Geforce 9800 GX2 benchpressed

NVIDIA’S MAMMOTH GX2 cards are arriving right now. You’ve been waiting on this beast for some time now, and we’ve found the numbers for you to gaze at. Tweak Town has benched, overclocked and sentenced... the GX2 is offering a decent performance as-is, out of the box, but you have some overclocking headroom as well as a near 20k 3DMark score running on a Q6600 Kentsfield. We can imagine a Wolfdale will provide way better numbers. TT is putting a little faith on Nvidia driver development to raise that bar even more – and we know Nvidia usually saves some performance headroom for driver upgrades... Get your GX2 monstrosity here.

When’s an E8400 not an E8400? CircuitREMIX found out: when it's a Xeon E3110, of course. These are in essence Xeon-branded E8400s and are even packaged the same way (LGA775). For all intents and purposes these are the same CPUs – so if you can’t find one on the market, find the other. The test shows OC performance is massive, which is great. Circuit got the Xeon E3110/E8400 running at 4.3GHz@1.443v on air... which says a lot about this generation of CPUs. Read all about it.

Benchmark Reviews has published an Overclocking 101 guide. Meant to enlighten the poor masses of users who question whether overclocking is safe, effective or at all recommendable, the guide is broken down into Intel and AMD overclocking theory, memory overclocking, voltage increases, software, tools, etc... No exotic stuff here, but the necessary to get the extra mileage out of your PC. Catch it here.

The X48 chipset has been on the table since November last year with every other reviewer nagging someone they know for a sample of the product. However, it was only at CeBIT that the boards started popping up. Now BenchZone managed to review Gigabyte’s X48 offspring. The GA-X48T-DQ6 seems to be the first time Gigabyte is going for their competitor’s throat. Lots of number crunching going on here.

Ginjfo is a French site dedicated to hardware and the environment (not very common, is it?). As such, they are mighty interested in finding out just how AMD can save the environment with the 780G chipset+4850e Athlon X2. Their rig was open and the HD 3450 they used for Hybrid CrossFire almost reached 100 celsius... apart from that, they think there’s some serious business to be done with this combo. Read it here in French, or here in English.

We aren’t big fans of tablet PCs. We’re clumsy, we drink, we don’t like to carry around expensive hardware in our hands the way you’d carry a notepad and pencil. However, the chaps at Trusted Reviews do... ‘cos they think there is a point to tablet PCs, after testing Tosh’s Portégé M700. It’s damn heavy... 2kg, which isn’t really a pro in this type of computer. Speaking of pros, this also has VPro certification. It’s also sub-£1,100 which is a testament to Tosh’s effort in getting these to be adopted. Tablet PCs are known for being obscenely high-priced and this one is an exception. Grab it here.

We don’t usually dilly-dally on multimedia players, but Pocketables has a review on the upcoming iRiver E100. It plays just about everything, including DRM-infested media. Video is pumped out at a smooth 30fps and it even has it’s own set of built-in speakers, it also offers a MicroSD slot for added storage, meaning you can potentially double up on storage through a cheap-o upgrade. You can find it in 2-, 4- and 8GB versions soon in the States. Read the review.

We’ve been following the Atom development pretty closely – and so has UMPC Portal. They’ve actually bothered to write up a two-part analysis of the platform for their readers. You can catch Part One here, and Part Two here. The juicy bits are in part two, including an interview, btw. µ