Lowly X3 outperforms X4 shocka

WE MISSED OUT on AMD Zone’s coverage of the Phenom X3 8750 (oh my...) so here it is today. It’s an all-round AMD test with 4 participants - no Cores from Intel, so you won’t be able to compare to the competition. AMDZone raises another question – one that most sites have overlooked – is the cheaper X3 worth buying over a similarly priced yet slightly slower X4 with an extra core? It’s a good question. Try and figure out the answer reading the review...

Chile Hardware is another site we like to pick on for reviews. They published their X3 review yesterday, but they added in a little bit more “perspective” into the recipe. There’s an interesting AMD slide in the article that shows performance comparisons throughout the Phenom family, putting the X3 8450 and others above the original Phenom X4 9600... which strikes us as odd. Performance is what you’d expect, and overclocking is again the Achilles’ ankle on the Phenom. Read the details in Spanish or English.

Bjorn 3D has a straightforward review of two high-end DDR3 memory kits from Patriot (Viper DDR3-15000) and OCZ (Platinum DDR3-12800) – Miles is, however, very aware of how difficult it is to explain to readers the finer details of memory performance. DDR3, timings, erratic motherboards, picky CPUs – we’ve been there. We’re pretty sure, though, that if you’re reading a review of the highest-end DDR3 you either don’t care about the money burning a hole in your pocket or are savvy enough to navigate the info contained therein. So shuffle on to the review.

Hexus.net has a monster graphics card round-up that includes the GX2, GX2 in SLI, 9800GTX, X2, X2 in QuadFire and a lonely 3870. Although 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 gaming with multiple levels of AF and AA, are far from the standard it *is* a sure-fire way to humble these cards. All but one get the wind knocked out of them in this here review. Care to guess which?

SharkyExtreme has been a long-time fave of ours for pricing guides, and the odd review or two. True, we haven’t posted many articles of theirs, so as soon as we saw this article here, we added it to the roundup. Samsung’s SpinPoint F1 terabyte drive is on the bench. Sammy’s drives have a nice reputation for being cool’n’quiet, and that seems to be the case – again – for the F1, which could easily make it a great drive for an HTPC rig you might be thinking about. It isn’t expensive either, which bodes well.

Biostar is a company that’s had its ups and downs in the mobo business. From top OEM supplier to budget retail, they’ve been there. Inside Hardware got hold of their newest GeForce 8200-based motherboard, the TF8200 A2+. Sure, you won’t use it for gaming (at least not until you stick a decent graphics card and maybe if you manage to get Hybrid SLI drivers soon), but Djordje says sings the praises of Biostar’s engineers. Read on.

Foxconn is an odd company that does really well in some markets, and in others can’t get it past the starting line. In this case, an American review, they’ve shipped off their top-of-the-line 9800GTX-512N Extreme OC to Futurelooks. It carries a slight premium over reference-type 9800GTXs but it comes with an out-of-the-box 780MHz clock (which is pretty much the fastest we’ve seen). It carries a 3-year warranty, which is quite decent of Foxconn, considering you’re running a GPU above-spec. Most tests were run against its ancestor, the 8800GTX, so you get a good idea of the generation gap. Catch the review here.