A right pair of Charlies

BOO! THE SILLY SEASON looked like providing some great entertainment as the hardware egomeisters spinning in their overclocked armchairs started slagging each other off in fine style, just when this particular wibbler wandered off in his 3400+ campervan to the misty southern coast of Blighty.

So, back to the stodgy old hardware it is, then, with no backstabbing, mudslinging and general childish shenanigans to blight the horizon and give us all a chuckle as the crucial sales month of September gets going.

Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum will have to replace Tom and Van then, so lets wibble on over to Digit life where the guys put an Athlon XP 2600+ up against an Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz. Apart from the new processors the chipsets are also of great interest, they reckon. This way, merry wibblers.

Over at Athlonxp.com an eye is cast over an Athlon MP 2200+. You'll find that here.

Meanwhile, the folk over at HotHardware spent the weekend fiddling with Nvidia's new Detonator 40 drivers. What'll they do for you, you wonder. Find out over here.

And there's more Nvidiousness over at Planet Analog, where chief boffin David Kirk reckons "rendering hair and fur needs computer graphics muscle". That'll improve your Quake experience, I'm sure… splutter. Grunt and blast your way over here.

From Nvidia to ATI, of course. And here's a look at ATI's Radeon 9000 PRO from Overclockers Online.

While the overclockers of the Aussie variety have a DIY guide to building a subwoofer enclosure. Cheap but sounds good they reckon. Wibble over here.

Aselabs carries a review of a Jaton Xabre 400 64MB graphics card. That's here. The perfect card for the casual gamer, they reckon.

And the T-Breakers fiddle with Creative's 3D Blaster 5 RX9700 over here.

The dodgy Phluxers have a roundup of 80mm Thermalright heatsinks over here.

German speakers can wibble over here for HardwareLuxx's verdict on MSI's KT3 Ultra2 BR motherboard while Anglophonic mobophiles will have to settle for Tweaktown's look at an Albatron PX845E Pro II, by wibbling over here -- Babelfish notwithstanding of course.

Dan's checked out four more CPU coolers, all from Cho-Liang Thermal Technology, and added them to his "monster comparison". Find the Socket A coolers here and the P4 coolers here.

And finally… a couple of show reports from ECTS have surfaced. Accelenation's wander round Earls Court kicks off over here. While Bit-Tech's version features a fine pair of charlies wrapped in an Nvidia T-shirt over here. Hmm.

For a post on these pages, mail this bloke here. µ