Dual DC Xeon rig breaks Specview, Cinebench benchmarks

3D Professor checks the Supermicro X7DAE Review over 12 pages. Geared towards corporate sellers, this dual processor, dual core motherboard offers all the best bits from Intel including VT, HT technology, EM64T and SSE3. It supports PATA and SATA through Intel's Serial RAID controller hub while at the same time offering an extra set through Adaptec's embedded SATA with HostRAID controller driver. Eight DIMM support means that you can place up to 32GB on it. Benchmarks were performed mainly with professional applications like SpecView or Cinebench. The rig breaks some records well and truly.

Wee Gordie Lang at Cameralabs reviews Sony's first ever digital SLR camera and declares it's an impressive little beastie for the money. Go here for more.

Elsewhere, Flexbeta has a little explanation about what exactly the Conroe is. Didn't know that there was an E6200 model around, whose price would probably be less than $180, which is a bargain. Also a reader called Rett has asked whether there is a review out there which analyses or at least benchmarks how Conroe-based technology handles memory virtualisation. He says that this could be Intel's main Achilles heel. More on that later.

French website 01net has a roundup of eight Direct-to-disc DVD camcorders. They have evolved quite a lot since Hitachi launched its series of DVD camcorders a couple of years ago. They come with their own sets of disadvantages like the fact that you need to finalise a disc, a session that can lasts 30 minutes, before playing it on a standalone DVD player. The DVD camcorders are bigger than miniDV camcorders but some like the Canon DC10 - wasn't there an 8mm white DC10 camcorder some times back already? - is half the size of the competition. With regards to their picture quality though, you can't fault them.

Like Xbitlife yesterday, Digitlife writes on a Core2 Duo CPU which is neither the X6800 nor the 6700. The E6600 is clocked at only 2.4GHz with 4MB L2 cache. It is actually a roundup where you will also find the FX60 and FX62 together with an E6400 Engineering Sample, the E6700 and the ex-Intel King, the XE 965. 24 benchmarks are actually used, with some 64-bit ones amongst them and quite a few professional ones. Interestingly, the number of games is limited to four. Results speak for themselves, the Core2 Duo eats AMD for breakfast and Prescott for Dinner.

Vr-Zone checks the Asrock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2 Motherboard, an entry level mobo that fears no one, especially not branded name. Asus's offshoot is very ambitious and already has snatched a sizeable percentage of the budget/entry level market here in the UK. The model reviewed is based on the i945p chipset. It supports HD Audio, SATA and eSATA2, NCQ, Crossfire, GbE and Firewire. The reviewer managed to get an E6400 model to do a 1MB Pi benchmark in 25 sec, which is not bad at all.

ITreviews reports on the Samsung SCX-4200 all in one laser multifunction device, which effectively turns it into a black and white photocopy machine. The MFP is not larger than an A4 sheet with a 250-sheet paper tray and a simple and effective control panel. There's no network option in there though. Running prices are low and the SCX4200 does come with a decent set of software bundle like ReadIris OCR and a document management application called SmartThru. µ