Multichrome does multiGPUs S3-stylee

S3’S MULTICHROME technology is being dissected by German gamers at PCGH. MultiChrome is S3’s answer to SLI/Crossfire and works using the same basic principles as ATI’s elderly AFR technology. Essentially you slot two S27-core cards in PCIe slots, using the PCIe bus as the bridge – that’s it. Now, before you go all north-south-east-west on us, you have to take a look (Englisch hier) at PC Games Hardware’s analysis of the technology. They actually got Crysis up and running on MultiChrome. Sheesh. Flippin’ night of the livin’ dead we tell ya - first VIA comes up with Isaiah, next S3 outs an “SLI-like” graphics technology that you can actually run Crysis on. What next? AMD delivers Intel an ass-kicking B3 stepping Phenom?

We know – it’s just a fact of life – that a $1000 CPU isn’t 10x better than a $100 CPU. The same thing applies to GPU’s and to gaming in general. Well, Chile Hardware has a pretty interesting comparison of apples-to-apples gaming, the premise being “all components but the CPU considered equal, how much of a kick does an expensive CPU give your system?” Short and to the point, right here (or here for Spanglish).

Sometime ago we threw in our two bits and asked “what happens when you start slotting PCIe 2.0 devices in PCIe 1.0 slots?”, with a bigger underlying question of “how much of a performance hit does the system take when a sub-x16 slot is used with an x16 graphics card?” Well, unawares to us, Tom’s Hardware got into that precise matter a little over a week ago (and we missed it…). Well, if you must know… here it is.

Yesterday, we pointed out the Ars Technica review of the MacBook Air. They did everything but the SSD unit ‘cos theirs was a standard HDD. Well the scribblers at Ars now got hold of the SSD version and faced-off both brothers. The good thing is it’s zippier than before, the bad is the extra $1300 you pay over the “standard” Air, and the ugly remains the battery life. Nice summary system… where have we seen it before? Pay for Air through the nose, here.

Expreview has landed another fresh-off-the-production-line review, this time with an 8400GS (G98) card. This is a card that’s mostly focused on deliverying an HD Video experience with atrocious 3D performance – there’s a market for that, you know? The latest core from Nvidia with third generation PureVideo HD manages to do all the HD decoding by itself, so it’s one shot on ATI’s battleship. Get your pure HD entertainment here.

Highpoint is in the business of making SATA RAID add-in cards as you might know already, and they’ve been quite successful in staying afloat where other companies have just been gobbled up. Well, they’ve released the new RocketRAID 2300 PCIe card and had it tested at TweakTown. TT took the card and stuck it in their Core 2 Quad system where they had the ICH9R to compare it to. Even though RocketRAID lost in almost every benchmark when compared to the ICH9R, the chaps at TT felt sure it’s a good solution ‘cos not everyone has an X38 mobo… read their findings here.

Finally Ze Germans at Secret Design got a present in the mail – some CSX performance DDR2 memories running at a cool 1200MHz with 5-5-5-16 settings. 2x1gigs worth. It’ll get you performance close to DDR3, they guess, but at rock bottom prices by comparison. The heatspreaders might present a real-estate problem for some cases. Interesting stuff, and definitely an OC’ers dream. Read it now (non-german speakers click this link here). µ