X48 mobo tips up down under

YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER heard of them, of if you have, you don’t know exactly who they are. J&W is a relatively (very) unknown company that made its debut on Tweak Town with its X48D2-EXTREME (lot of that going on these days, are we right or are we right?). J&W seems to denounce a sort of OEM heritage in its packaging, but artwork and literature aside, the board’s performance is ‘extremely impressive’. Worth looking on novelty alone.

Guru3D is testing a Phenom X4 9950BE. The king of AMD’s hill brings forth the unlocked multipliers of the Black Edition series that Hilbert used to unlock a decent overclock. The Phenom 9950BE might not be on par with Intel’s best, but it does a good showing of itself, particularly where its multimedia enhancement have something to say. It’s greatest strength, however, is the pricing and the combination with the absolutely cheap and powerful 790GX chipset. Do the maths, he says.

XS Reviews is testing the fairly unknown X-Spice Croon 750W PSU, a £75 kit that delivers on a lot more than just power. The only cons are that it isn’t modular and the voltages on the 12V rail aren’t the most stable (yet still quite good). X-Spice also claims up to 88% efficiency and the 135mm fan in the PSU seemed quite silent. Read about the newcomer.

German site, Technic3D also posted an HD 4870X2 Crossfire X test, showing the DAAMIT silicon pull some serious marks in testing, but real-life games show the performance advantage slightly curbed. You’re honestly better off with a single X2 or a couple of 4870s. As a sidenote, the quadfire graphics setup (just the graphics) sucks 10 times more power than a single 9400GT… how’s about that for comparison? Lots of things to read in German, or in Googlenglish.

Metku mods has a round-up of several DDR3 high-end kits (you know, the ones that you’ll have to put a muzzle on to work with an X58 chipset). You can actually see just how much power these DIMMs work on, and how that will easily exceed the Core i7 specification. Still, the E8x00-series are more than powerful enough to deal with these things – as long as you have a chipset that can accept OC’d memory. Give it a spin, here.

To many of you souls, the Iphone is the gateway to heaven, to the remainder of you lot, you’re waiting for Nokia to put out an Iphone-a-like handset. Well, OCWorkbench has a first experience with Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic Touch Screen. It’s no Iphone-killer but it’s a decent touchscreen experience with a very responsive interface, thinks OCW. Get it here.

Microsoft has been touting its mouse-wares lately with the introduction of blue laser mice under the Bluetrack series. The blue laser is supposed to bring comfort to masses of unhappy roadwarriors who hate their trackpads and their crappy red laser mice even more, as they won’t work on a number of surfaces. Well, blue laser has got that covered. Like we say, there’s one thing Microsoft does well… and that’s mice. Read Laptop Mag’s review, here.