Quake IV benchmarks checked out

THE EQS A72K9-CF motherboard, one of the first readily available Crossfire motherboard, is on test at Hexus. It is a pre-retail model with a pre-retail BIOS though. Based on the Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition, its specs correspond to that of a high quality board; GbE and 10/100 Ethernet ports, Firewire, four SATA150 ports, 7.1 audio channel. Have a read for your pleasure.

AMDzone has some very interesting benchmarks of the forthcoming Quake 4 game on a number of mid-range and high end graphic cards - ranging from the 6800GT to the 7800GTX. Since it is based on the Doom 3 engine, there's no surprise as the X8xx family stays far far behind the Nvidia models.

BIOSmagazine has a UK exclusive review of a Photo Inkjet Printer with a built in CD burner, the Lexmark P450. What's the purpose of that CD burner is a mystery for me. The P450 is finally quite mundane, has a mediocre print quality, is superbly slow and most importantly costs more than it should.

The latest paper edition of Personal Computer World has a small review of the ATI Radeon X1800XT which sports a GPU running at 625MHz and 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.5GHz. The resulting monster easily bests the 7800GTX. It ain't perfect though as it is a dual slot solution requiring some heavy cooling and as such is quite noisy.

Is the Radeon X1300 Pro really worth all the attention it is getting? Neoseeker has the answer as it tests a sample of the new entry level from ATI. Comes with Avivo and a single DVI out plus a copper cooler. Neoseeker compares it to the 6600GT which is even cheaper than that part - as is the X800GT. Which means that it is a no go right now.

Two 120mm Fans are being pitted against one another at Doomed PC - nice layout change Btw. The Akasa AK183-L2B faces the Thermaltake TT1225. The conclusion couldn't be clearer. Want looks first? Go for the Thermaltake, those looking for performance will go for the Akasa. µ