22-inch LCD monitors to become the norm

FRENCH website hardware.fr says that the new monitor size that will take over the world is the 22-inch models. They check the AL2216W from Acer which should be available for under £300. That's for a 1680x1050 resolution, a 5ms response time and a three year collect and return warranty. You could almost buy two 20-inch monitors for the price but HW.fr argues that it is worth the money spent. No DVI port though and a pitch of 0.282mm.

Elitebastards reports on the BFG Geforce 7800GS OC AGP video card. The model is factory overclocked, which even if it is modest, gives it a boost in benchmarks. It is a single slot solution with DVI and D-Sub ports. BFG also provided with a nice bundle as well. Of course the card's main appeal is its AGP compatibility. That might be a bit of a conundrum as I would not consider it wise to invest in AGP when PCI EXpress is mainstream.

AMD Zone reviews the OCZ Platinum PC2-6400 2GB memory module. That's the rev2 by the way and surprisingly, it is a cheap buy, a third of the price of some PC2 memory modules available out there. The modules comes with black heat spreaders which look a lot like XTC models. The PC2-6400 underwent various benchmarks using a number of timings and increasing voltages and came out as a top notch memory for midrange models.

Firingsquad sports a brand new design and a brand new review for us. That of the Zalman CNPS9500 which is an AM2 heatsink fan. Zalman are well known for their cooling solutions and the 9500 has a new clip and is made of copper throughout. It is not cheap and does not perform as well as compared with other fans from Scythe, Thermalright of Thermaltake. The Fan Mate2 does present with a convenient way of getting things under control.

Meanwhile Phoronix brings us another case from NZXT, the Apollo. This one is made up of steel chassis and is a screwless model. Apart from that it has two 120mm silent fans, support for four internal drives and a magnetic closing door. But the most important item that may attract status minded buyers are the see-through smoked acrylic. All in all, a nice modem which did accept the Tyan server thrown at it. It is relatively cheap and although there's no PSU bundled with it, it is still a decent buy.

Hothardware tests a system, a hot one from Systemax, which is known for churning out dirty cheap computers. The Sabre Intel Core 2 Extreme Gaming says it all. It is expensive at $3499, but comes with a host of top quality components, two 10Krpm HDDs, the Core2 Extreme X6800, two ATI X1900XTX and 2GB memory. The PSU is a 600w model but there is not even a monitor and the audio sub-system is an integrated one. We won't even mention the input devices - one from Saitek and one from Razer. µ