AMD San Diego 4000+ is overclocking champ

LET'S TALK about heatsinks, because Doomedpc has reviewed one from Zalman, the VF700-Cu which is, unsurprisingly made essentially of copper. It is a GC cooler and so comes with an assortment of eight Aluminium RAM heatsinks as well as other bits and pieces. They compared it to an Arctic cooler and to a stock HSF. The Zalman fan reduced the load temperature by 15 degrees. And it's quiet too. They also have a review of the Connect3D X850XT graphics card, a hell of a card. They overclocked it to 582/1155 achieving 6012 3Dmarks 05 on an Athlon XP 2000+ rig. No need for a PE here but ain't cheap.

Bjorn3D checks another case from Sunbeam, after the Transformer. Here comes the Samurai casing. Ten Tool free drive bays await you as well as well as multiple LED in the power swich and many more goodies. Does the job.

Techreport,er, reports technically on the Pentium EE 840 which costs at least $1020 - almost what you would pay for two 2.2GHz AMD Opteron 248 CPUs with an MSI mobo. Now comments. It is better than the FX55 in some applications but generally slower than the Opteron 175 both in multi and single threaded applications and consumes 100w more than the Opteron 175 under load. If this is what Intel holds for the future then it's a bleak one. Surely the EE 840 now represents an obsolete passé.

Hardwareanalysis has a brief 1-page look at the Pentium 840EE and compares apples to oranges or rather the EE to a Pentium 4 660 with and without HT. Results are rather puzzling. I wonder why AMD cannot implement HT in their whole range, after all they have SSE3 and have cross licenses with Intel. HT definitely is not a fad as it does substantially improve performance.

Belgium website Bel Hardware (French Translation) tests the San Diego Core from AMD. This A64 4000+. Apart from SSE3 and 90nm process manufacture, SOI process and memory controller has been improved. Quite a few interesting information there including the fact that the new memory controller is loses 300MB/s somehow.

Tomshardware has an article on the Creative Audigy 4 Pro which they claim might be the ultimate consumer Sound Card. I wonder what remains to be invented in the world of computer sound systems apart from the Graal, quality but cheap wireless speakers. The CA4P comes with a break out box as well as loads of IOs but won't come cheap.

Mikhailtech checks the Razer ExactMat mouse pad, probably one of the more exciting mouse pads out there with its integrated ergonomic writst rest. The official mousing surface may possibly make you a better gamer. Is it the best out there? µ