Gorgeous notebook gets an outing

Gamepc has a two card roundup featuring the best of ATI and Nvidia. On one side, the X1800XT and on the other side 7800GTX 512MB version. A SLI pair of card is included in the benchmarks for the sake of comparison. The X1800XT is slower and is more noisier than the 7800GTX card. But the X1800XT is cheaper by a margin - $200 in some case at pricewatch - and is more available. And one should not forget than the Master cards necessay for Crossfire and the next generation of ATI card, codenamed the R580, is only a few months away.

Neoseeker tests the Coolermaster Centurion 540 mATX chassis which also exists as a BTX chassis. Expandability is not its forte but it has good functionality and you can see that much thought has been put in ensuring that there is a good airflow. As usual though, there are better options out there. Just look around.

Is monitoring your fans worth $80? This might be a question to be asked to The Moditory as they tests the Ultra Fan commander which costs just that. It comes with individual control for up to seven fans, three thermal sensors, sleeved cables and back lit LCD as well as a few other things. Great features but pricey enough to buy you a top notch casing.

You could well mistake the gorgeous BenQ S53W Centrino laptop for one of Steve Jobs' ibooks. It is light, comes with a WXGA panel and a fast Pentium M 750 CPU coupled with 512MB memory. Shame it depends on Intel's onboard graphic module though. The rest is pretty standard except for the white finish that give to that Joybook a special touch.

Over at AMDzone, there is a review of the Gigabyte K8N51PVMT-9 motherboard which comes with Composite IOs as well as the 430/6150 chipset combo from Nvidia. In a small mATX format, they managed to include four DIMM slots, four SATA ports, 7.1 audio channel from Realtek, Firewire and Ethernet as well. As usual there are some shortcommings but nothing critical. Amongst requests are DVI, better BIOS and HDMI. But then expect a higher price. µ