AMD and Intel face off in media encoding battle

LOST CIRCUITS delivers some crunchy and yummy figures in a roundup of Intel and AMD processors. Michael explored the media encoding performance to find out the one which gave the best value for more money. Tools ranged from Nero to DiVX. A few stuff that crops out. The E6600 is as good as a FX62, but AMD is still better at the lower end, partly because, there are no E6100 or 62000 for the time being. The 3800+ is a bargain at the price.

Chinese website PChome.net reports on a X1950XTX with 0.9ns Samsung memory chips that is kind of strange, it does not sport the bulky heatsink fan that one can find on most reference cards. Instead, it comes with a water cooling solution grafted on top of it. Can't find the brand of the card but a crossfire system based on this card is feasible as it is noticeably smaller than the ones we've seen before. The card uses the Koolance Evercool solution which looks like a desktop mini satellite speaker. Anyone knows more about the brand, let me know.

PlanetX64 reports on the Corsair Nautilus 500 Water Cooling kit. We've seen it all before. The Nautilus is geared towards mainstream/enthusiast, those who want cheap and cheerful solutions to their cooling problems. The kit apparently can be installed in 10 minutes and it does the job. Not only it is easy and efficient, Corsair has obviously learnt a lot from its experience in memory category and gives top of the range performance out of the box.

HK-based website HKEPC pits the Core2 Duo T7600 aka Merom, against its Yonah predecessor, in a death match. We learn that Santarosa platform is the sum of Crestline, Kedron, Windigo and Robson. The T7600 consumes slightly more power than the T2700 - still 10%, to 34w and is slightly hotter overall. In battery mode, the TDP jumps to 20w, up from 13.1w. That said, the performance jump is impressive, especially in games where gains were north of 10%. Bearing in mind that frequency did not change, it looks like Intel did a P3-to-P4 like change.

Legionhardware puts the Albatron Geforce 7600GS videocard, dubbed the Bandaid. It is an AGP card which should give your ageing computer, the boost that it needs to get it going the extra mile. Albatron gets a kudos for thinking about those poor old chaps with old AGP cards. The 7600GS card they present has DVI, DSub and Svideo, a weird looking, diagonally arranged HSF and a power connector. Steven says that he does not feel that upgrading a system that is already old is something worth it. I would tend to totally agree with him.

Anandtech received a new BIOS for the Asus P5B motherboard and writes an article on how flashing a BIOS can bring so much more value to a product without actually costing anything to the end user, a free ride. The Asus P5B is therefore re-tested with the whole range of Core2 Duo processors excluding the X6800. Anandtech provided us with a summary of overclocking speeds. The E6300 reached 3.68GHz, up from 1.86GHz. Which is not bad at all.

If you want to send in reviews, hardware or software, don't hesitate, just bring them in. I am particularly fond of exotic hardware that you won't find elsewhere. Even if the review is not in English, as long as it is interesting and entertaining. Send it in. Also I would be glad if someone could point me to a recent directory of hardware websites.