AMD's K8L architecture analysed

DIGIT LIFE explores the next generation native quad core architecture from AMD, the K8L, based on one presentation made by Guiseppe Amato in Moscow. There are a few benchmark slides but most of the presentations seems to hover around the power to performance ratio which can turn quite dirty for Intel. Particularly interesting to compare the QC Intel Xeon MP, the tigerton, to the Barcelona of AMD and watch out for the 64% difference between the two platforms.

Extremetech reports on a 12-drive RAID Storage box from Norco that costs only $840. That's only $70 per drive, which is incredibly good. Fill it up with 750GB HDDs and you have 9TB of online storage. The DS-1220 is impressive to say the least. The price/performance point will be attractive to both SMEs and corporate clients. Even some geeky enthusiasts might see it fit for their purpose, particularly when you consider the storage amount, the fact that it is RAID and Hot-swap compatible.

One drive that would go well with the RAID enclosure is the Seagate Barracuda ES tested by Bjorn3D. The 750GB drive is based on perpendicular technology. The test bench used Seagate-only drives as competitor like the Barracuda NL-35 and the 7200.7. It is expensive but with a low CPU utilisation, a five year warranty and performance that trounces everything but the latest Raptor, this is a drive that you should consider if you want the best and biggest mammoth drive.

Up for review with the folks at Hothardware.com is the latest Nvidia based MSI graphic card, the NX7950GX2-T2D1GE, which is in fact a dual GeForce G71 in a SLI configuration. This should give to cutting edge addicts, double performance per card and enable SLI performance on motherboard that does not support yet such configuration. The board also delivers 1GB of fast DDR3 memory. The GPU and memory are clocked at an astounding 500MHz and 1.2GHz respectively, adding more juice to the product. Performance wise, the system does reflect the SLI architecture and live up to the expectation, scoring 109FPS on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory with resolution of 1600x1200.

OCZ Technology has ever been known to computer user for its memory products but how well does it engineer CPU coolers? That is what Phoronix answers to. The Tempest cooler just resembles any other cooler, with a fair amount of components that the user needs to assemble. The fan itself can go up to 2500RPM and push 44.0 CFM of air flow. The heatsink is well built and is titanium plated, which should add a couple of years to the MTBF. The fan is described by OCZ as being "low-noise" but actual tests revealed some level of noise. The heat-sink can mount both AMD and Intel based motherboard. For $60USD, the Tempest has all attributes to be a good investment especially for the gaming enthusiasts.

The upcoming Windows Vista operating system will be suitable for Gamers, as stated on Xbitlabs. It is no wonder that the OS, which was anticipated earlier this year, has a lot of expectations awaiting its deployment. With XP, Microsoft has proved that it could come up with a decent stable OS. Vista will support more hardware and with its enhance 64-bit architecture, we are eager to see how games performance will be affected. The OS itself needs a non-trivial amount of basic hardware to work with, RAM and CPU being of course the first on the list. The "innovation" Vista brings is a new driver model named WDDM or Windows Display Driver Model. µ