GT200 gets the Real World Treatment

WE’VE POINTED OUT more than a couple of Real World Tech articles in the past, usually of the highly technical kind, and very interesting if you’re like us and like to know what really makes stuff tick. Well, David has another article on-line for us, focusing exclusively on the green goblin’s GT200 chip. He’s dissected the architecture and gets you thinking about the potential of CUDA and the massively parallel processing capacity these things have. There’s a lot to be said about it (and even more to be read). Hardcore stuff.

Tech Report is trying to demistify the whole Netbook scene, especially considering the number of Netbook-type lappies and the back to school affair. Your kids probably have teeny hands that can type on those keyboards, provided they don’t drop it, get it stolen or lose it. But if you consider the price of these things, it’s well worth the bother. Tech Report will set you straight.

Ever since Tosh revealed its master plan to us a couple of months ago, we’ve been eagerly waiting for them to launch this baby here. Yes, it’s the awesomely advertised and much anticipated XD E500 upscaling DVD player. Thrusting Reviews had a go at it, and they were thoroughly disappointed, not of the upscaling quality, you see? But rather on the pricing this kit has that makes it way too expensive to justify the investment. Still, if you have a big enough DVD collection you might want to consider one.

Foxconn has lifted the skirt, err… sorry, veil on its upcoming G45-based mobo, the Concerto. You’ve got a lot of photography on the mobo (which actually looks cool dressed in orange and black), and the early benchmarks are limited by the pre-release BIOS don’t do it justice. The silly crossfire setup will ruin things a bit (16x/4x instead of 8x/8x), but then again you’re buying the board for its IGP, otherwise you’d be getting a P45… Read on.

While CPUs have, more or less, stabilised when it comes to power consumption, GPUs have gone other way. They draw more and more power with each generation. Granted, the lower margins won’t allow GPU makers to jump every time a new process comes along, and that’s a problem PC Games Hardware is addressing today: just how much does your GPU setup suck? No, really? How much?

CPU3D has a nice little Asrock frankenboard (now with Extra ESD) that uses the 790GX chipset and even includes 128MB of sideport memory. It’s called the AOD790GX/128M (quite a departure from the usual naming convention, really). The board isn’t micro-ATX which might turn off the HTPC crowd, but the newer chipset is supposed to get you some decent overclocking (which it didn’t) as well as some new power saving features. For an Asrock mobo it ain’t cheap either (£70-80). Bit of mixed feelings, here. µ