Itanium, EPIC and VLIW dissected

IF YOUR laptop is your main computer, then have a look at those two hard disk drives from Tomshardware guide. Patrick and Achim are testing two 7200rpm 2.5-inch models from Hitachi and Seagate, both of them come with 100GB storage and offers quite a performance bump from 4200rpm. With at least three year warranty for btoh of them and even SATA support for the Seagate model, one can envision their use even in blades or palmsize apparatus.

AMDzone reviews the Epox 9NPA+ SLI motherboard, which is a run-of-the mill NForce 4 SLI motherboard it seems. There are probably better value for money boards on the market, but this one does its job pretty well. Only hiccups include the lack of spacing between the PCIe slots and the need for more SATA and Ethernet ports.

Anoter motherboard test, this time, from VR-zone which puts the Sapphire A9RX480 Pure Innovation, pure white mobo to the test. It comes ladden with interesting features like 4v DIMM support, HD Audio compatibility, Firewire, RAID SATA2 and GbE support. If you're looking for a non-Nvidia pricey minimalist contender which can offer top notch performance, then this is your guy. If you are after accessories and bundled games, then steer away.

Hmm... Johan De Gelas seems to have joined Anandtech. Noticed it today. Johan is well known for his extensive technical knowledge back from his days at Aceshardware, one of the better known underground hardware websites. He has a very interesting article about the Itanium and reminds to the older guys out there and to the newbies what Itanic is all about and how Intel embarked itself on a very perillous and very very expensive project.

XFX has a two product line up in today HWR, the first is a SATA RAID card - the Revo 64 - which has the particularity of offering Hardware Accelerated RAID3, a rarity at such a low price. It doesn't support SATA natively nor is it NCQ compliant. The card comes with 64MB SDRAM, driverless compatibility and future version will definitely run on PCIe. But does that hides a nasty surprise? See for yourself.

The second XFX product is a Geforce 6600 video card boosting DDR2 RAM. With a core clocked at 400MHz and 256MB of memory running at 800MHz, the card is certainly not a slouch. It also sports a clutter free design - a smallish HSF and no special power connector. You do get Far Cry and some accessories, not bad for $100 card. It easily matches a 6600GT if you overclock it slightly and ATI should soon look for something to bridge the gap between the X1300XTand the X800.