Pentium EE 965 CPU tested, tested, and tested again

AS REPORTED by the INQ, newly Dellyfied Alienware has released three computer series - the Aurora 7500, the ALX and the Area-51 7500 model - which come with the first Physics Processing Unit from Ageia, the PhysX. One can wonder whether this will spark a similar revolution as the 3DFX a decade ago and whether video encoding could benefit from it.

Chinese website HKEPC tests the MSI Geforce 7600GS which is specially designed for MCE. It has no fan, passively cooled it is. It has two DVI ports and a TVO. It is SLI ready and supports H264. It is apparently twice as fast as the X1600XT, something HKEPC was quick to check and guess what, it turns out to be quite untrue. Actually, the XT holds its own quite well, even in Crossfire vs SLI configurations.

There's a new kid in town and it is the Pentium EE 965 which supersedes the XE 955. This one is clocked at 3.73GHz and is a dual core with 4MB L2 cache in total, etched using 65nm technology. The test setup is pretty complete with all the FXs, the X2s and the P Ds that you can expect. In video encoding, the P EE earns the FX60 et al, whereas in other configurations, the AMD remains on top.

The same processor is reviewed at Hexus where the tit-for-tat battle is exposed and where the 5000+ riposte from AMD is expected soon. As expected, Hexus says that it is good, but if you want to get better value out of your hard earnt £700, you might better go for something cheaper of still wait for Conroe to come... Or why not just invest in a laptop.

Gamepc inspects the future of storage in the form of the Gigabyte I-RAM which is one of these products that gets noticed easily. It is expensive, it has a 4GB limitations and although you might want to run several of them, the price appeal is far from being convincing. Better get a couple of Raptors and that's it. Or you might just want to wait for the I-RAM with DDR2 support and SATA2.

UK-based Biosmagazine tests the Evesham T807 LCD TV which is a £99.99 8-inch monitor/tv ready on time for the world cup in your office or in your kitchen. It not only travels well with a set of adaptors and antenna - which is a good point - it is compatible with many standards, comes with a numerb of IO and a USB cable and even if there no digital TV tuner, it will more than fit the bill. µ