Dual Via CPUs tested

THANKS TO Serge and William for having pointed out to me a detailed review of the Nvidia Quadro FX family and giving me more insights about something we already knew. Without drivers, there's not much to differentiate between the Quadro and the Geforce family. The FX4400, 4500m 1400 and 540 are covered. They are all PCI express part and except for the last one, all have dual DVI ports. You'll get a full list of benchmarks - including some from FireGL and the Geforce 7800GTS SLI and more on CGsociety's website.

Viperlair explores the layout of the Foxconn Winfast 6150K8MA-8EKRS motherboard which is an All in one motherboard build around an NForce 430GE/Geforce6150 couple. mATX size, integrated Geforce 6150 graphics, onboard RAID, GbE, 5.1 sound and Firewire, good for that price. The motherboard gets compared to a Polywell Mini Box which features an Asus board with almost the same features.

AMDzone has a look at the Coolermaster Centurion 531 casing. It is a massive 10Kg Aluminium giant. The case is virtually tool-less, comes with an air vent, a full set of I/Os on top of it plus a system for tidying up your cables. There are some minor issues as reported by the reviewer. Overall, a well designed, well price casing that should keep your PC himming for a while.

There's a real review of the VIA VT-310DP platform at Belgium website Matbe. Why Via came up with a Dual CPU processor platform is a mystery as VIA's CPU are historically very weak/feeble. But the VT310DP is not your usual dual CPU platform. The motherboard itself is a square with 17cm sides and the two processors use 14w in total. Stéphane, the reviewer, was utterly disappointed by the 310Dp. That said, the Dual P3 700 I am currently using probably cost a fraction of the price and is quicker

Computerworld reviews the Catalyst 4506 with Supervisor Engine II-Plus-10GE modular switch, deigned to support 10Gb/s bandwidths. The reviewer ran a battery of tests including those that would make normal switches fall heavily under the weight, think monstrous workloads and form Hell QoS. This one did not break a sweat and make it sound like a doodle. Now this is not your usual switch and carries a price to match it.

Vnunet and Simon Crisp review the Elonex Prosentia 800. It is a BTX system with a twist, it uses a Pico BTX format which means that the casing is just larger than a ream of A4 paper and just as heavy. It has a huge HS with two 80mm fans and is powered by a 533MHz FSB P4 3.06GHz coupled with 1GB memory, as you could guess, the integrated memory throwed in is well, very slow. You do get a 19-inch LCD monitor, a 400GB HDD and a 7.1 audio system. µ