Gulftown emerges in the Far East

LATER THIS YEAR we'll see Gulftown appear on shelves, according to the Intel maps. However, HKEPC has benchmarked the Gulftown already and drew some very interesting conclusions. First off, the six-core behemoth draws less power than Core i7. Secondly, there's no current benchmarking software that will really take advantage of six cores with 2 threads each. Only Cinebench and Sandra showed the CPU's worth.

Driver Heaven broke down its cooler roundup in 2 separate articles that you can find here and here. The Prolimatech Megahalem and the Corsair H50 dominate this month’s charts – the latter being a slightly different type of solution as it’s liquid-cooled.

Xbit Labs has dual duel, facing off two monster GTX 295 graphics cards from Gigabyte and Gainward. It’s more a case of twins separated at birth, as both are reference cards differing only in the bundle.

Thrusted picked up a new display, a Foris FX2431 24-inch panel from the very reputable house of Eizo. Putting the pro-LCD through the paces, Andy was blown away by the image quality but if you’re blowing almost £900 you’d better get the best, innit?

Small Net Builder tests Mvix’s latest media player device, the Ultio 1080p Media Centre. Fine interface, but the format support isn’t the best. You can buy it sans HDD, tho’, making it a cheaper all-round deal.

Tom’s Hardware Store bunged an article covering all the mainstream GeForce and Radeon cards on the market today. Your best bet, right now, is an HD 4770, says Tino.

OCZ’s Agility SSDs get a showing at the land of penguins, Phoronix. Michael stuck one of these on his Ubuntu testbed and it passed with flying colours. 128GB for $300 on an SSD, begins to sound pretty decent.

PC Perspective has taken Cuda, Stream and benchmarked a whole lot of GPGPU apps, and despite Steve and Ryan not seeing eye-to-eye on this, it seems ATI has something at least as strong as Nvidia, here.

14-inch laptops aren’t as popular as today as – say – five years ago. Still, notebook makers still use the form in systems such as this Dell Studio 14z. The quasi-HD lappie isn’t at all expensive and still packs quite a punch.

Madshrimps.be has picked up an MSI X58M motherboard. This ‘board is a micro-ATX form-factor, and it also carries a rather light price-tag. We’d look at it if we were building a LAN party machine.

Verdis Reviews received a Cooler Master V8 CPU cooler for testing. Simple enough, it snaps into place and cools your CPU very well. If you think the fan is just too loud, just tone it down with the included fan controller.

Overclocker’s Club tests the new Gskill F3 PC12800 CL8 3x2GB Core i7 memory kit. While having tight timings and performance, it won’t let you overclock *that* much. You start hitting snags at 1800MHz.

We’ve actually been waiting for this review: Silent PC Review tests the 785G chipset on a couple of Asus and MSI boards. The Asus M4A785TD-V EVO and the MSI 785GM-E65 are subjected to dire punishment at SPCR. Not revolutionary, at all, but a base for a fine HTPC. µ