Having a merry Geekmas

IT'S A MERRY, merry Christmas for the gaming/enthusiast crowds, as graphics cards and mobos have dominated reviews these last weeks. We haven’t seen such an intense barrage of launches .... uhm... ever. The latest gift is the NVIDIA 780i SLI board - one on test at Hardware Secrets. It’ll let you stick in 3 Ultras for tri-SLI joy, but only if you have the moolah to blow on that. Otherwise Hardware Secrets is sensible enough to recommend a Spider-based platform for your ultimate gaming machine. They aren’t totally convinced about the pricing on the board either - $290. PCStats, Hothardware and Legit Reviews also have their way with 780i SLI boards. Is it just us or do they all look quite the same? Well they are “Nvidia Design”. Also keep a look out for ESA (Enthusiast System Architecture), once Nvidia’s got its act together, we’ll see a host of ESA-enabled devices for your gaming rig.

Keep your AMD CPU cool or just try your luck at overclocking your rig – take a look at Icrontic’s round-up of Socket 775 and AM2 CPU coolers. The right one will get your OC’ed CPU running cooler than it would under the Intel stock cooler at default settings. Strewth.

Another 8800GTS 512MB review, this time at TechARP. It’s an absolute, they believe, with the only card competing with it being its sibling, the 8800GT – with whom they do a direct benchmark comparison, so you know just how much better it is. Adrian thinks the price is right and if you’re on the market to buy a DX10 card with serious HD decoding, the GTS is the way to go.

ITReviews.co.uk has the skinny on Dell’s latest XPS desktop. In case you’ve been in a coma for the past couple of years, Dell has invested some serious resources in the gaming/enthusiast market both by buying up Alienware, and then by providing the developers full access to their product portfolio – including servers. The XPS 720H2C is a liquid-cooled, overclocked, gaming machine (physics card included). The Intel chippery is overclocked to 3.46GHz in a four-core system. A pittance at £2801.51.

We know Viiv and Live bombed. It’s forced many of us to look for DIY solutions for our HTPC dreams. Metku has an interesting review of a GMC AVC-S7. This slim desktop-DVD-player-lookalike case will fit right in with the rest of your AV equipment. It could’ve been a contender but a couple of flaws (noise) impair it. But that’s nothing you clever chaps couldn’t solve with a tiny bit of DIY work.

Overclockers Club is still trying to squeeze some extra mileage out of a 640MB 8800 GTS. XFX supplied the goodies, an XFX 8800GTS Extreme Edition. The card comes factory overclocked and Alan thinks the performance is great. He pits the EE against standard versions of the 8800GTS 640 from other brands, and delivers a sound beating. µ