Radeons, Rambo mobos and ABIT shenanigans

I GUESS WE'LL STILL have to kick off with the latest Radeon happenings. German site hartware.net has a wee review of the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. How good do they reckon it is? Find out here. Or here, if your German's not up to ze mark.

VR-Zone has rounded up a selection of pix of cards sporting ATI's new Radeon chips, including Creative's 3DBlaster 5 RX9000 Pro. Wibble this way. While you're there, have a look at the pic they posted of a PCI-SIG roadmap culled from Japanese website www.mycom.co.jp

3DVelocity have posted their preview of ATi's R300 technology based on the London launch event over here.

French site Photim.com might not be entirely hardware focused but they reckon, "La carte SmartMedia" has had its day. Toshiba is set to introduce a smaller, quicker and all-round better card called the XD-Picture Card, they say. If you want more take hold of your Petit Robert and wibble over here.

The Monk at AcceleNation tells us of their review of the Abit MAX IT7 legacy-free P4 mobo "with bundles of integrated goodies". That's here. "You'll find 4 USB 2.0 ports powered by the Intel ICH4 south bridge, Firewire, SPDIF Optical Out, 6 Channel Audio outputs, Ethernet, 2 USB 2.0 ports and support for 8 IDE devices capable of 4 Channel RAID 0 or 1," he dribbles.

Overclockers Online have reviewed the Shuttle AK35GT2-R KT333 motherboard. That's over here.

Viperlair has a fiddle with a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card over here. "Turtle Beach -- now Voyetra Turtle Beach -- has been creating sound cards, including more professional sound cards for over 17 years," they say, and the Santa Cruz is its latest offering.

Deperate Dan has bang about with Just Cooler's SP-300 "silent" PSU. He tells us he checks out its spec sheet, "I poke around inside, and I reflect on whether this "silent computing" device will force you to install more fans in your case to compensate for its weedy little one." Wibble this way.

The deviants at DeviantPC have posted a review of the Asus P4T533-C motherboard. Based on the i850E chipset the board uses a Pentium 4 Northwood CPU with a Front Side Bus of 133MHz (quad pumped to 533MHz) coupled with PC1066 RAMBUS memory to produce top performance, they reckon. Have a look over here.

And OCWorkbench has a piece culled from Digitimes about Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) plans to buy into ABit. Outsourcing deals are leading to ever-increasing ties, the piece suggests over here. µ