D-I-Y SSD for 75 €urobucks

HILBERT AT GURU3D has a very interesting D-I-Y guide for those of you that are into SSD. Yes, a build your own SSD drive, the hook? The Bill of Materials, if you can call it that, is just under 75 €urobucks. How’d he do it, you ask? Well, there’s plenty of tech to shop around for, and this’ll let you to do your own thing. What’s more, it could very well breathe new life into an old laptop, if you have one. Come to think of it, you could do some real damage with a serious CF+RAID PCI card, but in the end it all comes down to how much you want to spend. Solid state D-I-Y here.

Upgraders... tennn-shunnn! What we have ‘ere is a genuine review of not one, but two, DDR2+DDR3 motherboards – the Asus P5KC and the MSI P35 Platinum Combo. Both support 2xDDR3 + 4xDDR2 slots (4 and 8 GB total, respectively). Although they get high scores, they both have some deal-breaking pros and cons, so reading the review is mandatory. Git your upgrade kit here.

Chile Hardware has tested the Asus Maximus Extreme, another ROG-flavoured motherboard from the box-builder. The X38-based mobo has one of the most powerful BIOS on the market (and the most troublesome, apparently), offering a host of options for enthusiasts to click away and tweak their rigs. The reviewer thinks that the DDR3 support is formidable, but apparently you get better overclocking results when resorting to Core 2 Duo as opposed to Core 2 Quads... Big thumbs up from Chile, over here.

Some basic analysis going on at IT Reviews.co.uk – a HannsG HG216DP, a 22-inch HD-ready . Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff (and not much to impress people, honestly), but the £135 price tag might raise some eyebrows, if you’re to believe the reviewer. Get cheap “HD-Ready” resolution over here.

Technic3D in Deutschland are testing Sapphire’s HD 3870X2 in QuadFire mode. This means 310 €urobucks a piece (€620 total, almost $1000). Although there’s no direct comparison to SLI setups, the reviewers have a clear idea that the cards perform very well, and that the latest drivers have provided some needed smoothness. Crysis is actually very playable at 1680x1050 0xAA, high detail... almost 40fps. Click hier fur Deutsch, here for English

Looking for a cheap LCD to put on your kid’s desk for work & play? Well, look no further. Trusted Reviews has something from Chimei called the CMV 633A – a bit of an oddity as it uses a 16-inch panel in a big-screen world. 95 quid will get you a 1366x768 matrix with a 550:1 contrast ratio and an average response of 8ms. This is not next-gen stuff, quite the opposite, and although it has that “HD-Ready” resolution, it only has a D-Sub connector. Good for your kid’s computer, your POS computer (that would be Point of Sale, not Piece of...) Read the short review here.

Lastly, Anandtech has scored as B3 stepping Phenom, effectively a 9550 Phenom, as it’s 2.2GHz and B3 steppings come marked as “xx50”, although for this particular case this is a moot point as we’re talking about an engineering sample and these come unlocked. This is a preview (ie: teaser, really), though, so don’t expect much number crunching or face-offs. We’ll pick this up again as soon as they have crunched the numbers. µ