Hardware Roundup While 690D makes a review debut


By Theo Valich: martes 13 febrero 2007, 10:45

THE GEFORCE 8800GTS 320MB makes a strong showing today, with most of the
hardware sites reviewing different brands that are now coming to market
with the most affordable DirectX 10 cards yet. Oddly enough, it seems
Nvidia's reviewers guide explicitly called for reviewers to review the card
using only Windows XP, since Windows Vista is not currently supported.
Pretty funny, especially when you see all those Windows Vista Ready
stickers on the retail boxes.
Anyway, this product was reviewed by our usual bunch of suspects, starting
with Bjorn 3D, which reviewed the fastest of the bunch, XFX GeForce 8800GTS
320MB XXX Edition. The board also featured on TechReport. Ryan over at PC
Perspective reviewed a BFG 8800 GTS 320 OC board< /a>, so did guys at
HardOCP and Guru3D.

A good friend from Hardware Info, Koen, took the most interesting one for a
spin, EVGA's e-GeForce 8800GTS 320MB ACS3 edition, which features a
non-reference cooler which shon on previous iterations of the 8800 series.
Overclocking capabilities are pretty impressive, so you might take a look.

Our old mate Joshua from PenStarSys reviewed the original 8800GTS with full
640MB of memory from Gigabyte.

Our own take on the board was here, since we filed it on Friday.

Hacks from down under also had a busy day, with Legion Hardware testing the
performance of Supreme Commander, upcoming hit-game. This RTS is the first
game in genre that features high-def graphics and the differences between
the game quality settings are staggering. Seven graphics cards were tested,
and results are quite interesting. Second review was Kingston's HyperX
PC2-9200 memory, featuring Elpida chips - meaning overclocking results
could be limited. Then again, Kingston features 25% more affordable price
than its most serious competitors, meaning this could be a best buy memory
for the premium segment.

At the same time, TweakTown filed a first fully-fledged review of AMD 690G
chipset on a motherboard from ECS.
Also, guys got some interesting info regarding future of AMD and ATI
chipsets. It seems that either AMD will continue to ship RD600 and other
Intel chipsets under ATi's brand, or someone drank too much of Christmas
eggnog.

If you want to exercise your German (after all, CeBIT in Hangover is
approaching fast), head over to PC-Treiber to read the reviews of Asrocks'
ALiveXFire-eSATA2 and Foxconn's K8T890M2AA-KRS2H (funny enough, KRS2H could
be translated as "trash" in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian...). If you don't want
to exercise your German, you'll find links to translated versions in both
reviews.

Having a secured environment is a must for safe computing, but the need to
memorise large amount of passwords can lead to having one password for all.
This is less than ideal, so BCCHardware went and reviewed several
fingerprint-ID products from Silex Biometrics.

ChileHardware posted a review of A-DATA PD7 1GB USB memory stick, which
undergoes a redesign to fit the requirements of Vista's ReadyBoost feature.
This helped the company come up with performance of a couple of notches
higher, but still way under the fastest sticks on the market, Flash
Voyagers from Corsair. Still, this one is several light years faster than
an iPod.

All this hardware is nice, but can come to a grinding halt if a virus or a
Trojan disables your operating system. BIOSMagazine posted a review of
NOD32 Anti-Virus software, which offers pretty good level of protection for
your favourite metal pet.

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