TWKR breaks cover

IN A RATHER effective marketing coup, AMD’s put world+dog talking about their “TWKR” processor. The company has been giving them away to a select number of hardware sites and OC’ing enthusiasts as a reward for their support of the Phenom II since launch, including overclocking legends the likes of K|ngp|n, chew* and Gomeler.

The Phenom II 42 “TWKR” processor is actually quite a tame bit of silicon. A quad-core processor clocked at 2GHz that can otherwise take some heavy voltages and some extreme tweaking (hence the name) resulting in some pretty good overclocking.

We found a few articles about it, worth mentioning in Ze Vibble. It *isn’t* the answer to life, the universe and everything, though.

Legit Reviews

Hot Hardware

Neoseeker

Tom’s Hardware

Overclockers Club

Tech Power Up has an elusive RV770-based card, the Sapphire HD 4730. Most will look at it as a stop-gap solution, but performance for under $80 makes it a worthy SKU in itself.

Anandtech is testing an Asrock X58 Extreme motherboard. All we can say is you can start planning your next PC on a Core i7 processor with this powerful yet cheap motherboard.

Benchmark Reviews got the smallest case they could find and put it to test. This is an Antec ISK300-65 Mini-ITX case matches any desktop in connectivity, although using as an HTPC case might be problematic.

Bit Tech gives us a hint of what’s to come with some nudie shots of Intel’s Lynfield processor on the sly. Benchmarks promised soon.

Thrusted Reviews tests the Biostar TA790GX-XE, a micro-ATX mobo with the 790GX genes. Some gripes says Leo, but all in all a worthy motherboard due to its very very very very cheap price.

OCInside.de has a new guide to unlocking the Phenom II X3’s chastity belt and letting loose the fourth core.

Windows 7’s native SSD support is put to the test at Tech Report.  TRIM plays a big part in the upcoming driver firmware and Geoff recommends you don’t buy anything until you can read reviews on Win7 performance.

Guru of 3D gets some more HD 4890 action in the lab. Using Sapphire’s Toxic Vapor-X HD 4890 edition, Hilbert chews through the frames. Novel (silent!) cooling solutions aren’t helping AMD bridge the gap to Nvidia, however. µ