First AMD AM2 review appears

TOM PABST'S HARDWARE site has the "big issue" in print, online on its German website. It is not photoshopped - as was the MSI/Abit card yesterday. Thi is the real mc-coy guys. The world exclusive test of the AM2 socket based AMD X2-4800 platform - using the GF6150 entry level chip. It uses DDR2-667 and a new kind of heatsink fan. Compared to a DDR 6150 entry level motherboard and a nForce 4 chipset and DDR400, it fares well, even if it is obvious that it needs optimizing.

Digital daily has a roundup of mid-range graphic cards running on PCI platform. In the basket, five ATI cards versus a very lonely 6600GT one. Asus, Sapphire, Point ov View and Gigabyte all have some cards there. The GTO2 is the fastest of them all especially when overclocked, in most cases. As usual though, a lot of your buying decision will depend on the budget allocated.

Neoseeker reviews the ECS PF22 extreme motherboard. I know that quite a few of you dislike motherboard manufacturers like Asrock and ECS/PC Chips because their parts are considered as cheap and unrealiable; which might be true. However ECS is working very hard to change that. The PF22 extreme comes ladden with features like Crossfire support, SATA2 support, HD Audio, Intel's Matrix Storage and some surprise ones. Quite a few accessories as well but the PF22 is a poor overclocker if that's what your after.

Manuel Massero of sister - offline - Publication, PCW, has a huge list of hard disk drives, almost all SATA/PATA drives currently available. Turn to page 98 in the April 2006 edition. 163 drives are recorded and provided with a guide price. Especially useful are the access time, the average transfer rate and a very very precious reading, the acoustics of the drive. You will be surprised to learn for example that the noisiest SATA| drive is not the Raptor but the WD Caviar at 42.6dB without acoustic management.

Only for techies now. Next generation memory is under scrutiny at realworldtech as part of their coverage of the ISSCC 2006 where pundits from all over the world come to present papers on what will be the next big thing in microprocessors and memory and storage. The T Ram is supposed to replace the SRAM and we're offered a very good one page introduction to it. Interestinly, T-RAM are only a fourth of the size of SRAM which means that you can decrease the size of cores and therefore potentially decrase costs.

When you want to move data around, you don't have much choice nowadays. Long ago, you would have various size of floppies as well as various tape formats. Now you only have external HDDs and UFDs - USB Flash Drives. Hardwarecentral looks at the Maxtor One Touch III turbo edition which packs 1TB - 1000GB of storage capacity into a handy external case. The $900 item packs two 500GB 7200rpm disks sharing 16MB cache. I'll let you read the rest and salivate. µ