreme mobo, a P45-based design that supports every LGA775 processor on the market and will overclock quite well, according to Sean. He got a solid 500MHz bus speed on a QX9770 (ie: 4GHz) on the most power hungry and demanding processor on the market. Board layout might be an issue, though. Read about it here.

Tom’s Shardware is looking at Samsung’s husky 1TB drives in their three incarnations. F1, F1 RAID class and Eco Green F1 (yeah, yeah…). The Eco Green, naturally handicapped by a lower spin speed, does get some vindication in the power consumption tests. So there’s F1 for your daily desktop use, there’s F1 RAID class for the high-end workstation computing and then there’s the Eco Green F1 for your HTPC or NAS. Look at the charts, here.

There’s another frankenboard from Asrock at Pro Clockers.The Asrock K10N78-1394 is built around the nForce 8200 chipset. It supports Hybrid SLI and will let you get some overclocking mileage. Tony, for example, got his 9850BE Phenom X4 all the way up to 3.1GHz. Not bad, maybe you don’t need a new southbridge chip to get your Phenom to overclock, after all… read the review, here. µ