Nano vs. Celeron vs. Atom

DESPITE THE GENERAL consensus on the Via Nano being positive, Xbit seems to have tripped on some of its weaknesses in this here test. Ilya compared it to all the lightweight Intel offerings, as this is a ‘nettop’ CPU face-off. So you’ve got Celeron E1200, Celeron 420, Atom 230 and the dual-core Atom 330. Via’s reference mobo design beats the heck out of Intel’s though. Give it a look.

Gainward is a recent convert to the ATI faith and, as Tweak Town noted, wasn’t quite able to create custom “golden sample” solutions in their first use of the HD 38x0 graphics processors – so now it’s time for the HD 4850 Golden Sample. The cards have a following, as they usually represent handpicked GPUs capable of going a bit beyond the reference designs. Memory 700MHz core/2200MHz memory… produces some ‘healthy’ as Shane put it.

Thrusting Reviews is on a notebook roll, of sorts, they’ve had Access to Toshiba’s new Qosmio G50-115. A full HD 18.4-inch DTR ‘entertainment notebook’. Not gaming, but entertainment. It’s also got one of those Spurs engines for DVD upscaling and some nifty gesture controls. Remote and TV Tuner included, but at £1100 you wouldn’t expect anything less. Widescreen review, over here. By the way, Tosh, why 4GB o’RAM in a 32-bit OS?

Driver Heaven has a monster PSU from Be Quiet(!), the Dark Power Pro 1200W. Modular and quiet, the PSU will feed as many graphics cards as your system can take and a hungry hippo. If only the fan was a bit more proactive in keeping heat down… The price isn’t too high for such a beast: £150 VAT excluded. Give it a read.

Audio is a helluva difficult thing to test. It’s very much a mix of subjective and objective tests that usually leave a lot of question marks. Well, InsideHW gave it a go with integrated audio. It seems they’ve come a long way since they became standard features in motherboards. We could use some help interpreting those graphs, tho’. Anyway, maybe you can make better sense of it… go here.

We’ve been intrigued about the capabilities of the Dell Studio Hybrid, that desktop made of notebook bits’n’pieces that Dell launched last month. Hot Hardware did a video preview of the computer’s disassembly and was he impressed! Three screws later and you’ve got full access to the innards, where you can stick in whatever upgrade you need. Just a peek.

Chillblast is a company that caters to building high-performance enthusiast machines like this monster here that requires its own nuclear power plant to operate. Very un-green, the Fusion Gemini uses a heavily OC’d Core 2 Quad together with a 2GB HD 4870 X2. Tarinder thinks it’s a great machine for the price, but he also recommends that if you’re into buying a high-end machine, you might want to wait for the Core i7 to be launched… prices will come down very quickly, we guess. Catch the review, here. µ