Ultimate bang for buck CPU reviewed

WHILE INTEL AND AMD are duking it out in the “enthusiast” segment of computing, one of the littl’uns gets its 15 minutes of fame at Hardspell. They’ve “reviewed” – I use this term loosely - the E1600 Celeron and stuck it into a monster system for a little round of benchmarks.

The little performer actually overclocks quite well from its native 2.4GHz speed, they upped the FSB by 50% and ran it at 3.6GHz. Their bench results increased by about the same, too. If the numbers are anything to go by, they’re talking 12388 3Dmarks in ’06. All together now: “Celeron 300A!!!”

Gainward is one of those vendors that takes longer to resurface with new products, but usually come out with a highly tweaked and overwhelming product. In this case XBit Labs benched the Gainward Bliss 8800GT 512MB Golden Sample GLH. Pre-overclocked, near-silent and HDMI sound output, the only snag they had was the cooling system that was less than perfect in its job and caused the occasional overheat and hang (though we imagine it’s something simple to rectify). Performance is massive, with some benchies scoring close to the 8800GTX.

Generation 3D compares “Extreme” processors from different generations, a QX9650 and a QX6700. Different processes, different caches, one’s a tick the other’s a tock. They are both tremendous overclockers, thinks the reviewer, with the QX9650 reaching 4.1GHz and the QX6700 at 3.85GHz. The performance differences blur in gaming, but are more obvious when it comes to video encoding and other multimedia apps.

The website formerly known as Adrian’s Rojak Pot has posted a thorough 8800GT overclocking guide. Although they stick to the stock cooler, they report decent overclockability and not much heat being generated there at all. We can’t really explain how they’re getting such low temps on an overclock using the stock cooler, though.

OCWorkbench fools around with a GeCube HD3850 OC Edition. This card comes factory OC’d at 722/725 and instead of the standard cooling solution common to all 3850’s it uses an X-Turbo III. It’s a heatpipe+fan design that takes up two slots, effectively doubling the card’ s footprint. Well, that’s ok when they get to the benchies. The HD3850 OC Edition scores almost as high as its bigger brother, the 3870. They’re actually selling these cards down under for around $250 AUS, or approx. 217 buckaroos Stateside.

Anandtech’s Jarred Walton has the skinny on a new 24-inch LCD screen from HP, the w2408. It’s on the cheaper side of cheap ($570) and it’s a pretty standard affair when it comes to features. The design, however, is pretty novel. It’ll interest consumers on a budget, like the author says, but don’t disregard the other offers on the market. µ