Two Opteron 2200se can't beat the XE

PLEASE KEEP the children away. Please. We are reviewing serious stuff here. The HP xw9400 workstation is tested with next generation Opteron 2200se processors running at 2.8GHz as well as with one Conroe XE. The rest of the subsystem is top notch with SAS Drive and Quadro video cards. The benchmarks do not lie. AMD is quickly swapping places with Intel. The latter dominates most benchmarks which is outrageous as two Opterons can barely hold kick the ass of the Conroe CPU.

Anandtech takes a look at the Abit AW9D-Max motherboard in a preview article. Abit is back in business after some serious financial difficulties. Based on i975x chipset, with support for nine xATA devices and it even features the Audio Max slot, a welcomed improvement to onboard audio - complete with support for Dolby Master Studio. The rest is pretty much standard. That said, even if the BIOS was still in beta, performance was stellar and it proved to be an excellent overclocker.

Bjorn3D reports on the XFX Geforce 7900 GS XT video card. XFX, which apparently, migh be going Asus's way soon. The GPU used is the 7900GS with this one overclocked to 480MHz/1.4GHz. The card is SLI compatible, comes with HDTV, Dual DVI and S-Video. The card is cheap and as B3D points out, buying two of those and SLI them makes more sense than looking for a single 7900GTX. Shame though B3D did not try to overclock the card a tad more.

Laptoplogic tests the Apple Macbook 13-inch model. Great stuff here, black in colour, lightweight and a right heir to quality build from Apple. This model integrates the Core Duo processor and does support Windows XP Pro through bootcamp and Linux native. Some improvements include a better LCD closure mechanism, an upgraded software package and a host of other improvements, mostly internal. The laptop is well priced and some niceties like the integrated digital camera and the screen will win more than a few over.

Gamepc compares five motherboards from Asus, all of which are destined to support the Core2 Duo processor. Each of these motherboards obviously target a separate segment. i975x, i965 and nForce4 chipsets are present. The P5WDG-2WS Professional motherboard is the most desirable and offers the most features, like PCI-X and superb SATA RAID performance. That said, you will probably be more than happy to get the Asus entry level motherboard and pair it with any Core2 Duo processor.

Another Conroe supporting motherboard is the ECS NForce 570 SLIT-A mainboard, version 5.1, which is reviewed at OCWorkbench. The motherboard has two PCIe x8 slot as well as a host of other mid-to high end features. GbE, 8-channel Audio but no Firewire. The board sports the usual features of an ECS motherboard like the purple colour and the translucent plastic heat sink fan. A good mid range mobo.

If you want to send in reviews, hardware or software, don't hesitate, just bring them in. I am particularly fond of exotic hardware that you won't find elsewhere. Even if the review is not in English, as long as it is interesting and entertaining. Send it in. Also I would be glad if someone could point me to a recent directory of hardware websites. µ