First review of the Eee Box

THE ASUS EEEBOX POPPED ON the radar a few days ago but so far no site had landed a review. Until today, that is. From what we garner, Mike at Silent PC Review has got the exclusive on this one, even though he didn’t blab after the fact on the website. Asus is hoping its EeeBox, the target of the review, will do for the desktop what the EeePC did for lappies (no, not cramp up your hands). The B202 (the version that was tested) performs well at most tasks, but just won’t get you your HTPC fix. Maybe when that dual-core version comes along with a decent IGP, eh? Read Mike’s review, here.

New versions of DAAMIT’s HD 4850 are popping up every day. Legion Hardware got a new one from Palit, in the Sonic range (ie: overclocked and with a heavy-duty cooling system), that’s 685MHz core/1GHz (2GHz effective) memory. However, some extra overclocking got Steven all the way up to 735MHz and conquered most of the competition (except the very hardcore X2 and GX2) in most tests. You can find it for under $200 which makes it a very good buy, he says.

Graphics card companies seem to be stuck on repeat, considering the 9600GT is what we’d consider ‘venerable’ by now and the way they still come up with remakes of the card. So what are we talking about? This review here, at XS Reviews shows the Galaxy 9600GT OC in all its budget glory. Yes, you can get one for £70 right now, or you could even go for cheap SLI here. Looks like a good deal.

Asus has a nice feat of engineering over at Thrusting Reviews. A M3A79-T Deluxe seems to be a tidy little overclocker, considering it’s based on the 790FX and targeted at the black sheep of overclocking: the Phenom. By adding the SB750 southbridge chip, Asus has provided some nice performance enhancements. Leo wasn’t able to use the AMD OverDrive Utility, though, so he did things the hard way (or the only way, if you’re a hardcore enthusiast). Wibble this way.

Acer did a good job of landing the Ferrari franchise and milking consumers for their automobile passion. Asus had to go another way, as you know they landed the equally-super Lamborghini brand name on their laptops. These are effectively Asus’ supercars. Tech Report is probing the VX3 today and we can’t say we aren’t green with envy, the VX3 takes the cake when it comes to extravagant pricing and below-par speccing. Read about it here.

Today a few more HD 4670 articles got themselves published, namely Bit Tech, Hardware Canucks and Legit Reviews. All very worthwhile and readable. If after yesterday’s deluge you weren’t convinced to buy one for your budget PC, who knows if one of these holds the tie-breaker?

Small Net Builder completed their “Build Your Own Atom-based NAS” guide with Part 2 where Tim focuses on Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu thoroughly thrashes FreeNAS and comes out smelling like roses (if an OS can do that). Atom has found a home… Ubuntu be thy name. Get Tim’s literature, over here.µ