HD3850X2 burns bigger hole than 2xHD3850

SO, WHAT ABOUT slotting a HD3850X2 in your PC? Think it’s a good idea? Legion Hardware has some qualms about that particular idea. been thoroughly tested and performance is bang on – claim Steven. Still, you have to think about the economics of putting 2 GPUs on a single PCB and coming out with a product that is more expensive than 2 full-blown retail cards, and performs. We would’ve enjoyed seeing the power figures on 2xHD3850 vs. this particular card, but that was not to be. Anyway, Asus thinks it makes some sort of sense... they built it. Read on.

Hot Hardware is exploring the trappings of SAS storage drives, following the delivery of Seagate’s Barracuda ES2 1TB SAS. Yes, SATA has delivered some serious storage, performance and reliability to the consumer’s PC, but SAS puts enterprise storage on top of the food chain again ... at least until someone comes up with a better, faster, cheaper way to kick its behind. The article can be found right here.

Elliot at Fudzilla takes a look at what Nvidia is up to in the chipset department, in the form of an eVGA 750i SLI. It’s a bit more than a standard 750i reference design, but where eVGA followed the pointy finger of Nvidia, they shouldn’t have, it seems. Despite some choices, the eVGA offering is as powerful as bigger players, but 170 €urobucks sounds expensive, yet cheaper than tier one builders. Catch the review here.

You can expect Asus to deliver on solid, high-performing, expensive mobos. The Rampage Formula X48 seems to follow that general direction, but Hardware Canucks says they also deliver features and a BIOS that’ll make you turn green with envy. For an X48 mobo, it’s DDR2 ‘tho, which means that you’re paying a premium (an Asus premium) for your DDR2 mobo, no surprise eh? Blow your wad here.

Austrian site Hardware OC has a review on XFX’s “Luxury Edition” 9600GT. Luxury means you get a ZeroTHERM cooler on your GPU and it comes overclocked out of the box – 720MHz vs. the default 650MHz. Although it looks single-slot, the ZeroTHERM heatsink will kill the slot underneath it. Performance puts it in the HD3870 category, which is by no means bad. HardwareOC leaves the best for last: the price on this card – apparently – is just 149 €urobucks! Read it here (or here for English).

Mad Spaniards at Madbox PC have Sapphire’s Radeon HD3650 OC. Although these cards come with only 120 stream processors, which limits the performance somewhat, the 3650 comes clocked at 800MHz, which tries to make up for it ever so slightly. If you’re gaming at 1280x1024 or lower resolutions, then you’ve got all you need right here. Don’t expect too much from this card, but if you know what you want, you’ve got an option. You also get full HD hardware decode, which is slightly better than the competing 8600GT.

Little gray men from Alienware landed in the Middle East and took their stuff to Hardware Logic. The latest build in the Area-51 ALX family is really a beast of a machine – equipped with dual HD3870s, DDR3, an Extremely Expensive QX9650 and 1 KW of juice – you can throw anything at it, and it’ll barely flinch. Yours for just *coff* $7000. Read the review here. µ