Foxconn 939 Board, 6800 PCI-E, HUSH HTPC, Red Vs Blue
Good morning gang, it's time for the morning news update at HH. It's been a hardware week that I would soon like to forget. I just wrapped up building my first HTPC, nothing crazy, just wanted to do it. Of course, nothing could go smoothly and it took close to a day to get things working right. Then, not a week goes by and the hard drive decides to die, so it's back to reinstalling. Thankfully the second time around went well and now things have settled down nicely. Along with lots of TV and moview watching, I got to catch the latest Red vs Blue on a full screen. If you haven't checked these guys out yet, you should. Pretty funny skits with a Halo theme.
Foxconn 755FXK8AA-8EKRS Review @ ClubOC.net:
"Even this little Foxconn board benched as equally as our old testbed, a Mach I cooled 3.0Ghz Prescott at 4.0Ghz with an x800 Pro from Visiontek massively overclocked. The socket 939 beats all our existing benchmark numbers without overclocking our system OR video card. That is very significant indeed, and it just simply points out the power of the AMD socket 939 interface. Although we would like to focus on the aspect, the Foxconn board is not an overclocking board, but is simply a board that is rich in features, and runs good and stable as a SIS chipset should."
MSI GeForce 6800 PCI Express @ GamePC Labs:
"Today at GamePC Labs, we've taken a look at a card which appears to be nVidia's first native PCI Express GeForce 6800 graphics processor MSI's GeForce 6800 PCIe. This card uses an NV40 based GPU which does not require nVidia's HSI bridge chip to operate on a PCI Express x16 based system. Just like the AGP-based GeForce 6800 chip, this card comes with 12 active rendering pipelines and lowered clock speeds compared to other 6800 GT/Ultra cards, but also sells for quite a lower price. We compare this new card to rival PCI Express offerings from both ATI and nVidia."
Trusted Reviews has a nice write up on a sweet looking HTPC from HUSH:
"Talking of the graphics card, it's mounted horizontally along with the TV Tuner card to ensure that the height of the PC is kept as low as possible. Hush has used a single riser card that plugs into both the AGP slot and a PCI slot, allowing an AGP card and a single PCI card to be used in the system. This configuration does limit the amount of PCI cards you can use, but it's an acceptable compromise to achieve a décor friendly form factor. It's also worth remembering that there is so much functionality integrated into modern motherboards these days, that the need for more than one PCI card is shrinking."
