Dazzle you with lithography, charm you with tables

STARTING OFF with some serious tech talk for a change, RealWorldTech’s David Wang published the RWT “Process Technology Advancements at IEDM 2007” article. Immersion lithography, high-K gate dielectrics and process technologies are summarised, table-ised and simplified for the common mortal.

Possibly the most interesting info isn’t pointing out Intel’s breakthroughs - or AMD’s for that matter (they’re sitting in IBM’s shade by the way) - it’s on TSMC’s latest 32nm process (that the author believes will do wonders for next-gen GPU’s), Fujitsu’s own 45nm process, as well as the Nippon alliance of Tosh, Sony and NEC that show they’re at least equal, if not ahead, of everyone else when it comes to producing high-performing silicon from a handful of sand. Interestingly, if anyone were to actually buy AMD this year, our money would be riding on either TSN or IBM. Give it a read.

More things hailing from Canada these days. Amongst them is this review of the Asrock 4Core1333 -eSATA2 R5.0 mobo. It’s a “budget” ($105 CAD or just around $100 USD) board based on a P31 chipset. The vendor claims to be able to support Wolfdale cores which make this a target for upgraders looking to the mid-term, and it’ll still support decent graphics combos through the use of Crossfire technology. However the Canucks thought the pricing to be a little too steep for a budget mobo. You decide.

Silent PC Review is one of our faves when it comes to tracking down the right HTPC components for your rig. This time they’re trying their luck with a 1TB Hitachi drive. They believe the Deskstar 7K1000 to be a major improvement over the noisy little imps that inhabited the previous generation of Hitachi drives, but it still falls behind the remainder of the competitors. Baby steps, Hitachi, baby steps...

OCinside.de is one of those rare German sites that serve up English-language articles. They’ve been experimenting with OCZ SLI-certified PC2-8500 (DDR1066) 2GB kit. They tried lowering it to 4-4-4-10 timings and upping the frequency (having reached 453MHz) which seems quite tight & high, but translates to the same results as having the default timings and frequency. At stock speeds, it performed admirably well, and they do mention something about headroom for overclocking...

Back in the graphics arena, [H]ardOCP collected some 8800GTSes (512MB) from XFX, eVGA and Asus, and crunched some figures. They have all sorts of tests performed on the cards (no stain removal ones) and they all perform exceptionally well. However, in a three card race, you’d expect all three of them to get medals. They didn’t. Guess who? Click here to find out.

Super Talent makes an extra-pricey, ultra-performance bit of memory kit called the Project X 2x1GB PC3-14400, and as you’ve already guessed, it’s being reviewed somewhere... Overclockers Online has it. Apart from the great looks it’s one of the highest rated DDR3 modules you’ll find right now – but restrictive when it comes to timings. We said pricey, didn’t we? How about 500 buckaroos? Blimey... makes you wish RIMMs were the fad again. µ