Bastardised Crossfire makes for 50-percent gains

HYBRID CROSSFIRE has always been understood as discrete+integrated graphics. However this whole concept takes on new meaning at Fudzilla’s hands. Apparently someone at ATI let them know that current Catalyst drivers support a mixed Crossfire mode that’ll let you stick HD 3870s and HD 3850s together. They got together all the 3800 series cards they had and rammed them into their rigs in all the permutations. Bleedin’ orgy of benchmarks... you’ll get dizzy just looking at them.

Toshiba charged into the “full-featured” 13.3-inch widescreen laptop market a couple of years back (at least here in €uroland) with the U200. It was small, thick, light and you could game on it too – all the more impressive. Now they’ve pitched a U300-134 at ITReviews.co.uk and they were more than happy to review it. It’s still “full-featured” but more than likely Tosh dropped the performance graphics in lieu of the more power-efficient X3100 from Intel. ITReviews thinks it’s destined to do great things... it isn’t expensive either, £699 VAT inc. Get your 13.3-incher over here.

Part Three of Tom’s Skulltrail analysis is up, with a new look into 8 vs. 4 core performance. We’re barely crawling out of the 2-core cave and along comes Intel with 2x4 computing cores. Barely any software out there to support 8 full cores on the desktop, as the benchmarks show – but it’s a matter of time, and Skulltrail has a lot more to do with successful marketing than insuccessful tech implementations. All it got from Tom’s crew was a big thumbs-down. If they had it their way, it’d be taken out into the courtyard, drawn and quartered.

There’s some pretty Rich literature at Hardware Logic today (too rich for my blood). They’ve grabbed a couple o’sticks of Aeneon XTUNE DDR3-1333 and taken them to town. You get some overclocking headroom and that’s about it, here. Yes it performs as DDR3 is expected, but for it’s “entry-level DDR3” moniker, it’ll still cost you anywhere between $300 and $440, depending where you shop. Read about this oddity, here.

Over there at Legion Hardware, Artic Cooling has gone overboard with the Accelero Xtreme 8800. Tailored to the high-performance/high heat dissipation requirements of... uhm... 8800GTX/GTS/Ultra cards (you knew that was coming). Everything comes in threes in this cooling solution: 3 fans, triple slot. It’s a trade-off, as you can imagine, but the 40% drop in core temps over stock cooling is what you get for your troubles. It won’t fit a G92 card, but it’s cheap as chips.

Sigma Shark SP-635 is a 635 watt power supply that’s currently on display at Mikhailtech. Peter, the reviewer, found the pros outweighing the cons (he did hit a spot of bad luck with his HDD) and the aesthetics on the PSU are great – it looks like a solid block of machined metal. No modular cable system here, or in fact 8-pin PCIe (forget high-powered configs).

TechpowerUp has an interesting proposal for daily roundupers – a passively cooled HD 3870 from PowerColor (SCS3). The card has reference clocks, although it makes use of a massive lengthwise heatpipe+fins that takes up 2 slots+a bit more, effectively killing off 3 slots total and the chance to do Crossfire. You can Dual Link the DVI to create up to 2560x1600 resolutions, tho’. The card retails for just a little bit more than the standard 3870 - $269. They liked it, yessiree. µ