Dual Opteron 275, dual Quadro rig breaks records

ONE mea culpa to start up with, concerning yesterday's headline - Intel Dual vs AMD Quad:
"Dear Désiré, You are aware, I hope, that "Open Magazine" is produced by the PR firm Strategic Communications. That "review" you linked to is a press release paid for by Intel. "Strategic Communications can spell out your business value in the most compelling way." Indeed, I have snapped that bait. Sorry for misleading any of our readers.

That said, they also have some very interesting Open source articles. They have a test of Suse Linux Professional 9.3 which they have tested on an antique Pentium III 733MHz as well on one HP Dual Xeon Proliant server. They explore the more interesting aspects of the distro including improvements to the kernel, as well as the XEN virtual machine.

3DProfessor has a cracker of a review on platform consisting of a Dual Single Core Opteron 250 and Dual Core Opteron 275, coupled with two PNY Quadro FX 4400 in SLI mode. The results are absolutely stunning to say the least. From Bios to Windows in eight seconds and Cinebench benchmarks done in 26.1 seconds. Unfortunately, no comparison with any Intel platform.

Hexus has some benchmarks of the for the forthcoming dual GPU-capable card, the EN6800GT and the EN6800 Ultra. They have benchmarks for 3DMark 05 and 03 and guess what, they o'c the 6800GT to 6800 Ultra speed with convincing results.

Our good friend Chris from AMDzone, previews the performance of the forthcoming AMD FX57 and a FX59 by overclocking a FX 55 to 2.8Ghz and 3.0GHz respectively before pushing the core to its limit at 3.1GHz using a Thermal Right XP-90C. He predicts the rapid phasing out of high end single core AMD processors. Chris also updated its Battlefield benchmarks with a 6800GT, X850XT PE and 6600GT card. A must-read if you're into that game.

VR-zone has a three-way shootout involving the nForce 4 SLI Intel edition. Three models from MSI, Asus and Epox are under review. They do not come cheap, have almost the same features and perform similarly. All of them get awards - editor's choice, best buy and features pack. No one gets forgotten and everyone is happy. There should be an award for the least good product as well.

Hardwarezone has an exclusive review of the Asus EN6800GT which goes head to head against its Gigabyte Alterego, the 3D1. The card is based on two 6800GT and comes with 512MB memory. Construction and performance are more than impressive, being more than a match for a Geforce 6800 Ultra. In fact, it has been overclocked to 6800Ultra speeds with ease.

MVKTech has checked the XGI Volari V8 video card. While the card in itself seems to be a very potent entry to mid level graphics cards, pricing and availability are still problematic. If the card is not widely available, then there's no way that the V8 will break the stronghold of ATI/Nvidia. µ