Weekend Hardware Reviews

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Another PCI Express video card makes its way into our hands for testing. This card from Gainward features a hand-picked GPU for better overclocking, but can performance justify its price?

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Today, I'm going to take a quick look at some DDR2 from Corsair in the form of the TWIN2X1024-5400C4PRO 1GB kit. You might be thinking to yourself, '5400!?!' Oh yeah...this RAM is designed to run at 675MHz. The fastest DDR I reviewed was 550MHz, so I was definitely excited to check out this DDR2 kit from the top performance memory company on the planet.

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Over the next few pages PCstats will be sussing out the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard to see just how it performs, and the features it offers up. Built upon the nVidia nForce3 Ultra chipset, the MSI K8N Neo2 supports the socket 939 AMD Athlon64 or AthlonFX processor, and will support up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR memory. With respect to its onboard components, users of the MSi K8N Neo2 Platinum will find two onboard Gigabit NICs, IEEE1394 Firewire, 7.1-channel audio, four Serial ATA ports with NVRAID (RAID 0, 1, 0+1), and MSI's own CoreCell technology. That might not sound like a lot, but remember the four Serial ATA channels are integrated, as is Serial ATA/IDE RAID, and all this runs us about $140USD.

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The ASUS AX800XT/2DT package has a number of positive features going for it. The card is small, well-built, quiet, and looks damn good. The very fact that you can pop it into a small PCIe-based system is a real bonus. ATI/ASUS also use a native PCI-Express design with no bridge chip in between. The benefits of the faster PCIe link won't manifest themselves until applications require massive streaming from motherboard to GPU (and vice-versa), but it's nice to know that architectural bottlenecks aren't going to hold up progress.

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uGuru gives Abit the most advanced bios and monitoring features of any board out there. You can keep tabs on everything from your system up time to the voltages. Speaking of voltages you have more voltage settings for more components than in any other Socket 754 board. The board also comes with some great documentation. Stability of the board is good, and the price is competitive for the features it buys.

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Because this motherboard has so many overclocking features I could tell from the start that things were going to go well. I decided to overclock normally by choosing the standard overclocking option and adjusting the FSB and voltage. After increasing the FSB and adding more voltage as needed my final result was a FSB of 265 taking my 2.8GHz P4 to 3.7GHz! With this overclock it also pushed my Corsair memory to DDR706 which is extremely impressive. To achieve this overclock I flashed the BIOS to version 1003 and set the DDR voltage to 1.9v, northbridge to 1.5v, and CPU to 1.5875v. I also locked the PCI-Express to 100Mhz and PCI to 33.33MHz. Unfortunately my cooling got in the way after increasing the CPU voltage causing it overheat and shutdown my system. I know this motherboard could have given me more, however without watercooling my processor would have been in danger.

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If you recall back in 2002, R300 (RADEON 9700) was blasting at full speed with its full availability. Although it was still a .15µ micron process it was a very mature silicon (ATI's first .15µ chip was the R200) with very few if no flows. R300 was ATI's greatest success which accounted for best performing DirectX 9 chip. During 2002, ATI was already working on a new design -- the R400 which was later canned mainly because of beyond DirectX specifications which could make the chip a bit too avant garde if you will.

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In this review PCstats is testing something a little more mainstream, but no less interesting; a pair of GeIL's Ultra Platinum PC3200 512MB DDR RAM DIMM's. Each DDR memory module has a liquid crystal thermal monitoring sticker attached, which shows the temperature in both Celsius and Farenheit. Each stick of Ultra Platinum PC3200 DDR is rated to run at 200 MHz, while keeping memory timings of 2-2-2-5 at a voltage of just 2.55V. To help protect the memory from physical damage, tin coated copper heatspreaders are utilized.