Phenom 8000 proves good for gaming

IF YOU'RE WAITING for AMD to unleash a Tri-core oddity upon the world, you can get an idea of what to expect from this test here.

Tom’s Boys have purpose-tested one, two, three and four cores with their Phenom 9900, simulating what a three-core 8000-series CPU could do. Interesting to see that most games take little or no advantage of the fourth core, which means that AMD could have a potentially cheap gaming CPU on its hands (but on the other hand it would stall quadcore sales for AMD...) Draw your own conclusions here.

Dell has put some serious firepower under the XPS M1730's bonnet, as Anandtech discovered. This particular M1730 is a refreshed model now equipped with Penryn-based Core 2 Duo CPUs and a slew of new Nvidia graphics options in both single and SLI-mode. The XPS is massive for a laptop, even for a DTR. However, you’ll be pleased to note, that the dual-SLI takes a hugh performance leap from the current Nvidia drivers to the unreleased 174.20 beta drivers in Bioshock, Quake 4, World in Conflict and Crysis. Not too shabby. Read on.

Chile Hardware has an in-depth analysis of three different Intel-based micro-ATX boards. ECS, eVGA and MSI made the cut. You’ve got integrated graphics, discrete graphics, overclocking. Sadly, only one of them has serious HTPC potential. Cheap, powerful, under-used, would define these mobos. But they’re all below $100 so it’s always worth a good look. Read it here, or here if you don’t understand the lingo.

Chipsets are becoming complicated affairs, usually stuck between a rock (CPU) and a hard place (GPU). Hotcases.de took some measurements of the Coolink ChipChilla, a chipset cooling device that should help improve your overclocking efforts. The ChipChilla looks eerily like a smaller-scale Scythe Mugen. Measurements were taken off-chip after 2 hours of 3DMark06. The 17 degree (Celsius) drop seems to justify the €16.90 investment, thinketh the author (here in English).

Looking for the right external HDD to drag along on trips? Xbit has a thorough poke at 9 different external 160GB units. External HDDs have the nasty habit of coming pre-formatted to Fat32 (for Mac compatibility we assume). Aleksey draws attention to the fact that many times, the firmware is as important as the interface it’s connected to, which in some cases can be a deal-breaker while in others, it can take a seemingly poor bus (USB 2.0) to overtake eSATA. Some time you’ll need to buy one. You might as well read about it right here.

Trusted Reviews is interested in a little bit of home entertainment. They bummed Linksys for their DMA2100 Digital Media Extender. The DMA2100 comes equipped with dual wireless LAN, Ethernet, HDMI, Component, Composite, S-Video, S/PDIF RCA and Stereo RCA. Add to that the PVR features and it’s almost a surefire winner. Oh, it also supports VC-1 HD decoding, which means it really matches your Full HD panel’s capacity in the living room. Worth a read. µ