Mysterious P4's replay uncovered

GamePC has the review of the first Dual Core Intel Processor to arrive on the market. The PEE 840 is a monster in every sense of the term. Two 2MB Cached 3.2GHz Core on 800MHz FSB means you basically have two Xeon CPU on one Pentium IV processor. A real power eater - with 198w consumed when system is idle. Also generated some of the best figures in professional benchmarks like WME or LAME.. But anyway, that's before the X2 come in.

HardOCP checks the first motherboard from BFG, well known for their NVIDIA video cards. One of those card makers, who like Sapphire, have decided to cross the line. The BFGRNF4U might be their first motherboard but it seems that it is a straight winner performancewise and designwise. As critical as Kyle and co can sometimes be, they haven't been able to find a single major default in this product. The price is set right at only $125. That BFG motherboard is sure to fly off shelves. HardOCP also have news that DFI got two ATI cards working without actually using any XFire card.

The excellent Xbitlabs reporters bring to our knowledge (at least to mine), the existence of "replay" which they say, might explain some of the strange performance behaviours of the Pentium IV Northwood and beyond. The amount of information they unearth is simply stunning and worth a serious look. Many such articles could well be a dissertation on its own, complete with its bibliography list. There's another one coming on called Replay: Unknown peculiarities of the netburst core.

Hardwarezone has compared eight nForce Ultra 4 motherboards in a giant comparison. Abit,. Chaintech, DFI, ECS, Epox, Gigabyte and MSI. The market for socket 939 motherboards is ripe now if you want to get mature problem free products. The forthcoming X2 will bring a new lease of life in these already wonderful products. Unsurprisingly the DFI Lanparty gets the top awards.

A motherboard that was left out of the above comparison but which according to Viperlair could be used to build a SFF system is the Foxconn Winfast NF4K8MC which is a mATX model based on the nForce 4 chipset. It has everything integrated as one would guess and the design is uninspiring to say the least. Viperlair calls Foxconn a little known manufacturer. They're actually slightly larger than that. They employ 160000 people, and have produced 33 million motherboards last year (behind Asus) and over 55 million chassis and God knows how many things they make.

Matrox has released their first PCIe card and Trustedreviews has tested it; codenamed the Parhelia APVe Two DVI ports, one S-Video and 128MB memory make it a slightly enviable graphic card. Not a card for playing mind you. You get a host of connectors and some more like D Sub to Component video cables etc.

AMDzone has reviewed the Shuttle XPC SN25P which houses a nForce 4 Ultra motherboard. Dual Channel DDR and a stash of functions makes it one of the better options should you want to go the SFF AMD way. Anyway any gamer would probably take this one under their arm to their local LAN party with a Venice core inside. A very capable SFF with RAID 5 option possible.