SIS's Pentium chipset benchmarked

A COUSIN to the Gigabyte Motherboard mentioned above is reviewed at motherboards.org. The GA-K8NF-9 is a cheap n cheerful mid range product using the nForce4 chipset. it has four memory slots, support for PCI Express and four S-ATA plus six USB ports connections. [Yawn] Performance is OK, expansivity and presentation are all right. We're nearing the age of motherboard commodisation, it appeareth.

Still in the land of motherboards, HKEPC brings to us the SIS649 chipset which is the company's first attempt to bring PCI express and a host of new features to its aging platform. The first product to carry it is the Foxconn 649-M02-6ELRS and it is here.

Laptopshowcase is a newcomer to our daily column. That site is reviewing the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1630. This laptop makes good use of an AMD 64 3000+ Processor as well as a Radeon 9700 GPU. At £899 from comet it is not that expensive mind you, the price has been trimed by a full £100 pounds since this review and it comes with free delivery.

Anand tests the latest memory from OCZ, the EL PC4000 VX Gold and attemps to crack the performance barrier with DFI's nForce 4 Ultra-D. For your information, the memory is rated at 2-2-2 and a rated voltage of 3.3v. If youre' in that kind of thing, then read the review, else it might be better to invest your hard earned money on a dual processor rig instead.

Hardwarezone comes back to the AGP Radeon X800 Pro shootout that it froze some time back. Actually they found out that some cards, notably from Gigabyte had either 12 or 16 active pipelines and they did not mentionned which one was the real meat. The winner of the conest was the Gecube Card, not a brand that you often here in UK.

Still with ATI cards, Firing squad has been able to test the latest AIW family member, the ATI AIW X800XT which got the first editor's choice of a hopefully long series. It features both DVI and VGA and is loaded with innovations.

It is a superb casing and Techreport agrees with it. The Silverstone Temjin TH Full tower Case represents probably the best in ATX casing design today. It is boy's case. Heavy and sturdy and brings BTX style air flow to ATX systems.

Meanwhile chinese website GZeasy brings us to the Pentium 4 3.46GHz Extreme edition and tests it on Intel's latest and best platform, the 925XE. As usual, loads of monsters, dragons, benchmarks and figures. If you care only about figures, fine, else try to get a chinese translator. µ

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