Spedo for Geeks

THE LEGIONS OF HARDWARE got a new Thermal Take case, the Spedo (one ‘e’), on test. It’s a very advanced case that features ATC 3 and CRMS 3 marchitectures (heat chamber and cabling routing, in English). These allow you to remove all the cables from air-flow areas, and put the PSU, GPU and CPU into three thermally insulated areas. It’ll also take extended PSUs, it seems. Vague on pricing, though ($200-$300 envelope). Read about it here.

Xbit took a good long look at DAAMIT’s flagship HD 4870 X2 and decided to face it off with a couple of HD 4870s in Crossfire. We’ve seen some tests where X2 had a decisive advantage over Crossfire, but here the performance is almost identical. According to Xbit’s article, the X2 offers a bit more stability. Unfortunately, there’s no power consumption test, which should be another little “con” for Crossfire. Lots of nice graphs with benchies, here.

Aloysius at Hardware Zone got his hands on a new HP lappie, the DV7. This laptop is the sequel to the popular DV3000, but equipped with all the latest-gen goodies, like a P8400 processor, 4GB of DDR2-800, Windows Vista 64-bit, 320GB HDD, a TV Tuner and a 17.1-inch screen. It’s not heavy for a DTR, weighing in at under 3.5-pounds. It’s no Qosmio, and it’s got no HD capabilities, but it’s cheaper… Wibble this way.

Thrusting Reviews had its moment of Zen with Intel’s X25-M SSD drive going as far as calling the performance gains over the OCZ Core V2 SSD a ‘trouncing’. Intel scored twice as much in PC Mark than OCZ… if you like synthetics. Quite right they are, it seems, but it’s still expensive as hell. Flipping good stuff, it is. Get going.

There’s a review of Intel’s Q9650 at Techware Labs (not the ‘QX’ flavour, mind you). It works at 3GHz (333x9) and costs a paltry $555. In what regards to overclocking, Jason used the Asus software to ensure “safe” overclocking and got it to 3.51GHz, although our experience says you can take it up a lot more… SIPP isn’t a ‘technology’ though, it’s basically a marketing programme that guarantees customers some degree of driver development and continued support for a product over a period of time (ie: driver packs). Look at the Q9650, here.

DAAMIT’s partners are re-launching the whole RV770 range of cards, replacing the reference design with their own stuff. That’s the case of Sapphire and its revamped HD 4850 (better identified as the 100245L SKU). Sapphire made its own PCB and added a chunky cooler to the card (which we can’t identify). Overclocking was quite good (+19%/+10%), considerably boosting performance without breaking the bank ($169), says Tech Power Up.

Our favourite hillbilly is looking at what 1GB of graphics memory brings to the table on an HD 4850 card. Well, he’s pretty much summed it up in his tests (ie: nothing) as you can see here. True, the 1GB frame buffer does bring one thing, right now, a bigger price tag.

It’s been a long time since we’ve sat behind a Wheel, but Techgage has Logitech’s Force GT racing wheel in the lab (if you consider your gaming PC a ‘lab’). With upcoming racing franchises revving up for Yule, it’s time to ‘test’ this kit and let people know just how fun it is... If you like racing, and many of you do, we’re sure you’ll want to read it. µ