Upgrading your rig is never an easy task- especially when you have to replace the motherboard. Generally speaking, when you upgrade your motherboard, chances are that you’re also looking at a new CPU and sometimes RAM. With their X48 chipset based motherboard, MSI tries to make things a little easy by providing DDR2 as well as DDR3 support which can certainly reduce the size of dent to you account.
As flash memory prices keep lowering, we see higher capacity drives more readily available. We’ve already looked at the 32GB version of Corsair’s Voyager drive. Today, we look at the 32GB of the Survivor. In case you missed our first article on Survivor, we would quickly like to say that its enclosure is one tough shell.
Scaling from one GPU to two doesn't necessarily result in doubling the performance as we've seen in countless SLI and Crossfire articles. But what happens when you add a third GPU to the mix? That is what we're going to find out today by putting three 9800GTX SLI cards together.
When we took the initial look at the 9800GTX from nVidia, we were far from impressed. Over its previous counterpart- the 8800GTX, there was not much improvement in performance while the prices were about the same as AMD’s dual GPU based 3870 X2 cards which we preferred.
Today we take a look at AMD’s updated Phenom CPU. Besides the slight speed bump, these B3 stepping based CPUs are now free of the “TLB Erratum” bug that AMD rightly disclosed during the launch of Phenom that causes the CPU to crash under extreme workload conditions.
Zotac is a new nVidia partner- at least for us. Its a new brand in the region and this is the first product we have received from them which is an overclocked 9800GTX card. Considering how cool the 9800GTX runs, this should work out quite nicely. Lets find out how the AMPed version of Zotac compares to the stock 9800GTX and other cards.
Asus didn’t wait long to introduce its first motherboard based on the Intel X48 chipset. Asus Formula Rampage board is part of the Republic of Gamers series and it is obviously aimed at gamers and enthusiasts alike.
The 9600GT from nVidia is a pretty decent GPU as far as the price/performance ratio is concerned and thus its no surprise to see many vendors jumping on it. Today we take a look at one such card by Leadtek modeled as WinFast PX9600 GT with 512MB RAM. Looking at its specifications, the PX9600 GT runs at stock speed as per nVidia’s specifications with nothing overclocked.
When AMD introduced the 3850 graphics card, it came bundled with 256MB of RAM which is a bit on the lower side for games that come out nowadays. Granted the 3850 is targeted as a mid-range card, it still pumps out pretty decent performance. Today we look at the 3850 solution from AMD’s biggest partner when it comes to graphics cards- the Sapphire HD3850 card with a frame buffer of 512MB.
With games getting more and more demanding, the amount of frame buffer available to the GPU has been on a continuous rise. However, as we saw in the ASUS 8800GT-1GB article, it doesn’t always help to equip your VGA card with more RAM than the reference design of a manufacturer. Today, we see MSI going down that road with their 1GB version of the 9600GT graphics card.
If an 8 or 16GB of flash storage is not enough for your everyday needs, what about a 32GB? Yes, you’ve read it right, Corsair has released its latest Voyager flash drive and this time it comes with a hefty 32GB of flash memory. Before you decide what to put there, let’s check out key features and drive’s performance.
Naturally, AMD has decided to build on good sales of a 680G chipsets and release a new one, called 780G. New chipset was main topic for AMD during CeBIT and all AMD major partners had their boards ready. One of them was ECS, AMD’s long-time partner, best known for their low-cost boards and OEM business.