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MSI NX8800GT Video Card
MSI NX8800GT-T2D512E-OC Video Card: MSI's latest mainstream product is priced as such, but packs a punch that will floor you.

MSI RX2600XT Diamond OC Edition
MSI RX2600XT Diamond OC Edition: MSI's latest appears to be a great fit for HTPC purposes, but packs a decent left hook in gaming.

Asus Blitz Formula
Asus Blitz Formula: Another in the popular Republic of Gamers lineup, this P35 based board supports DDR2 and Water Cooling out-of-the-box.

Latest Site News
Afternoon Edition: Friday, December 14 2007 - 14:14
3850 HD
The is at Bjorn3D. I don't think the Xtreme means it's great on the powder or gets phat air on the slopes, but I could be wrong.

Going back to reality, I have another graphic card for you to check out. It's AMD's second attempt to convince you to their high-end Radeon HD models. The ever wonderful PowerColor aka Tul, shipped a surprise package to my doorstep with the PowerColor HD 3850 512MB Xtreme inside. I would like to apologize to Raymen and you guys for not releasing the article as planned, but Leadtek WinFast PX8600 GT SLI article had been in the works.



8800 GT
And in the green corner is the . Blue hedgehogs? Yeah, it's time for my meds.

Palit do a good job of impressing us here; they seem to be consistently one of the cheapest partners on the market but it doesn’t seem to come at the cost of specs or build quality.

Going into the arena with our Palit 8800GT Sonic is a stock clocked 8800GT from ASUS and the older HD 2900 XT from MSI which is also stock clocked.




Memory and Peripherals
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ByteSized
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Morning Edition: Friday, December 14 2007 - 5:18
FREE Stuff!
TechSpot Giveaway!

So what does it take to win? In short, post a picture of your PC(s) showing TechSpot's frontpage on the screen.



Hybrid Crossfire
A quick sneak peak at over at HotHardware.

We had a chance to sit down with some folks at AMD to talk about their upcoming Hybrid CrossFire technology and to get some firsthand experience with pre-production hardware. It looks like tomorrow’s next-gen IGPs are going to be much more interesting than today’s offerings. Head on over to the site and take a look.



Spider
Despite Phenom not quite being as great as everyone hoped, the Spider platform is great. The is a budget 770 board for the Spider platform.

The A770M-A is an entry level AMD 7 series (770/790X/790FX) ATX size motherboard for the Spider platform (when paired with a Phenom CPU and ATI 3800 series graphics card). Upon first glance, the layout of the board looks promising. It has support for the Quad Core Phenom CPU as well as Dual and Single Core AM2 CPUs, so current AM2 users have an easy upgrade path to the Spider platform that should not break the bank all at once. The rear of the board is standard fare with no obstructions on the back.



Sound
ASUS manufacturer quite a diverse amount of products, including the .

As far as laptops go, lately it's gotten as close as it would get to desktop performance in all but one area: Sound. For a while now, I've been looking around for a decent USB audio solution for my mobile computer -- and most of them are either impractical, provides virtually no improvement over my Dell Inspiron's integrated audio, or the features offered are simply not enough to make a difference. Last year, my friend lent me his Creative X-Mod USB sound device for my enjoyment -- while it has great looks and builds upon the X-Fi brand, the performance was more or less disappointing for me. After Asus' successful release of the Asus Xonar D2 sound card, Asus made quite a smart move and decided to expand on this brand to the USB sound device market. How will this sweet looking Asus Xonar U1, combined with a complete set of home theater audio technologies and features such as optical digital out, perform altogether? Is it the sound solution for notebook PC owners? We'll put it through our tests today to see how it goes.



ByteSized
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Afternoon Edition: Thursday, December 13 2007 - 16:27
Trade Magazines for Free!
We've expanded our selection of free magazines offered here via Netline and Viper Lair. Topics cover everything from , to , and are completely free to those who qualify. No strings attached.

, and we're pretty sure you'll find something that will interest you. In the past, , and have also proven popular with VL readers. There are also dozens of magazines for less technical fields like marketing, sales, and retail.

For Canadians, there is a . There are also special links for readers and .



Folding @ VL
If you got some spare CPU cycles, give us a hand in cracking the top 100. It's for a good cause anyways. :)



3-way Action
NVIDIA has been the forerunner in multi-GPU rendering for a long time now. HotHardware shows how the gap will widen with their

With years of maturity and performance tuning, their SLI technology has shown very strong scaling when chaining a pair of GPUs together to tackle the 3D graphics processing workload. We’ve seen quad-SLI on mid-range GPUs previously with NVIDIA’s GeForce 7950 GX2 but what about three GeForce 8800 Ultra cards strapped in under the hood?



Mars Attacks
Foxconn's Mars motherboard is their first 'overclocking' motherboard in their new Quantum Force product line.

Quantum-Force.net is going to be a great home for our products on the internet, and a really interesting place for enthusiasts to visit and learn more about our products and philosophy.



Silent but deadly
Want a decent card backed by a celeb? I guess unless you're an internet geek, you'll have no idea who he is, but the bears his name.

Another nice feature of the XFX 8600 GT Fatal1ty is its passive cooling solution. This allows for no additional noise to be added to the system and for your games to be heard more clearly. The unique design also allows the video card to only take up one expansion slot in your case and motherboard, which is another added bonus.



Asus Review
If you're looking for a well rounded board, the would be a good choice.

Today we are taking a look at a Asus P53K Deluxe motherboard. What is deluxe about this? Well features like Wifi, and HDMI should make you take extra time in considering this card. Also, it supports DDR3 and has the performance features most Asus cards have; or at least that is what they say. So let's take a closer look at this motherboard and see how it actually does perform.



Cases, Power & Cooling

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Memory Related

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Morning Edition: Thursday, December 13 2007 - 9:09
Trade Magazines for Free!
We've expanded our selection of free magazines offered here via Netline and Viper Lair. Topics cover everything from , to , and are completely free to those who qualify. No strings attached.

, and we're pretty sure you'll find something that will interest you. In the past, , and have also proven popular with VL readers. There are also dozens of magazines for less technical fields like marketing, sales, and retail.

For Canadians, there is a . There are also special links for readers and .



Folding @ VL
If you got some spare CPU cycles, give us a hand in cracking the top 100. It's for a good cause anyways. :)



8800GTS
Nvidia has been on a roll as of late. The certainly doesn't slow things down.

Nvidia doesn´t want to miss the oportunity of being the most powerful in the graphics cards market and the brand shows it with something many users were waiting for: their G-92 8800GTS.



Black Pearl
For you POTC fans, the name Black Pearl probably stirs up some memories. Given the quality of the last two movies, maybe not good ones. Let's see if the non-POTC themed conjures up better feelings.

The "Black Pearl" edition P5K3 Premium motherboard has several distinctive features that sets it apart from the crowd. First and foremost is the lack of DIMM slots for the system memory. The reason becomes evident when you take a closer look. The memory is actually built onto the board and is heavily heatsinked to reduce its operating temperatures and improve its ability to overclock. With speeds guaranteed at 1500MHz or above, it needs the help.



Ultra Durable?
I thought the name was kind of weird but now I am really puzzled. Is Gigabyte claiming other cards, including their own from the past are less stable?

When we say components from their motherboards, we don’t mean that the HD 3870 now carries support for a socket 775 processor, rather the “Ultra Durable” technology behind GIGABYTE motherboards which makes them such a stable product.



Power & Cooling

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Bytesized Bits

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Late Night Edition: Thursday, December 13 2007 - 0:06
Trade Magazines for Free!
We've expanded our selection of free magazines offered here via Netline and Viper Lair. Topics cover everything from , to , and are completely free to those who qualify. No strings attached.

, and we're pretty sure you'll find something that will interest you. In the past, , and have also proven popular with VL readers. There are also dozens of magazines for less technical fields like marketing, sales, and retail.

For Canadians, there is a . There are also special links for readers and .



Folding @ VL
If you got some spare CPU cycles, give us a hand in cracking the top 100. It's for a good cause anyways. :)



P35 Review
Too lazy to read? No problem as Rod is giving you a gimmie video of his review.

The Abit IP35-E Socket 775 Motherboard motherboard is based on the Intel P35 express / ICH9 chipset and supports the Intel Dual and Quad Core processors. It accepts up to 8GBs of Dual channel DDR2 800/667 un-buffered non-ECC memory. It overclocks very well, is stable and affordable. If you're in the market for an excellent inexpensive motherboard without Crossfire capabilities, I would strongly recommend you check it out.



Updated Review
OCC has published a new update of the If you missed it the first time, there are some changes.

We re-ran all of the benchmarks over with the new drivers and with the GPU overclocked to 850MHz and the memory at 900MHz. These updates are in the graphs as "Overclocked".



Power & Cooling

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Bytesized Bits

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Morning Edition: Wednesday, December 12 2007 - 5:56
G92
The G92 version of the 8800 GTS is proving to be a winner. Here is Tweaktown's look at the .

ZOTAC are still a relatively new company and we saw their first graphics card a few months ago in the shape of an 8800GTX AMP! Edition. This time around, while we’re still looking at an 8800 series card it’s a GTS 512MB based on the new G92 core.

What we’ll do today is put the stock clocked HD 3870 against the stock clocked 8800 GTS 512MB from ZOTAC and check out exactly what’s going on with these two top-end cards from NVIDIA and AMD.




FREE Stuff!


Up for grabs in week fifteen of Bigbruin.com's Pro Football Pick 'Em is a Rosewill RD600N-2DC-SL-SLV Stallion Series 600W Power Supply.



Case, Power and Cooling
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8800 GT
Elite Bastards check out the .

Despite those bumps in core and memory clocks, the Alpha Dog XXX Edition sticks with NVIDIA's single slot, reference cooling solution - We'll be checking out GPU temperatures for this board compared to a stock part later. Thus, aside from the
killer dog labelled cooler, everything is exactly as you'd expect from a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB; from the six-pin PCI Express power connector and PCI Express 2.0 support, through to the single SLI connector on the top of the board.




G92 #2
Another Alpha dog review over at NVnews who look at the .

The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is a solid implementation of NVIDIA's reference design and competes with the much higher priced GeForce 8800 GTX. However, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB faces stiff competition from the GeForce 8800 GT, which can pose a difficult decision in choosing one model over the other.

Tech report also check out the .



ByteSized
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