Nano gives Atom food for thought - and then some

FAB-U­LESS VIA might not have the resources Intel has, but we have to say they’ve been hyping up the Nano to good effect and today, for the first time, you can see how the Nano measures up to the Atom. PC Perspective has the bomb, and we call it a bomb, because the performance on the Nano puts to shame the hyper-threaded Atom. The Nano draws a bit more power overall, but it delivers that much more of a punch. Ryan’s got it hosted right here.

Today we’re exceptionally linking to two TweakTown reviews. Both are graphics cards, both are Nvidia, and they are… you guessed: a 9500GT and a 9800GT. The first of these two cards looks like it’s trying to kill-off the34xx series in the ATI family of GPU, whilst the 9800GT seems to be targeted at undermining the HD 4850 *price* advantage. The 9800GT looks like a rebranded 8800GT, and that’s just what it is… at least right now. There’s a 55nm shrink coming down the line. The 9500GT, on the other hand, is a 55nm G96 core that gives you sub-9600 performance for a sub $100 price tag, which seems to be a nice round number for people to set limits on cards. Read the 9500GT review here and the 9800GT review here.

Hilbert at Guru3D also scored a (Galaxy) 9500GT (Overclocked Edition) and he’s pretty clear about what it is: a 55nm 8600GT. The 9500GT features 32 shader processors at 650MHz and 1650MHz shader clocks. The card performs as you’d expect for a $100 card, so it’s really for the bigger slice of the market that doesn’t want to spend much but still have some performance for low res gaming. Get it here.

We’d have loved to see some Hybrid SLI numbers up on either of the TT or Guru3D reviews, tho’.

XS Reviews in the UK has a review of the Spire CoolFlow III. It’s got push-pins and it’s top-down, and that usually isn’t a formula for success (in our book). The 3 out of 10 (1.5 of 5) score it earned kind of proves our point, but XS put things this way: the CoolFlow III is like an Intel stock cooler, only worse. That’s gotta hurt.

The Canucks o’Hardware are reviewing Asus’ mainstream P5Q Pro. Based on the P45 chipset, you’re looking at a CAD$150 mobo that has a pretty good set of features and where (quote) “Asus has cut no corners”. Like HC points out, the feature set on this thing was considered high-end just a few months back, so it sounds like a really good deal. Great overclocking potential, too. Catch it here.

Wrapping up today’s roundup, Golem.de has just lain its hands on what we think is a world first: the Gigabyte M912. The M912 is a mini-tablet PC built around the Atom platform, and it actually isn’t that much more expensive (as tablets usually are) than a standard Atom UMPC. It’s got the usual 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM a 160GB HDD and, of course, a flip-rotate 8.9-inch, 1280x768 touchscreen. It’s also got Bluetooth 2.0, 1.3MP webcam and a decent 3.5 hour battery life… not bad. Kudos to Niko for catching that prize. Oh, it’s in German, you know? Englanders can take a trip down Googlenglish Road. µ