LCD screens have yet another critical flaw

FRENCH hardware website Hardware.fr has a rather worrying article on the fact that LCD has one more hidden disadvantage on CRT. LCD monitors apparently display images a few frames later than their CRT counterparts. All LCDs are concerned by that, even the Dells and the Samsungs of this world and even if you paid thousands for them. The guys in France tested several screen including ultra fast 2ms and 3ms LC display. A sound engineer explains why that might be so. Hardware.fr goes on to explain that one might be up to 6.5 frames less with respect to another gamer.

Digitlife reports on the Epox 5EDAI motherboard which is built on the Intel i915P chipset. This budget board has two DDR and two DDR2 slots plus six PCIxx slots for expansion. Other nice addons include passive chipset cooling, an integrated POST controller and a well laid layout. As you might expect, the board also offers a 5.1 audio module and 10/100Mbit LAN. THe board is compared to an Albatron and a PC Chips model and it was found that the Epox was generally slower than the first and faster than the second. Is it worth it? Well, depends on your budget actually.

RBmods reviews the Corsair Nautilus 500 Water Cooling kit which is an entry level, all integrated, pre built water cooling solution. That little baby has a 1800rpm fan and an airflow of 74.4CFM. It supports all recent available sockets, although I don't know if LGA771 is amongst them. The Nautilus 500 does come with a number of accessories except the distilled water which you have to buy. Not that much quiet, but very effective. On the AMD platform, it managed to cool the CPU by a full 21 degrees more than the stock cooler.

Ever heard of the brand Verax? Me neither. Frostytech, the coolest hardware website around checks the Verax Helado PWM-T Low Noise Heatsink to see whether it is worth their dime. It is made up of nickel, copper and aluminium and can be installed on most processors without any difficulty. It is quite expensive mainly because it is a low noise, high efficiency cooler. As you can guess, you get what you paid for, in this case a very efficient cooler that was whisper quiet under load.

Our good friends at the Reghardware puts some Nvidia Geforce 7600GS fanless cards to the test. The 7600GS is what I consider to be the sweet spot of midrange video cards, at around £70. Two cards are under the hammer, the Asus EN7600GS Silent/HTD 256MB and eVGA's e-GeForce 7600GS 256MB, both with passive heatsinks or heatpipes. They come with the default clock frequency - 400/800MHz. While they are not destined for hard core gamers, I cannot but think that a pair of them should be sufficient if you are after a noiseless SLI rig.

VR-Zone tests the Zalman Reserator2 which is a fanless water cooling system. To be compared with the Corsair Nautilus above. So it has a built in coolant flow indicator - which the Corsair does not have, it has a visual coolant flow alarms system and is to be left outside the casing. The full aluminium passive radiator is 44cm long which means it is quite big. It also comes with a CPU and a GPU water block. It is silent but does not support AM2 sockets for now plus, it is huge and like many Zalman products, not so cheap.