Gigabyte lays on the features

TWEAKTOWN GAVE Gigabyte's P55A-UD6 a lookover. If you think the name is familiar, that's because it is. The "A" is a variant on the original P55-UD6 that includes SATA-III and USB 3.0. Gigabyte packs the mobo with just about every accessory cable and bridge under the sun, including an SLI bridge for Nvidia graphics.

PC Games Hardware strips the HD 5970 bare and shows off the geek pr0n. PLX bridge, dual GPU, power components, coolers and a whole lot of things to get you started on your 5970 customisation.

Antec has shrunk its NSK2400 Fusion case into something a little more elegant, the NSK1480. Silent PC Review is reviewing it, and although it isn’t a high-end case, it cools well (including an intake fan right in front of the HDD cage), but should come with a better PSU,  the cables are too long and the PSU fan, noisy.

Tech Gage, erm, gauges the performance of the Sapphire Radeon HD 5750, a low/mid-range card that doesn't break the bank and delivers on a whole lot of performance... well, more than enough to power your mid-range rig.

Legion Hardware has been dealing with some issues with their sample HD 5970. Apparently, despite being targeted at the ultra-enthusiast community, as AMD put it, it won’t overclock very well. At least, it overclocks and then downclocks to be on the safe side. Nuisance? Yes. Problem? Depends on what AMD does about it.

Xbit Labs tests the rather impressive Noctua NH-D14 cooler. This 1.24Kg behemoth mounts two fans, one sandwiched 140mm one, and another lateral 120mm one, to push through a huge volume of air. Sergey thinks he’s found the new king of the hill.

OCaholic unpacks a new Lian Li PC-P50 Armor Suit. This is quite lightweight for a mid-tower, weighing in at just 6.6Kg. The reviewer didn’t like the hard-drive mounting system at all, but otherwise it’s an affordable case with some good details.

Dutch power supply vendor, Nexus, has one of its semi-modular kits at Hardware Secrets, the Nexus RX-8500. Semi-modular makes sense. There are cables you won’t do without and others you can disconnect. It has some faults though. First off, it’s not as efficient as its smaller brothers. Then if you want tri-SLI, you need to spring for the extra power cable...

Fudzilla hails the new graphics king, the (Sapphire) Radeon HD 5970 OC Edition. The card comes with a meagre 10MHz overclock on both core and memory. AMD provided AIBs with the overvolting tools to push these cards beyond spec, and Sapphire repacked them with the “Redline” theme. Otherwise it’s a “standard” HD 5970, if there’s anything standard about that.

Elite Bastards also had a close encounter with one of the HD 5970 OC edition cards from Sapphire. The fact that you’re overclocking the already massively powerful card won’t eliminate the need to buy a 30-inch 2560x1600 screen just to squeeze every ounce of performance out of this card, which would be our first concern.

Oddly enough, we just counted three Sapphire articles. We wouldn't mind seeing one of these cards in the flesh, if you know what I mean, eh Sapphire? µ