DFI shrinks LANParty

LANPARTY MOBOS are back with a vengeance. Hardware Canucks has a review of the JR P45-T2RS - a smaller, leaner, meaner gaming mobo. For $170 you get a very full featured and very cool (literally) motherboard. You also get Crossfire, which is great for building a powerful gaming rig. Contrary to DFI designs, this mobo isn’t that great at overclocking, says HC. Read the article, over here.

Watercooling has been around for a while and it’s come a long way. It’s still a very DIY kind of customization only and handful of vendors go with OEM builders. AMA is targeting retail right now, and you can find their latest watercooling creation – the Serac 770 – at Driver Heaven. The Serac 770 is easy to set up and use, according to Nathan, but finding it on a shop shelf might be your biggest challenge. Read on.

Tweak Town is enjoying a bit of DIY work with the mini-ITX Zotac nForce 610i mobo. With its IGP *cough* mGPU in place, it can use Intel processors to drive some decent HTPC features. Performance-wise it doesn’t break records, but it doesn’t disappoint either. If you think it’s targeting the Intel CPU market, it’s got plenty of customers to go around. Read about it here.

Thrusting Reviews has a short hands-on with the 9400M mGPU. What can we say? It’s an Apple MacBook with an 9400m compared to Intel’s G45… According to Hugo, loading big files in Photoshop is where the mGPU kicks in (although we can’t really see how), and apparently you can combine the GPUs to operate together in the MacBook Pro (although we’ve heard the opposite). You can read the article, here.

Although not technically a hardware review, HardOCP has posted a preview article on the upcoming Far Cry 2. This game, as you might not know, isn’t programmed by Crytek, but uses a proprietary engine called Dunia – so you really can’t establish parallels to Crysis or Warhead. Apparently it’s set to be the next gaming benchmark. Read about it here.

The folk at Les Numériques have a face-off between three 30-inch uber LCDs from Apple Dell and Samsung. If you’re interested in upgrading your graphics card, remember you need a decent LCD to go with it – we know our 24-inchers won’t max out the GTX 280 or HD 4870. They’re not cheap but they’re impressive when it comes to entertainment. Read the full article, here (in French) or here (in English).

HKEPC has also done a round-up of 9300/9400 mGPUs on desktop motherboards. OK, it’s Chinese to us, but you’ll get the gist from googlenglish – and graphs are always graphs. You’ve got comparison details to Intel’s G45 (but no 790GX, for example), so you can see performance gains on the Nvidia chipset of anything between 40% and 300% over Intel’s G45. We can’t really see where Nvidia came up with the “5x the performance” claim… who knows? Try and give it a read, here. µ