Silent night is holy night

ONE THING can be said about the discrete graphics market: it is unconventionally adept at innovating and dropkicking thresholds. This here is one case. Sharky Extreme reviews Sapphire’s HD2600XT Ultimate 256MB graphics card. “Ultimate” means it’s fanless, hence noiseless. You can also Crossfire this mid-level card, so you can setup a silent PC gaming rig in your living room. Sharky expects the retail price to be about $10-20 over the standard vacuum cleaner-like version.

Silent PC Review exacts benchmarking agony on an Intel D201GLY2 motherboard. This is a mini-ITX mobo equipped with a Celeron 220 (embedded) with minimal features at a minimal price. It’s targeted at “emerging markets” – they figure. We’re sure It’ll make torrentboys happy campers for that lowly $75 price.

RBMods.com takes a look at a massive CPU (air)-cooling system, the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme. Its an entirely passive heatsink/heatpipe combo for your hot-headed CPU and actually provides decent cooling – much better than your standard OEM fan, and able to withstand some decent overclocking. It’s a monster of a heatsink so forget about sticking it in any box of the “slim” species.

Motherboards.org has a review of the bastard son of G92 – a (Alpha Dog XXX) 8800GT card with “only” 256MB. Since everyone is having a hard time finding G92-based cards, this is probably where they’re all hiding… the cheaper end of that particular graphics pool. They figure ATI is going to have a hard time competing with this one. If you can find one.

UMPCPortal has a nice review of the HTC Shift. This UMPC is based on Intel’s Ultra Mobile Platform 2007. In other words it’s a 7” touchscreen powered by a 90nm Intel Pentium M w/ 2MB of cache on a 400MHz FSB – aka “Stealey”. Apparently it’s a decent performer (even) under Vista Business, but battery life suffers even though it’s got a gig of RAM. Vista apparently enjoys disk access and botching your battery life. This is a “strictly business” UMPC, though.

XSReviews.co.uk reviews the Biostar TA690G AM2 mATX mobo. The integrated Xpress 1250 graphics don’t offer SM3.0 support like Nvidia’s but it’s not really relevant to its purpose. A solid foundation for a media PC is XS Reviews’ opinion, especially if you’re on a budget. At around £50 it’ll allow you to keep the AMD chippery silent and in your living room.

There was a time when Small Form Factor computing was analogous to Shuttle, the mobo-maker-made-SFF-innovator. Here (Gurgled here), the weirdly-named Cowcotland (they're French, make what you will) gives the Shuttle XPC SP35P2 a look-over and while thoroughly enjoying the design and concept of the box, they’re left asking if its worth the price and the inherent limitations of SFF systems. µ