Asrock enables Crossfire on AMD770

THE INGENIOUS CHAPPIES at Asrock have combined the AMD 770 with the SB700 southbridge to enable Crossfire in the usually Crossfire-less 770. Asrock A770Crossfire motherboard. The mobo gives you that and a whole lot more: overclocking latitude. OCWorkbench has the exclusive on this. They did some Crossfire tests with a couple of HD 4850s and got some real overclocking numbers (who needs an SB750?). Not bad. No pricing info, tho’ but you can expect it to be cheap as Asrock usually is. Read it here.

Who wants a $200-X48 mobo when they can get a $110-P45 with the same performance? That’s what Tech Gage looks at as Rob unwraps this Black Series P45T-A motherboard from ECS. The mobo offers very little in the way of overclocking, but then again, it isn’t really an enthusiast-grade product. Give it a look.

Shane down at I4U is testing OCZ’s gaming keyboard, the Alchemy Elixir. Like many other gaming keyboards, focus doesn’t go into the design and slimness of the board, but added features that require more space, and a less elegant design. That’s a gaming keyboard for you. At 1.12-inches thick and 20 inches long, it’s a brute. It’s also got a nice price tag on it, that’ll please most gamers. Be sure to read about it.

Mtron has more or less held the crown for performance SSDs. Their Pro series, although carrying a monster premium, have beaten the competition in all benchmarks. This time, Benchmark Reviews got hold of the 7500 Pro that boasts a massive 120MB/s write speed. We have to disagree on that “Solid State Drives are based on DRAM memory components (…)” statement, tho’. Wibble this way, please.

Dubbed the “Chuck Norris Phone” at GSM Arena, the Sonim XP1 (JCB Toughphone) is a rugged feature-light phone that’s being taken under the hammer… and we’re not kidding. They used the XP1 as a hammer, ran over it with their car, mixed it in with cement, did a tire burnout with it, dunked it in beer, cooked it and played football (soccer for our American buddies) with it. It survived. It’ll set you back €300 by the way. A small price to pay for the ultimate survivor handset, we guess. Read about it here.

Extremetech has a midrange motherboard roundup today. These are 5 mobos from Adsus and Gigabyte (you could look at it as an Asus vs. Gigabyte fry-off), costing between $100 and $200. You kind of draw on the same conclusion as always: Asus and Gigabyte are evenly matched in this chapter, but whatever you choose will be up to price and features. Catch it here.

Jarred at Anandtechies has on occasion tried and tested the Gateway P-6831FX enthusiast notebook. It offered a great combo of value and performance and didn’t fall behind higher-end solutions in gaming. Now, Gateway has done it again, and Jarred been fooling around with the P-7811. This time around, things weren’t as smooth. There are a lot of kinks to work out of the product, but it seems – at first glance – to be a decent performer. µ