100 AMD and Intel CPUs

THOSE HYPERACTIVE guys at Matbe have a treat in store for the fanboi crowd. Stéphane gathered up in a single place benchmarks for 100 processors, both AMD and Intel. You’ll notice some particularities like the Phenom X4 9950 comes behind the Athlon X2 6400+ in most games, but when it comes to truly multi-threaded apps, the Phenom’s four cores kick in. You can find the massive endeavour, here in French, or here in Googlenglish.

UEFI firmware has been long talked about, but hardly any motherboard manufacturers have put out the corresponding firmware. Xbit-labs is looking at a pre-release version of the UEFI BIOS from MSI. Right now, it’s in the early stages, but once complete you’ll be able to do a lot more than just set the voltages and configure your system from a graphical interface... Give the article a read.

Guru3D is testing one more GTX 260, of the 216-shader flavour, only this one comes from Gigabyte and they call it the GTX 260 OC. But it’s not overclocked, you see? Apart from that slight misnomer, the card can actually squeeze a bit more performance in a slight overclock, overtaking the HD 4870. Check out the numbers game.

Microsoft, the maker of great peripherals and so-and-so operating systems, recently launched their Sidewinder X6 gaming keyboard. Benchmark Reviews are giving the mutating keyboard a look. The shortcut keys and interchangeable numeric keypad are a Godsend to guys like us who fumble around their keyboards in MMOs... Give it a look, wilya?

Tweak Toon is looking at the Cooler Master Hyper Z600R CPU cooler. Announced as a highly efficient, silent cooler, the Z600R lets you hook up two fans (although it comes standard with just one), that cool the six heat-pipes rising from the block. Chris says Cooler Master is on the path to cooling greatness, or sumfink like that. Read it here.

The very enlightened beings at VR-Zone managed to perform (and publish) some SLI tests on the X58 with a GTX 280. Scaling at 2560x1600 seems to be pretty formidable (over 90 per cent) in both Far Cry 2 and Crysis: Warhead (different engines, right?), so performance is pretty impressive too. No SLI chip in the middle, so this is pure Intel chippery at work... Check out the benchmarks, here. µ