Nehalem snaffled, benched - a bit

THE GREAT GEEKSTER of hardware has snuck away a couple of Nehalems from the floor at Computex and run some quick benchmarks on Intel’s upcoming marchitecture. Anand couldn’t grab a mature X58 mobo and run so he did improvise. Unfortunately he didn’t get any gaming benchmarks and the memory latencies were high, but what he did get is shocking enough for you to mull on for a bit more. The architectural changes brought by Nehalem over current the Core 2 architecture are many, but the integrated memory controller and the new L3 cache seem to be doing the job, and even the questionable Hyper Threading feature is back. The only setback in the Nehalem core is power consumption, but that was to be expected. Put on your seatbelt and click here.

Ars Technica has taken a good long look at their resident PS3, and they can hardly recognize it for the hardware it was on the day it launched. Like Ars says “The revolution will not be televised, it will be downloaded one update at a time”, the PS3 is an ever-mutating machine. From upgrades to updates, going through a bevy of new game titles, Ars rubs its eyes and re-reviews the whole thing. Worth a read.

Hardware Logic is testing Crucial’s Ballistix DDR3-2000 (2x1GB). As you can imagine it’s the fastest rated memory coming out of Crucial’s stables, and it has been reviewed here. It’s got an EPP profile, but HL didn’t manage to run it adequately on a 790i mobo so they did things manually. Out of the box, however, the performance on these things is blistering fast. Word to the wise, check compatibility for t hese modules before you drop $600 on these. Yes... that’s six-oh-oh for this little piece of kit.

Big Bruin is reviewing Hiper’s Osiris tower case. Introducing some nifty new features, the Osiris surprised BB with a lot of detail and some ingenuity – like the air intake/PSU mounting at the bottom of the case that would blow air into the rig and extract it at the top through a 120mm fan. The motherboard tray isn’t removable, though, which could be a serious drawback for us geeky fiddlers who eviscerate our PCs too often. Big thumbs up with a decent pricing. Read it here.

Metku.net is testing Xigmatek’s Battle-Axe (VD964) GPU cooler. The Battle-Axe is a twin 92mm fan-with-heatpipes cooler for your graphics card. It isn’t the most compatible, as it has some memory clearance issues. It’s a ruinous affair if you want SLI, ‘cos it takes up 4(!) slots on your PC, but if you can afford it, the cooling performance is pretty decent. Noisy, though. Read it here.

Tweak-a-ville’s Shane is reviewing BFG’s OC’d 9600GT that retails under the name Tech Force 9600GT OC2. BFG kept the 9600GT’s stock single-slot cooler and overclocked the card to a healthy 690/940MHz core/memory speed. Power consumption remained pretty much unaltered compared to stock 9600GTs, though, which is a good thing. BFG’s choice of the stock cooler seems to be the right one, more so if you don’t have much space left inside your case and really can’t afford to sacrifice room with dual-slot solutions. Get a couple of these and you’re set to play Crysis and indecently high resolutions. Check it out.

We’ll leave you today with something Hexus.Net spotted while on the floor at Computex 2008. It doesn’t look like anything to write home about, but J&W build a Mini-ITX (not Micro) with AMD’s 780G chipset (called MINIX 780G-128M) that produces about 1700 marks on 3DMark 06, mostly thanks to the mobo’s 128MB onboard framebuffer. It uses a couple of SO-DIMMs so you’re slightly limited. They say it supports the Phenom X4 but we’re not quite sure you can stick 125W processors on it. Pricing is supposed to be around $180. This seems a bit steep, though. Should make a phenomenal HTPC... µ