Pack of Wolfdales circles

WHILE ATTENTION is focused on the Intel announcement made at CES (nope, not talking about it), the comrades at XBit Labs have outpaced the whole lot and published their reviews on, not one, but three of Intel’s E8x00 series CPU’s. These are the E8500, E8400 and E8200. XBit thinks that even the lowliest of Wolfdales is giving AMD a run for its money... Read it here.

Dragon Steel Mods is reviewing Kingston’s CompactFlash Ultimate 266x 4GB card. That’s 40 MB/sec write speed for the mathematically impaired, and basically the item any photographer would kill for when it comes to hi-res digital photography. Naturally, for such a specialty product, you pay through your wazoo.

We’ve always entertained the idea of having hundreds of gigs of video, music and pics available at the click of a mouse button, without having to turn on a server per se. Ethernet disks were the solution to this matter and no-one does external disks in style like LaCie. ITReviews.co.uk has reviewed the Ethernet Disk Mini, a gigabit Ethernet device with backup scheduling, mirroring and file serving. It can also work as an HTTP file server, as long as you register your device through LaCie, they say.

Hardspell has a nice table with the specs on current 65nm and 45nm mainstream CPUs from Intel. This include everything from the E1200 to the top of the scale, the E8500. It’s a quite simple reference tool for your everyday enthusiast.

Coolermaster made a solid reputation for itself with their Stacker series cases. German reviewers at Tweakpc.de (Gurgled here) have the Stacker 830 NVIDIA Edition under the microscope. If you know Stackers you know this product, and you know what it’s doing here – it’s also BTX-compatible, has the cooling capacity needed to plug in outworldly graphics cards (up to 9 120mm fans). They liked it.

Hiper has another go in the HTPC arena and SilentPCReview has got hold of their HMC-2K53A-A3. It’s basically a revised edition of the H2 but with a more advanced feature set and decent accessories such as the Windows Vista remote. They seem to find the product greatly improved, but still has some kinks to work out – nothing a DIY job wouldn’t fix, though. Click here if you want to know more.

Our modding link of the day purports to the Extremetech article where they teach you how to void your warranty on your Xbox 360 (actually it’s a how-to about replacing the fan to make the console quieter and cooler). For a measly $40 you can hush your Xbox 360 down to a whisper. It’s that much more rewarding if you’re using your Xbox 360 as a media server at home – that way the DVD drive doesn’t spin up and drive you mad.