Dual-core royals rumble

IF YOU REALLY have to know which dual-core delivers the greatest ring-side thrashing, XBit-Labs has some literature you won’t want to miss. They’ve rounded-up 17 different dual-core processors from AMD and Intel, and benchmarked the hell out of them in 5 different types of benchmarks, just so you know which CPU best suits your needs. Calling the E8000 series CPU’s “contemporary” is a bit of a stretch, but all in all it’s a long, detailed, article that should keep you entertained this evening.

Kris at Anandtech has a first hands-on with MSI’s X48 Platinum. Still a lot of work to be done, cries out Kris. The performance is up there, but some tweaking and twiddling could get a lot more mileage out of an expensive investment. The four PCIe x16 slots are really what you think they are… and pink and light-blue memory slots should go a long way, if you have the taste of a Japanese teenage girl. Read it here.

Zumax isn’t a name we’ve heard before (but maybe they’d care to introduce themselves?), but they’ve got the attention of the folks at OverClockersClub with their 950Watt X4. This PSU has a couple of features that OCC liked quite a bit – one of them being the thermally controlled fans. For an “unknown”, they sure gave it a thumbs-up. Worth a read.

The reviewers from ChileHardware have got it in for ATI’s new stud, the HD 3870X2, and with good reason too. Their testing shows that the X2 in general only matches the performance of an 8800Ultra. They speculate a bit about the reasons why this happens, but simmer them down to two: the way the GPU’s link creates a bottleneck, and; the memory used is unsuitable for the tasks. The word is “don’t buy right now”.

We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again – there’s more to PC’s than the CPU and GPU, and how much of an overclock you can squeeze out of them. In this frame of mind, the Hardware Canucks have been beavering away at an Asus DRW-2014L1T superduperdrive. Well, it’s a 20x Lightscribe DVD+/-RW drive, as you might’ve guessed. It has one feature that we particularly like – it’s quite silent, say the Canucks. Slow spin-up speeds, though.

We think Tom’s Hardware has singlehandedly torn to shreds the entire “Green” chapter in AMD’s marketing handbook. They’ve compared four different marchitectures of AMD processors and Phenom just sucks away at your electric bill – they actually go to the point of recommending that if you’ve got it in for an AMD processor, then go after the Athlon X2 or 64 X2… it’s a good read.

DragonSteelMods has a review of the OCZ DDR2-6400 Platinum Dual Channel (2x1GB) kit, a bit of performance DDR2 for a pretty decent price. Apart from the trademarked OCZ heatspreader, DSM seems to like their performance beyond anything else. Factor into that the price and oc-ability, and they gave it their best score. Read all about it. µ