Intel V8 does the rounds

DUANE FROM A SITE called Bootdaily reviewed Intel's preliminary "V8 platform", as the company reps like to call it.

This is the most powerful Mac Pro unleashed on Mac OS X OS. Eight cores are something that AMD was touting with its 4x4 (later renamed to QuadFX/OctaFX over trademark issues with "4x4" moniker), but Intel ended up shipping the product first. Our own take on this eight-core beast can be found here.

Logitech decided to fix the issues company gave to gamers when G5 and G7 rats were released. First G5 featured only a single button for the thumb, which made a lot of gamers (including yours truly) disappointed, since thumb usually addresses two buttons. New G5 features a button that should have been included anyway. Techgage brings the review. Alternative partner for your right fist (sadly both mice are designed for right handed folk) can be find in the form of Cyber Snipa SWAT Laser Gaming Mouse, reviewed over at RBmods.

OCWorkbench brought up a review of Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3 board, a product which would not be so spectacular if there weren't for one small thing: this 690G based board supports not just HDMI connector, but ATi's own multi-GPU concept named CrossFire.

Virtual-Hideout featured a welcomed returnee to the world of first class products, no other than Universal Abit. Their IN9 32X-MAX board features nForce 680i chipset, but comes with a custom design. No sticker-stamping here, board features solid state capacitors as well, so it should live for quite a long time.

HardwareLogic tested Hiper Type-R 580W, 580W power supply that features some impressive modular cabling.

IT-Review decided to stay in la-la land of mainstream GeForce boards and pitched two Point of View boards against each other: is 8500GT really all that much weaker than 8600GT? You can find the answer here. Phoronix checked the performance of 8500GT board under Linux operating system as well. Personally, I know that both ATi and Nvidia designed parts around mobile segment, but I fear that performance in DX10 apps will be the same as FX5200 in DX9. Can you say, stillborn?

XSReviews tested Crucial Ballistix PC-8500 memory kit, in a standard 2x1GB configuration.

At the same time, Bjorn3D wanted to find an answer how to stop PCI cards from overheating. As we all know, TV tuner cards heat up like there's no tomorrow, and cards like Ageia PhysX and Killer NIC can appreciate cooling as well. CoolIT is more known for their brilliant Freezone CPU cooler (sadly, yours truly received broken Eliminator), but their PCI Cooling Booster is a low-cost product that should fit the bill...

Phoronix posted a review of Core 2 Duo E6400, entry-level model with 4MB of L2 cache. Really interesting to see how one year old dog battled the tests under Fedora 7 enviroment, rather than usual battery of windows-based benchmarks.

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