DDR2 deal of the year

THE COMPANY POPULATED by enthusiasts that build stuff for enthusiasts, G.Skill, is now flogging very cheap performance DDR2-800, the PI Black PC2-6400. Legion Hardware this 2x2GB kit that’s 800MHz at CL 4-4-4-12 and costs just $70. Impressive stuff. You can almost hear the crunch of the silicon as the G.Skill kit crushes the competition. Go here for the review.

Eliot at Fudzilla is worried we hadn’t noticed his penmanship with the very thorough article on the desktop Atom 330, the dual core version to the 230. The CPU remains outrageously impaired when it comes to FPU processing and the motherboard it comes attached to is, as Eliot put it, ‘in 1996’. How about a little mobo innovation, eh Intel? Read Eliot’s article, here.

TweakTown got a sneak peek at a DFI LANParty X58-based mobo. LANParty is the target of many an enthusiast’s affections and we’re pretty sure the mob is waiting for the Core i7 to start buying them up. Apart from the board looking like the Brazilian flag, DFI’s techies claim they can run 1.8v-1.9v DDR3 without a second thought. Less power phases than the Asus design, though. Check it out.

XS Reviews took a Zotac 9500GT for a spin and they don’t seem too disappointed. The cheap-as-chips card retails in the UK for £50 and is totally passive, as we’ve seen before. Despite being passive, XS managed to perform a 125MHz overclock on the card. Not bad, not bad at all. Read the review, here.

Puma is still making review headlines across the web. Hexus.net has a Tosh A300D-15B on the bench and they’re feeling pretty happy about the performance this budget lappie puts out. The chipset/IGP+CPU combo is great, but the battery life and noisy ODD need some tweaks. Lots for next to nothing, right here.

Over there in Penguinland, Michael is taking a look at AMD’s HD3300/790GX chipset, under Linux, of course. Support for the HD3300’s main features, like HD decode, is spotty but Phoronix says it should be up by the end of the month. Better CPU overclocking, one of AMD’s sales arguments just isn’t there to be had… still, it’s a step upwards from the 780G. µ