4x2 Core AMD Opteron, 16GB PC tested

IT IS Tech Report's turn to review the Asus A8R-MVP motherboard, probably one of the most exciting motherboards lately. What sets it apart from other motherboards is its price, the fact that it combines ATI's Crossfire technology with ALI's - now Nvidia - superb M1575 Southbridge. The motherboard is simple in design, comes with 8-channel HD audio. Storagewise, it has four SATA Raidable ports, and more tweaks in its BIOS than most motherboards in its category. No GbE though. Fantastic value for money.

GDhardware tests the Visiontek X1900XTX video card. It is a 48 pixel pipeline monster with a huge power supply and a huge PCB. GDH says that it is the fastest single card - guess what it does in dual mode. It runs stably, albeit heating a little bit too much. Only bad points noted by GDH apart from the price are the fact that the X1900XT performs very close to it and that the official driver package is bloated - that said, you can always try the Omega ones.

The Terabyte barrier is quickly coming down thanks to the falling price of HDDs. Extremetech introduces us to a couple of pretenders to the throne of big daddy in the HDD world. On our right the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB from Seagate and on our left the WD Caviar RE2 400 GB. Even if the first one is bigger, the price per dollar easily goes to the second one. The WD one is designed for RAID and offers entreprise-class robustness, which is not a bad thing at that price.

Meanwhile, the Winbook A215 gets hardware central's attention as the latter gets to try that $800 Turion MT laptop. 1.6GHz with 1MB L2 cache, 512MB DDR333 memory and a 60GB HDD and a DVD writer. The whole stuff is topped by a WXGA 15.4-inch widescreen. No Firewire here and the battery life is pityful. Plus there were concerns as regards to the power button. Too many compromises according to the reviewer.

Which one is better, an iMac G5 or an iMac Core duo. To this interesting dilemna, Anandtech and Mr Shimpi provides an interesting answer in the form of a review. Well, Anand likes it a lot, and would possibly fit well in a kitchen setup. He also finds out that the current G5 matches the Core Duo when it comes to performance but is no match when power consumption is factored in. The first generation Core duo, he says, are like public beta test machines. Come on, Apple imitating Microsoft now.

We end up this HWR with the 23rd part of the SPEC CPU2000 report by Digitlife. No I am not kidding. THey check the four processor Dual Core AMD Opteron 875. Where they managed to obtain four Opteron 275 and 16 1GB DDR memory modules is really beyong me. The motherboard is from Newisys BTW. Since it is a Spec int benchmark, it is absolutely worthless to start drolling about its desktop performance. Still very interesting if you are in corporate sector. µ