Monday Hardware Reviews

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Hot off the heels of the last Corsair review, we have another Corsair review for you. Corsair has done it again, they are leading the pack in memory technology advancements, by releasing yet another quality high performance memory product. The Twinx2048-4000PT line of memory is engineered for speed and performance, using Samsung UCCC chips to power the sticks, these sticks just rock. Guaranteed 250Mhz at 1T with timings of 3-4-4-8, using high density, high capacity modules, being able to run high capacity sticks of ram at 1T is crucial to having a great performing system. Today’s high end systems take a performance hit if they run at 2T, so being able to run 2 gigs at 1T is a great triumph indeed, and at a speed of 250/500mhz is just amazing! Let's get into this review and see just how well these do perform..

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More recently, the RAM sweet spot using Windows XP has been 1GB using a pair of 512MB DDR RAM sticks. Since the release of Doom 3 and Battlefield 2 though, many users are finding that using 2GB of RAM enhances game play and computer performance. There have been a few problems with going to 2GB though; first off was the availability and price of 1GB DDR sticks, since so many users opted to go with 4 512MB sticks of RAM. Unfortunately, some motherboards do not support DDR with 4 sticks, and others will kick the FSB speed down to 333 to reduce errors. Also, many people have limited success when trying to overclock a motherboard with 4 sticks of RAM in it even if they are matching sticks. Plus, there is the increased voltage requirement. OCZ recognized the issues and released a 2GB DDR memory kit that is rated up to PC-4000, so now you can have your cake and eat it too.

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The next major push was at 3-3-3-8, where these modules scaled all the way to 287FSB (DDR574) at 2.93V, which is well past their rated speed of 250FSB. I was pleasantly surprised here, and considering the very modest voltage increase and the fact I still hadn't loosened the timings to their rated specs of 3-4-4-8, I thought this kit would fly past 300FSB (DDR600). Alas, loosening the timings to their rated speed only garnered me a slight increase to 292 FSB (DDR584)...

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Foxconn has doven headfirst into the shark infested waters of the mainstream market and proven they can swim with the big boys. Pleasing the hardware enthusiast crowd is no easy task, but Foxconn has put their years of manufacturing experience to good use and put together a winner with this board. Even a hardcore enthusiast will have a hard time finding fault with this board.

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Overclocking with the ECS board and our Athlon64 3200+ (Venice core) yielded a result of an impressive 2.65GHz. We got here by dropping the HT to 4x, moving the DRAM timings to 3-4-4-8. We left the CPU at 10x and increased it's Vcore by 125mv (resulting in a Vcore of 1.52). This is an impressive overclock to say the least. I was thinking that without the ability to apply more voltage to the chipset or FSB (HT) ECS would be hard pressed to catch up with the DFI's overclock. It turns out, we passed it nicely.

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Sometimes us reviewer tend to forget that not everyone have the money to buy one of the latest and fastest cards available. Instead of a GeForce 7800GT or GeForce 7800GTX many instead have opted for cheaper, but yet capable, GeForce 6600GT. But what if you have one of those and want to in a cheap way increase the graphics performance? NVIDIA has the solution with SLI. Pop in a second card and in theory get double the performance. Today I am looking at one of the cheaper SLI-capable motherboards on the market, the K8SLI from Albatron.

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The X800GTO from HIS in my point of view would be a perfect performance mainstream oriented gaming card that will handle any current game on the market and will easily toy with most games when overclocked. The overclocking potential in this card is fantastic and seeing that HIS has strapped on such a great cooling solution, you can squeeze out every last Mhz without turning your card into a peripheral cinder...

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The Golden Sample is clocked with a 450 MHz core which is 4 MHz faster than one of the overclocking sweet spots (18 x 27 - 40 = 446). Now, as our last 7800 GT review showed, the good thing about the 7800 series is that we see good performance boosts when they are overclocked. There were some instances of a 10 fps increase in some benchmarks with reasonable overclocks. What this suggests is that the Golden Sample at its stock clocks and under warranty will perform much better than the reference 7800 GT and just might be up the rear of the 7800 GTX.

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The Sapphire X800 GTO2 was modestly launched recently and not much hooplah had surrounded the card until it's secret was discovered. The X800 GTO2 is a 12 pipeline 256MB video card much like the vanilla X800. What is very much un-like the vanilla X800 is that the X800 GTO2 doesn't run on the same ATI430 GPU. Instead, it runs on the ATI480 GPU. For the GPU model informed you will notice that is the same GPU core model used on the Sapphire X850 video cards which pack 16 pixel pipelines.

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ATI's new All-In-Wonder (AIW) X800 XL picks up where the company's X600 AIW card left off, which means a faster core processor, more multimedia capabilities and a heftier price. Surprisingly, the AIW X800 XL isn't the company's most expensive All-In-Wonder product though. Nestled in between the AIW X800 XT and the X600 PRO on the ATI product line, the AIW X800 XL offers impressive performance while still maintaining a somewhat modest price. But what is the main difference between the AIW X800 XL and the AIW 800 XT, and have multimedia capabilities really been improved over the previous year's offerings?

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Once again, Sapphire is releasing a hidden jewel into the market, this time it is the X800 GTO2, a card based on the R480 GPU and boasting 1.6 ns GDDR3 --- and the entire thing sells for about US$ 200.-. From a marketing, logistics and legal standpoint, this is is only possible because officially the card is specked to run on 12 pipelines only at a core and memory speed of 400 and 490 MHz, respectively. In contrast to the X800 Pro series in which some cards could be modded to full 16 pipeline functionality by means of a BIOS flash along with the necessary bridging of blown substrate fuses, the current version only requires a BIOS update to live up to its fullest potential. In the best case, we were able to achieve approximately 70 % overall performance increase over the original configuration of the same, physically identical card. So what did we have to do for this other than selling our souls to the Sapphire aliens?

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For the cost involved the X700 from HIS turned out to be quite a performer. When compared to a similar classed card from NVIDIA it outperformed at almost every task put before it. AGP is still a VERY viable option, and HIS has proven with the X700 that they haven't forgotten about those of us that can't shell out a couple weeks pay every time a new card is released.

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The X800GT performs very well for a $160 card. It delivers solid performance when using 4x Aniso and 4x Anti at 1280x1024 and below, but anything over that will get you choppier video. Once you get to higher resolutions the card really shows it's lack of pipeline power by showing an even larger % dropoff than the GTO cards. Doom3 really shows some of this weakness as does Futuremark and FarCry, but UT2004 and HL2 are a bit more forgiving.

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Several review sites have really popped the 7800 GTX from a price point of being around $500. For the past few years, be it ATi or NVidia, the pinnacle of VGA performance has always hit the market around $500. The increase in performance with the 7800 GTX is much more than just the next logical step as we have seen before. With this said, your dollar is actually much more future proof here than it has ever been before.

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When video card shopping, many people look at a card's core and memory clock speeds, the included bundle of software and accessories, and the warranty among other things. More than ever before, NVIDIA's board partners are offering out-of-the-box, warrantied overclocks, so checking out clock speeds is worthwhile. More important to many consumers, though, is the warranty. XFX not only offers factory overclocked cards, but it also offers an exclusive Double Lifetime Warranty on 6 and 7 Series cards. The company also packs in some nice bundles with its cards.

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Those of you on a budget, but are still pretty serious about gaming should really look no further than the XFX 6600. I'll have to admit that our expectations were pretty low when I was told that this was a mere 6600 but the card exceeded my expectations in almost every way. Performance was excellent, and despite not having any fancy copper/heatpipe cooling solution, the card overclocked very well as well.