The reason why AMD beats Intel at games

ONE READER from Extremetech went beyond his call of duty and dug to find out why Intel processors s*c*s so much in games when compared to AMD - that's the industry worst kept secret. He went into reverse engineering Battlefield 2 and much more. His results, as you may guess are very intriguing.

Anand's at it again. This time, Wesly Fink tests a newcomer from the largest motherboard manufacturer, Asus. Under the knife is the A8N-VM CSM which is a Geforce 6150 based motherboard. Under the hood you get the promise of HD Video processing, SM3 and DX9 compatibility as well as hardware firewall, athough there is not much to differentiate the 6150 from the 6100 over here. A solid choice but watch for the competition.

Digit-life has published yet again its 3Digest which presents us with a Monthly Drivers report and Popular 3D accelerators. It is actually their 66th issue and concentrates on AGP cards only - PCI cards will come in January. It might not be as detailed as it might seems but the card list is huge, especially when you see the list of cards no longer updated. Double thumbs up for that team.

Tomshardware has released the eighth version of its VGA Chart which now is mostly populated with PCI cards, 25 of them in total, out of which four are SLI configurations. The cards are compared across 50 charts in what is probably after Digit-life's monthly graphics roundup, the web's most comprehensive graphic guide. The figures speak for themselves. Games reviewed include AOE 3, BW2, SS2 and FEAR as well as others.

TabletPCcorner checks what appears to be a dying brand, that of Tablet PCs. The Acer Travelmate C200 is the one on test and the fact that it costs around twice a similarly configured normal laptop does not help. A hugely long one page test of that beast with loads of photos and interestingly for us, quite a few benchmarks. TBC considers it to be a step back in time rather than a progress on the Travelmate C1x0 range.

HKEPC tests the first really new VIA CPU for a long time in the form of a laptop. The VIA C7-M ULV 1.5GHz CPU will certainly not win any benchmarks but it will prove sufficient if you are looking for a low voltage, cheap and efficient processor. There are no benchmarks really to play with only some nice photos, charts and also some interesting information on what seems to be a Pentium M mini me, except that it is based on ye' ol' stuff.

* My apologies to readers and to Brian from 3dprofessor for the link problem yesterday. 3DProfessor's link about UK's fastest workstation is here. µ