DIY 9600GT Kit on the slab

Inno3D’s iChill GeForce 9600GT ZEROTherm Hurricane is on display at Guru3D. It’s another OC’d 9600GT but this one has a twist: it’s a DIY job. Yes, you get to set up the cooler yourself, and it’s a really big cooler. It’ll turn your card into a three-slot monster. Hilbert, however, attests that it is a worthy trade-off as the card is almost silent with this fan. There is a slight con to the card, a choice of Inno3D, which Hilbert really can’t wrap his head around: why on earth did they clock the shaders at x2.22 instead of the usual x2.5? Read it here.

APH Networks has a review of Asus’ Striker II NSE, the jaw-droppingly expensive motherboard that Asus considers to be its (current) ultimate motherboard. It uses the über-complex 790i Ultra SLI chipset and will jump through all sorts of hoops for you. It isn’t the fastest performer in the world, and the price tag doesn’t help at all, but you can run the fastest CPUs with the (still) fastest Nvidia graphics cards (although the review is run on an E6300). Overclocking results were pretty amazing, taking the E6300 up to 3.85GHz. Speaking of the devil...

A few days ago Acer announced it was entering the gaming PC market with their Acer Predator line. Today, TweakPC in Germany has the skinny on the beast – it isn’t a review per se, but you’ll get a good idea of what Acer is doing. Predators come with an Asetek watercooling unit under the bonnet, and a CPU overclocking tool from Acer itself, to give you a bit of a boost in gaming arena. Prices vary from £1699 through £3999, and the specs seem killer. The article is here in german, and googlenglished here.

George at Hillbilly Hardware is reviewing the Phenom 9850 BE. Facing off in the blue shorts is the Q6700 from Intel – true, one’s been around for a while, but it’s basically on the same process. George also added an X2 6400+ BE for flavour, and what you get is a bit of a sweet/sour combo. The X2 more or less equalled its sibling while the Q6700 spanked Phenom’s botty throughout the benchmarking sessions. According to George, you better not go for AMD when it comes to gaming. Still, the Phenom makes for a useful upgrade in case you’re sticking to AMD in your rig. Rampage over here.

Digit Life decided it was about time to find out just how worthy is a Quad intel CPU over current Duo offerings – in just about every single app you can imagine. Using a Q6600 as a baseline 100 per cent, the E7200 performed just a teenie bit under the Q6600, while the Q9300 performed just a little bit above. Core 2 Duo – especially the Wolfdales – really perform well and the power consumption is nothing short of astonishing. Digit noze.

Taking your laptop to the desktop might be simpler and an all-round better experience if you use this piece of kit here. Thrusted Reviews has a Tosh DynaDock DVI Universal USB docking station. The DynaDock adds a (HDCP infected) DVI and USB video outputs to your laptop, so you can plug in three monitors to your laptop+docking system – HD video is pretty sucky, according to Ardjuna. Like everything in life, it has its quirks, but once you’ve gotten over it, it’s all downhill.

Finally, even though our own Charlie has already disclosed the Via Nano, Via released its own set of benchmarks that shows performance when compared to a Celeron M and a Via C7. Some sites ran the numbers (with the appropriate disclaimer) while others are probably toiling away like gnomes doing the benchies themselves . Read the article from PC Perspective here. µ