Intraweb swept by green blizzard

TODAYS' HARDWARE ROUNDUP is marked by a massive number of reviews featuring Graphzilla's GeForce 8500GT/8600GT/8600GTS cards.

The partners sent out ton of cards to reviewers, and we are not surprised to see sites and our own inbox flooded with Nvidia's mainstream DX10 attack.

Sadly, the product we got is not exactly as the legendary Radeon 9500 vs. 9700 comparison, but still the company did a good job. Our first take about these cards can be found here.
It seems to us that XFX was most agile in providing the cards to our colleagues, since reviews of these babies were almost everywhere. HardOCP tested BFG and XFX 8600GTS boards, while RealWorldBenchmarks tested XFX 8600GT and 8600 GTS, both in XXX flavour. , same as LegitReviews.
Neoseeker also tested XFX GeForce 8600GTS XXX, but the world of reviews didn't revolve around XFX alone. BFG and MSI 8600GTS also got reviewed on DriverHeaven.net.
IT-Review.net offered a review of several different cards, testing so far the only real non-reference board. Gainward Bliss 8600GTS Golden Sample comes with a red PCB and two slot cooling, something that you won't find on other boards, almost certainly based on reference design. But according to HotHardware, Asus had the most balls of the bunch and cranked the clock all the way up to 745 MHz for the GPU and 1.145 DDR (2.29) GHz for the memory.
Seeing GDDR-3 working at GDDR-4 clocks only makes me wonder what are actual limits of GDDR-3 standard. GDDR-3 proved that it is without the doubt, best memory standard that came to market. Ever. The standard was developed by Joe Macri and the gang over at ATi and given to the world as an open spec. This memory went from 450 MHz in 2004 (oddly enough, Nvidia debuted the memory with GeForce FX 5700) to 1.15 GHz in 2007 and is still featured on high-end and mainstream boards.

TechPowerUp! was one of rare sites out there that went to counter the Nvidia's launch with a review of an ATi-based product. Even though AMD's DX10 line-up is slowly getting shape, launch is still a bit off. Sapphire made a design exercise and launched X1950Pro Dual, a board based on two RV570 chips and slapped 1GB of video memory on it. Performance was... interesting, to say the least. At the same time, Agent IvyBat from Overclock Intelligence Agency got struck by blast from the past and ended up testing ATi Radeon X1900XTX, a board that is over a year old, but still packs solid amount of performance.

We would not recommend the use of this cards with the product that got over at TweakNews.Net. Samsung Canada was so kind to the lads that it delivered a 27" monitor, named SyncMaster 275T. If we disregard the case that looks like the one on Dell 2407WFP (new 27" comes in a more posh case), this one packs some serious quality features: contrast ratio of 3000:1 is followed by brightness of 500 candels, and picture-in-picture feature is a neat one indeed. Price of the monitor was only 1000 Canadian dollars...*sigh*. With street price of $1100 for a Dell 2407WFP in Croatia (yeah, I know, a rip-off), most folk here can only dream about something decent.

BeHardware stayed in monitor world and tested two new 30" monitors: Dell 3007WPF and Samsung SyncMaster 305T. Dell just came out with a new revision WFP-HC - still using the 6ms IPS panel, while Samsung SyncMaster 305T uses a 6ms S-PVA panel. All in all, HC brings new colour gamut to the table, but head over to the site and read what is going on in premium LCD monitor segment.

In the region of power supplies, arrival of mainstream DirectX 10 offerings means that there is a bit less need to suck all of the power from wall-socket. However, our regular Jo hnny Brav...Guru tested Ultra's X3 power supply with 1000 Watts of available juice. This is maximum what you can pull from it, but seeing 70 Amps on a 12V rail pretty much speaks what is this power-supply targeting. This PSU comes with two 6-pin and two 8-pin PCIe connectors, so R600 in CrossFire is easily doable.

Motherboards were also tested - PC Stats came up with a review of Asus P5N32-E, a motherboard based on Nvidia's 650i chipset.

MadShrimps proved that shrimps should be tried with something else than a cocktail sauce, and posted their monthly CPU heatsink roundup. This is one of most solid cooler roundups on the whole Intraweb, so check back every month to see what's new.

T-break stayed in cooling world with comparing the OCZ Vindicator HSF with Thermaltake Typhoon.

XYZ Computing tested Thermatake's Bach VX case, a pretty interesting and a classic design from a company known for its gaming extragavanza designs.

HotHardware didn't played only with GeForce 8600 cards, guys also tested GTR Tech Corporation's GT3-BH case. For almost a year, we have been in touch with Sean Hall, designer of the case for months and personally I consider this one of products with really excellent potential. Concept that enables seamless placing of 8800GTS and HD2900XT in such a small place deserves an applause for effort.

If you want to relax from the world of hard-core and less-hard-core PC peripherials, head over to EverythingUSB and read a review of Samsung YP-K5 4GB MP3 player. Yours truly used to own a YP-T7 and that was one of most brilliant devices I have ever used. Sadly, it was so good that it got stolen from my former office and ever since I've been using my Nokia 6680 as a MP3 player.

In the region of USB drives, a site with an interesting name, BootDaily came up with a review of 8GB USB stick from Kingston.

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