Creative hatches a new plan

CREATIVE LABS (or Zii Labs, take your pick) seems to have found a niche for its Zii “Stem Cell” processing ARM-based SoC: MIDs. Hardware Zone got one sample in their hands long enough to see just what it could do. Specs look impressive, really.

Neoseeker takes us through the paces with the new Thermaltake Element T case. It’s the cheapest of three in a series of cases, but the T focuses on airflow rather than silence (S) and gaming (G).

You can also take a gander at the Element G case, only this time at Ninjalane. The Element G has some sharp looks and plenty of fans and space for enthusiast kit. Fan controls and compartments for specific components give you a bit more control over the end product.

Dragon Steel Mods has a different case, this one from Xclio, and it’s called the Godspeed One Advanced PC Case. It’s almost entirely tool-less but has some shortcomings DSM couldn’t get over.

OCaholic reviews the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P. FX is still the top end of AMD’s branding and the board performs as expected, no quirks, no incompatibilities, just total control over your CPU. Good for overclocking an AMD processor we guess.

German site, Hardware Mag, tests Intel’s Core i7 950 processor. Calling it “mid-range” is a bit of a stretch… it’s a €480 processor, yet it’s the second cheapest in Intel’s Core i7 line-up. It looks like a fine overclocker.

Guru of 3D tests another aesthetic wonder from SmoothCreations, the LANShark. As the name implies, it’s a LAN party-goer – and the custom paint job just scores tons of points in the department. Brann says it’s a strong gaming machine with some out-of-the-factory tweaks to boot.

PC Perps previews MSI’s first 785G motherboard, the aptly-named 785GM-E65. As motherboards go, it fits a ton of features into a micro-ATX form-factor (and its eerily similar to an Asus Gene), only for the AMD platform.

Asrock’s X58 Extreme motherboard is being tested at Xbit Labs. Despite inheriting a lot from the “Supercomputer”, the Extreme is a step above when it gets around to tweaking, and what with the $170 price tag, it should sell like hotcakes.

HP has all but relegated the Compaq brand to the netherworld of budget notebooks, as is the case of the Compaq Mini 110c. In fact it’s a less refined version of the Mini 700. Cheaper, too.

Driver Heaven scored another Novatech wundernotebook, the X80 GTX Pro. It’s a 17-inch DTR with a very good CPU+GPU combo or at least enough to keep it ahead of its Alienware rival.

Madshrimps is doing something we should all be doing these days: looking into the shallow end of the CPU price pool. Testing the Pentium E6300 processor, Madshrimps believes its found Intel’s value champion.

Some positively insane benchmarking went on at Tom’s Hardware. If you can stand the speed, check out the 16 Intel X25-E 64GB SSDs in RAID, writing data at a record-breaking 2.2GB/s. B….. hell.

Legit Reviews faces-off a couple of VGA favourites: the HD 4890 vs the GTX 275. It looks like a tie and the tie-breaker is really the price tag.

Bjorn 3D tests something called the Max Cube Amoris 6010. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of them, neither did Raymond. Apparently they make PC cases, and this one is a looker. The 6010 is tool-less and it does have great cooling potential.

George at Hillbilly Hardware did some Tri-SLI testing with an HD 4890, just to see how much of na improvement he’d get. Well, it isn’t that much, at all. Performance gains go down massively after the second GPU.

Finally, Eliot at Fudzilla did some clever tests on Phenom II under-volting. The point is that you retain most of the performance whilst losing a bit on power consumption. This could be good if HTPC builders picked up on it, right? µ