Made a Clarkdale’s IGP not so hot

Hardware Roundup: Trailing Nvidia’s 9400

FAR IN THE EAST, HKEPC got something we’ve all been waiting for: a full review of Clarkdale and a head-to-head against Nvidia’s 9400m IGP. Pay attention to page 6, lots of interesting figures there including power consumption and 3Dmark and gaming scores. The GPU core – as powerful as it might be – doesn’t come close to Nvidia’s… But Charlie will definitely have something interesting to add to this further on…

AGP just doesn’t want to go away, it seems. Tom’s Hardware has an extensive review of a Gigabyte AGP Radeon HD 4650, on the same system. Its only problem is the previous generation AGP HD 3850 will outperform it hands down.

The MMORPG crowd has reason to be excited. PC Games Hardware tests a new mouse from Razer – the Naga – which brings a ton of hotkeys within range of your thumb. You can key-bind to your heart’s content. If only we’d had these in our Diablo days…

Charlie might not enjoy the Nvidia-drip that hardware sites are hooked up to, but there’s something to be said about some solutions, like the 9500 Bravo from Asus. It offers a couple of brackets, one for regular cases and another for low-profile ones. You also get a media centre software, remote and light sensor to calibrate your screen. Not bad, considering it’s dirt cheap.

AMD has moved fast into the 45nm arena launching model after model of Phenom II processors. Now, enter the greatly underestimated Phenom II X4 905e and X3 705e as seen on Legit Reviews’ … uh… review. We’ve got a 905e in the office right now and we can attest every word Nate put down in writing.

Gone are the days of the $800 graphics card… or are they? Well BFG resurrected this urban myth and turned it into something quite nasty, the GeForce GTX 295 H2OC LE graphics card. Basically, add liquid cooling to a GTX 295, overclock it massively and get what is likely to be the most powerful card you can plug into your PC right now. Give it a look.

Xbit Labs unwrapped a shiny new eVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard. Like Nvidia’s graphics cards, the “LE” suffix is supposed to mean cheap (or less expensive, your pick). It’s also a mobo that can do tri-SLI – but it works in a pretty odd way. A BIOS update is due, apparently.

Just north of the border, we can find our chums at the Hardware Canucks. Michael has been working on eVGA’s upcoming launch of P55 motherboards, including the one Xbit tested, and the flagship FTW version. Looks promising.

Tweak Town has posted some interesting figures on Win7 vs. Windows Vista. Shane got mostly ties between them – which isn’t to say it’s bad, just “green”. As drivers mature on the new platform, things should gain some speed, wethinks.

A small round-up of HD 4890 cards took place at Driver Heaven. The three contestants – Powercolor, XFX and Asus flexed their muscles, but the XXX came out the winner in the end, although we do think manually overclocking a factory-overclocked card shouldn’t be necessary as you already pay the premium…

A less-known hardware development group that goes by the name Illuminato Labs has gone it alone and developed their own concept of modular computing blocks the Illuminato X Machina. Each module is just 2 square inches and interconnects with another 4… well, seeing is believing.

David Kanter over at Real World Tech raises some interesting points about Nvidia’s next graphics architecture. The argument for ECC in graphics products is set, our only question here is: just Nvidia? Check it out.S|A

 

The following two tabs change content below.

Newsdesk

Latest posts by Newsdesk (see all)