ATI R520 English preview tips up

HKEPC and VRzone teamed up together to deliver the first worldwide preview of the R520 video card in the Shakespearen sort of tongue. More exciting reviews to come from them hopefully. Terence and John actually looked at an engineering sample and since the text is not botched by any translator, you can get some fair amount of information from it. Memory used is a 1.6GHz Samsung part. Perfomancewise, expect it to be competitive.

Hardwarezone checks the Aopen Aeolus 7800GTX-DVD256 video card, one more 7800GTX cards. Aopen is known mainly for its quality optical drives and for its casing, slightly less for its mobo and graphic cards - it is part of the Acer Brand which also gave us Benq. For once, this card is not overclocked running at 450/1250MHz. You're still stuck with the usual twin DVI, single slot format. Performancewise though, it is a hidden gem if you get it to overclock it, since it is one of the cheapest GTX available.

ESreality meanwhile checks seven mousepads for gamers. With loads of inputs from actual gamers, no actual conclusion and very detailed analysis, you will never look the same way again at your mousepad.

AMDZone reviews the Gigabyte 7800GT graphic card, one of the cheaper 7800GT in UK and in the US. Even with less vertex/pixel pipelines and a decrease in clock frequency, the decrease in performance is not as acute as one would expect. Software bundle is quite good - Raven shield, PowerDVD and Spell force complete the usual adapters and cable. A good overclocker, it performs on par with the X850XT PE, ATI's highest offering.

Hexus presents the RockDirect Pegasus 650, a laptop which has more than one trick in its bag. It has a 5% guaranteed overclocking feature when plugged in the mains which means that you end up with a more powerful CPU with no associated cost. The laptop comes with a P-M 2.13GHz, 1GB memory, 100GB HDD, a Radeon X700XT graphic plus the i915G - meaning that you can get more juice for the price - and much more. As for the screen, it has a resolution of 1680x1050 which is one of the highest available on LCDs.

Madshrimp has a summer roundup of four AMD Athlon 64 heatsinks. Candidates come from Coolermaster, Speeze, Scythe and Asetek. Cooling is a very important part of the very functionning of a computer and finding the right heatsink is paramount to a good experience. The Asetek Vapochill solution seems to perform the best even if the reviewer does not give definite directions. µ