Chaintech Mobo, Logitech Speakers and Much More
Good morning friends :) Well, today is the day; the day in which Half-Life 2 is officially launched. Myself, I have the Collectors Edition currently installing in the background and personally, I have never be so excited about a game. After nearly six years of waiting, I am very eager to see how Gordon is going to get out his current mess. Nonetheless, the news bin is filling up and it is getting late. Here is your AM shot...
HTPCnews.com Mobo Review: Chaintech VNF3-250 nForce3 250
"For those of you looking for a budget board to run the latest and greatest AMD A64 chips on, we've got one up for review that you very well might be interested in. Seems to pack in a great deal of options for the price; including on-board LAN, Passive chipset cooling for silence, 5.1 Audio that even includes the desired SPDIF for sending your Digital audio to a receiver / preamp... Just to name a few of the HTPC related options we found nice to have."
Logitech X-230 Speakers Review @ CoolTechZone
"We recently evaluated Logitech's X-530 speaker system and found it to be an excellent speaker system for valued listeners. Logitech introduced a 2.1 setup to its successful budget product line with the X-230 system. While there is a price point difference between the two, we must admit that both units performed above par in our audio quality tests. Today we are looking at the Logitech X-230 2.1 system. The X-530 and X-230 systems are quite similar in design with their major difference lying between a full surround sound setup versus an even affordable 2.1 setup."
NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT AGP graphics card @ Tech Report
"WHILE WE WERE extremely impressed with the GeForce 6600 GT when it was launched back in September, the card's PCI Express X16 interface left us longing for an AGP flavor. It's wasn't that we didn't like PCI Express, but the only commercially available PCI Express platform was saddled with the Pentium 4's comparatively poor gaming performance. Since September, we've previewed Athlon 64 chipsets with PCI Express support from ATI, NVIDIA, and VIA, but none are available in production motherboards just yet. You'll still need an LGA775 Pentium 4 or Celeron processor if you want to get in on PCI Express graphics."
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT AGP Review @ Beyond3D
"The inclusion of the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra in this article also highlights exactly the importance of a flexible shader pipeline in current gaming titles. The top level fill-rates and geometry performances between the 5800 Ultra and the newer 6600 GT's are fairly similar, and yet in gaming titles, even DirectX8 ones that rely heavily on multi-texturing and not so much on shaders, the 6600 GT's show large performance gains over NVIDIA's two year old high end technology."
Intel's P4 3.46 ExtremeEdition and 925XE chipset @ LostCircuits
"The latest improvement in Intel's desktop line of processor involves the increase in bus speed from 800 to 1066 MHz. Initial reactions after benchmarking the new against the old configuration ranged from silence to outspoken dismay about the lack of difference. Sometimes, there is more to the story than meets the eye and we started digging and digging and more digging. In the end, we reached the verdict that the current combo of the 925XE is better than originally assessed. However, we also have evidence that the recent platform mislaunch is at least partially a result of poor product planning, resulting in a forced mismatching of the wrong components. We leave that part for last in this article, though."
Mushkin 1GB Dual Pack PC3200 222 LII V2 Review @ 3DX
"According to Mushkin, with the proper timings set, you should be able to push this memory up to and possibly beyond DDR500 speeds. For our overclocking tests we ran this memory up to 250MHz HyperTransport speed with a resulting SiSoft Sandra memory score of 6904/6793 at timings of CAS3 4-4-8."
That's all I have for now, catch us back here later :) - Cheers
