X800GT is the new 9500

THREE OF the newer-but-soon-obsolete X800GT video cards are being tested at Digitlife, one of ATI's shortest lived components. Sapphire, HIS and Powercolor have models tested. The X800GT is basically the same X850 with some features disabled. The reviewer dares to compare it to the 9500 - an expensive product at a bargain price.

Xtremeresouces checks the Jackson Backup Armor card which does a decent job of saving sys admin from tearing their hairs apart. It is a small card that goes into a PCI slot and reloads a fresh copy of your OS at every boot so that you don't have to care about what happened before. It is not compatible with RAID though but since it is OS independant and works fairly quickly, it should be high on anyone's looking to go hardware GHOST.

Hexus brings to us the roundup of three 955x motherboards - soon to be obsolete products - from Intel, Gigabyte and Abit. The latter comes with a host of goodies - Audiomax, uGuru overclocking tool and OTES silencers. Gigabyte gives it a run for its money but ultimately the former wins the contest for the day.

Tech-hounds, a new comer to this column, reviews the Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT silent pipe which of course is silent due to its heat pipe and wieldy heatsink. Don't expect it to beat the pants of the 6800. With 128MB GDDR3 memory running at 1.12GHz and a core clock of 500MHz, it does have plenty of muscle power if you do not plan to go over 1024x768. But temperatures did rise considerably and not everyone wants a 100+ degrees component. Also don't expect overclocking with it.

Xbitlabs brings a direct competitor to the above, the Powercolor Bravo X700 graphics card which has a fanless cooler and as the model above is suited for silent systems. After a hefty 28-pages of discussions and deliberations, Xbitlabs says that it is an "arguable solution". If you do not care about overclocking or high resolution gaming, then give it a look.

Notebook TV Tuners might not be a hot seller around, but with the rising number of laptops being sold, it does make sense considering one. Trusted reviews puts the Lifeview Fly DVB-T Duo and AverTV head to head. The second one wins hands down. The Lifeview has too many flaws and software dodgyness to be a worthy product. And we've not even mentionned its size, the low TV quality and inferior specs.