Wed Reviews

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In our last article we looked at the new Intel platforms with respect to their overall configuration as well as with regard to their memory performance. Briefly, some of the results came unexpectedly but most of what we did was concerned with theoretical memory benchmarks. Overall, the streaming performance was comparable with the older DDR(1) platform, whereas the latencies were higher, as expected. The write performance of the new platform was unexpectedly high, however, keep in mind that chipset buffering as well as the streaming algorithms used by AIDA32 may not paint an overall relevant picture.

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Hardware Avenue has today reviewed the Gigabyte Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition videocard. With the X800XT at the wheel, and with an awesome retail package, the Gigabyte X800XT Platinum has a hard time not impressing, but is it the right solution for you?

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Crucial Technology has always been known for their quality memory, great prices, and fast shipping. Recently Crucial has added a new "high performance" memory product line, called Ballistix. The Ballistix line of memory encompasses both DDR & DDR2 products, and emphasizes performance while still maintaining Crucial's high standards of quality.

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What us worry? That seemed to be Crucial's attitude not too long ago. For ClubOC to be located in the same vicinity as Crucial, it was somewhat disheartening to see them not partake in the high speed DDR wars of the last few years, and concentrating mostly on OEM and JEDEC minimum spec modules without a "CL 2" rating. It seemed to us like no fun, but that just is not the case anymore. The Ballistix memory lineup is very impressive, and given Crucial's excellent customer service, not to mention how easy it is to grab some of these fabulous sticks of memory, I cannot really see a downfall. At least it sounds good on paper, but is Crucial really taking a stand this time? Or are they merely trying to again give us just the bare minimum of overclocking overhead so we can have default speeds at high latencies? Well unlike some other sites that have reviewed the Ballistix lineup, ClubOC decided to take the long road and give you an impressive array of benchmarks to give you an example of what a couple sticks of Ballistix can give you...

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Look around the web for pre-Nocona Xeon vs Opteron articles and you'll generally find just one style of conclusion; the Opteron is great, the Xeon less so. Therefore testing the Nocona Xeon, based as it is on the desktop Prescott core which affords it a faster system bus, new cache layout, SSE3, tweaked HyperThreading and access to DDR400 memory officially for the first time, was a means to see if the update was worth Intel's time and effort.

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The MSI RX600XT-TD128 flew through all the benchmarks we ran, and performed quite well at 1024x768. Higher resolutions might be out of the question depending on the application, but if you find the card a bit slow, simply overclock it. Our particular card was able to hit a very respectable 610 MHz core, and 438 MHz memory. Despite the added stress, the MSI RX600XT-TD128 is completely silent during operation, and you will not hear it when it's installed into a case