ATI brings in cheap AIW PCIe card

ECOUTSTICS filed an article about the new Thinkpad Z60T which is a cutey laptop. Lenovo is doing a wonderful job of keeping the Thinkpad spirit alive. It is expensive and comes with a 14-inch wide screen. Amongst features which make it a worthy buy are a fingerprint security, airbag hard drive protection as well as integrated broadband access. The rest of the equipment includes a DVD writer, an 80GB HDD and of course, a Pentium M.

Meanwhile, Pentarsys checks the BFG 7800 Series cooler which comes with its graphic cards. The cooler is made up of copper and the fan is fairly loud which is something which will definitely bother you. Not only that but it is not as good at dissipating heat as aluminium for example. The BFG cooler though makes a good job of cooling the GPU several degrees below that of the reference cooler.

Viperlair checks the ATI All in Wonder 2006 PCI express card which is an entry level equivalent model. At last there is a worthy and cheap PCI express AIW model. It is based on the Radeon X1300 clocked at 450MHz. It supports SM3.0 and is passively cooled. Onboard, we find both the Microtune 2121 TV tuner as well as the Theater 200 chip. I am still wondering why Nvidia can't make something similar. You can expect the AIW 2006 to be very similar in multimedia rigs as from January. The X1300 is a vast improvement on the X600 Pro. If ever it supports Crossfire, we might just as well as a dual tuner.

Anandtech investigates Athlon X2 overclocking a little but more. They concentrate on the X2 3800+ and have some words on the Opteron 165. The article is not targetted at hard core overclockers as Jarred mentionned it. Rather it is destined at those who want to balance risks and gains. The main conclusion I get from the article was, get two 1GB DIMM rather than four 512MB. Memory is a very important item but there is little to be gain from splashing your money on very high end memory. The Opteron 165 might be better but it is much less available than the 3800+.

Bjorn3d tests the Powercolor X800 GTO 16 which apparently has 16 pipelines instead of the normal 12. It is therefore, to some extent, equivalent to t a rebadged X800XL but costs much much less. It is designed to compete against the 6800GT and does exactly that. It has great performance, is a good overclockre and is much smaller than most high end PCI express cards. Its 3Dmarks 05 is lower than that of a X850XT which means that it is still less appealing than the Sapphire GTO2.

Finally, Hardware Asylum has a review of the Corsair TwinX 2048 PC4000PT. As I said previously, 2GB is now the sweet spot. The reviewer acknowledges that you no longer have to sacrifice memory size if you are an overclocker. The Corsair TwinX is geared towards that particular category of users and results do show that they are one of the fastest, if not the fastest 2GB kit out there. Got a perfect 10 out there. µ