QuadFire 4850 X2 fails to impress

QUADFIRE WAS LEFT out of the initial 4850 X2 coverage as the cards were few and far between. Shane at Tweak Town did manage to get hold of a couple and has provided some telling numbers. The fact of the matter is that games either don’t take advantage of the extra cores, or the CPU is a darn bottleneck for performance. Adding the second 4850 X2 produces pretty pitiful results – with the added problem of extra heat and a 65 per cent jump in overall power consumption. Pretty damning results, if you ask us. Get it here.

750GB drives are moving into the mainstream of storage solutions – and considering the number of movies, games and songs you need to store – they’re a good deal in terms of price/capacity, more so than a TB drive, right now. 10 contenders duke it out at Xbit Labs, you can find the article, here.

XS Reviews finally got their hands on their first HD 4870 X2 – although they had to replace some hardware in their test rig to try it out. The card shows off the fact it’s the biggest, baddest, kit on market, and the price shows it: £370. Poor on the bundle side, rich on the performance... Read the review, here.

That cool looking Hybrid Studio PC from Dell is on test at Trusted Reviews. Sure it’s a spiffy machine for office work, but consumers have been quick to judge the little desktop PC due to high pricing and poor options. Ardjuna thinks the platform needs a bit of an update, but there’s the economics of the thing behind it, we’re sure. Read about it here.

Technically this isn’t a hardware review, but it’s relevant to hardware enthusiasts. Tom’s Hardware has done a round-up of several overclocking apps. Although most of us will tweak all the settings in the BIOS, as we demand a better voltage/FSB/DIMM clock/DIMM voltage control, these apps just make things a bit easier for the newbs. Give it a read.

Guru 3D is looking at yet another X58 motherboard. This time it’s the Asus P6T Deluxe which has more than the usual features of the X58 chipset – starting off with 6 DIMM slots and an overclocking device dubbed the OC Palm – Hilbert says the board’s strengths are many, and the only real weakness he can see is the impossibility of using tri-SLI due to the slot spacing. Get it here.

Heise.de, the last real tech magazine, published its review of the Core i7. Our German colleagues will excuse us if we didn’t pick up on the article earlier but... it’s in German. You can find the review in its original form here, and in Googlenglish, here. We promise this is the last Core i7 review we cover. Apart from our own, of course. µ