Day of the Wolf dawns

A BRAND spanking new Wolfdale CPU is on test at ChileHardware (here en Inglés). The E8400 is there and, compared to the previous generation E6850 it delivers quite a decent sibling beating and, as we’ve pointed out before, that’s before SSE4 benchmarks are out the door. Expect the chip to get a more comfortable lead as soon as these instructions are supported in applications. Oh, did we mention they took the beastie all the way up to 4.64GHz OC-ing the FSB?

How about a couple of Terabytes of external SATA RAID storage? Take a look at the Thermaltake Muse R-Duo at Anandtech. It’s a SATA enclosure (which can do USB 2.0), and operates as a SATA RAID 0/1 or JBOD device, or simply as two separate attached drives (they call it linear mode). It’s an interesting solution to storage, but Thermaltake needs to work out some kinks in the controller, ie: why does RAID 0 performance suck so much?

You know what we haven’t heard lately? Sound cards. Yes, that dying breed of aftermarket song’n’tune thingies you used to stick in your PC. Benchmark Reviews got their ears on a HT Omega Claro Plus+. It’s a C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8788 processor-based card, and the chaps at BR think it’s the best audio fidelity they’ve heard in ages. 9 out of 10 points, but no system usage benchmarks when operating audio API’s are to be seen...

When is an 8800GTS not an 8800GTS? When it’s an 8800GTS. Confused? Well, you should be. That’s the premise Extremetech takes in their review of graphzilla’s new G92-based ASUS 8800GTS TOP. Their relative performance chart helps put things into perspective by the end of the article and the pricing difference is now more clear – with the ASUS card listing $100 above its smaller brother the GT. Add to that there’s no Tri-SLI and the higher power requirements and the lemon starts shaping up.

One Paste to rule them all, One Inquirer to find them, One MadShrimp to bring them all and in the review bind them (sorry, couldn’t resist). The ‘Shrimps are on a quest to find out which TIM (thermal interface material) is the best. Intel’s own stock thermal pad, Artic, Tuniq and Nanotherm are up for testing and burning-in right here. The Tuniq passes with flying colours, and you can also find some handy tips about cleaning old paste off the CPU too.

Lord Elric at Gamepyre gives new life to the saying “black is beautiful”. They picked up an Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition and gave it a jolt worthy of Frankenstein to turn it into a smooth running 3.2GHz processor (actually they didn’t... it just sounds better). Not bad for a $130 CPU. Look into it if you like OC-ing.

Lots of threesome action on the web these days, greatly due to it being Tri-SLeIght-of-Hand week. Guru 3D tests a Tri-SLI configuration from XFX (3 ultras) and are pretty much blown away by the performance. We like the way they summed it up: Friggin’ Fast! Friggin’ Expensive! Friggin’ Fun! No fuss, no hassle, 3-way SLI seems to be up and running. They also have a nice tip for Vista users – there’s a patch out that improves SLI performance under Vista (which we assume is still wanting).

Ze Germans at Hardware Experten (Gurgled here) have tested a PC2-9600 2GB DDR2 Kit from Patriot. It’s nose-to-nose with Crucial’s PC2-8500 offering in terms of performance. Everest benches it to 6.9GB/s read/2.2GB/s write while offering decent timings. It’s yours for about 213 €urobucks. Motherboard support for this memory is limited though, as they probably won’t support the 1200MHz data rate. µ