Reviews, Reviews and Reviews

We just published today a review on the Radeon HD 2400 XT, DAAMIT´s latest attempt to cover the mainstream market. You can check out the review here (spanish). Continuing with videocards, we received a pair of Geforce 8600s this week, that will be punished during next week. Another review, this time envolving motherboards is a Sapphire R690G which includes onboard HDMI on a sweet white PCB. This review was ready but we had some problems, and waited for a new BIOS that alowed overclocking. And finally we will publish a review on what is said to be the world´s toughest flash drive, you can watch a little tease in this video:

Motherboard is in the house

The motherboard I will be using in my new setup has arrived. What´s not so cool is that the case I was looking for, is out of stock, the only one available has a window, and I don´t want to buy the one with the window for three reasons:

1) This is not a gaming computer, but more of a 24/7 personal computer, so I don´t need a window.

2) The parts that will have are no show-off

3) I don´t want to spend 20 bucks extra for the damn window

“Good” news is I don´t have time for building it till I finish this semester, which should be the 12th of July. Considering I plan to go out on vacations the 17th, I will use that week to buy the rest of the parts and build it.

DirectX 10 Fiasco

Both PCPerspective and Boot Daily have editorials on the compatibility between new videocards and DirectX10. I wrote mine a days ago, and it seems to cover the same info.

You can check mine here (translated by Google).

Intel P35 Motherboards arrived

P35 is the next mainstream chipset Intel will be using on their motherboards. It´s still not officialy announced but I still could get some samples, and this are just the first ones arriving.

One of the biggest changes P35 brings, is compatibility with DDR3 memory, but don´t worry you still have DDR2 compatibility. On the other hand, P35 supports future 45nm Intel processors (Penryn) and 1333MHz Core 2 Duo 6×50 processors. As you might see this is a really new forward looking upgrade, because it´s compatible with unlaunched technology.

What I´ve been up to

I´ve been quite busy. When I re-started this blog I didn´t even imagine how busy things would go. I´m finishing a review, just a few editions and it should go fine. I also have to start and finish in record time a review on the GeForce 8800GTS 320MB. The new GeForce cards arrived. This the GeForce 8500GT, 8600GT and 8600GTS, courtesy of MSI. They are already being benched by one of our moderators who now is one of our new reviewers.

In between I´ve been searching for air tickets to Taipei, for Computex. Yes I will go to Computex even thought I thought I wouldn´t. This time I´ll fly through New Zeland, Australia, Hong Kong and finally Taiwan, 32 hours of love. At least I´ll get enough milleage to complete my account and get two free two tickets, one of them is of course CES Las Vegas.

GF 8600 review: big mistake

Today we didn´t publish a GeForce 8600 or 8500 review, and we should have. Why didn´t we? Well quite easy, we are too busy finishing some pending articles, and we thought that all spanish hardware review sites would have an article on it. So we thought it wouldn´t be a real exclusive review and the fast and hard work wouldn´t compensate.

For my surprise, there are no spanish Geforce 8600 reviews. I was offered two or three different videocards and rejected them, we have one flying here right now, I hope it arrives soon. But when the time comes everybody should have their reviews ready and it won´t be much of a surprise. Next time I´ll raise up the ante and work my poker reading skills…

DFI nForce 680i LT SLI

DFI, Diamond Flower Inc. or Design For Innovation – whatever you like best – has just launched a long anticipated motherboard, the DFI LanParty UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R. This, the latest motherboard in the LanParty series, is designed to support Intel latest processors, including the all mighty Core 2 Extreme QX6700. But what really surprises me is that DFI chose the NF680i LT SLI chipset instead of the full featured NF680i SLI. As many of you should know, DFI´s LanParty series is built from scratch thinking on high end gamers and overclockers. What DFI did here was just skipping the reference 680i LT board – the one that eVGA, ECS, Biostar and XFX offer – and design their own motherboard, this is why it includes a third “long” PCI-Express that runs at 8x for some physics love. Oskar Wu and the rest of the LanParty team at Taiwan also dropped in third party controllers (Sil 3132 for SATA ports and VT6307 for Firewire) to complete the features the high end and fully featured NF680i SLI motherboards include. They chose a digital PWM for overclocking pleasure that keeps the socket free of obstacles for your big ass heatsink, dry ice/liquid nitrogen tube or phase change evaporator. In short words, DFI built a motherboard using a mild chipset and tweaked it to the extreme.

In the future I´ll tell you about a job offer I got from DFI USA about 18 months ago. I finally didn´t accept but it´s an anecdote worth telling.

Travelling: 2007

This year I won´t travel as much as I did during 2006. This means that I won´t be able to go to Computex. I will send one of our editors for sure, Computex is the world cup of computer hardware. The problem is I really want to finish school, and during that week, I have my finals.

So basicly from here to June is just Argentina. I´m planning to go somewhere with my friends during winter vacations, that´s July down here, maybe Brazil, Peru or even Mexico. If that doesn´t work, I´m studying in making a Taiwan & China tour to meet some manufacturers and check out the latest trends. This all depends if I have something to do in Asia and they don´t throw all their chips in Computex (which they might).

In September – we have a one week vacation – I plan to go to IDF San Francisco. I hope Intel invites me, if not, I´ll just use my milleage. In fact I already have ticket reservations for September, I´m really thinking in confirming them. If finally Intel decides to pay the trip, I´ll just move the ticket towards January 2008 with a U$100 fee. During January I plan to go to CES at Las Vegas and MacWorld San Francisco, in fact I´m really thinking in renting a nice car and drive from Vegas to SF. But that doesn´t count because it is 2008.

As you can see I won´t travel as much as during 2006, this means I´ll probably loose my elite status at One World, which sucks, but at least I´ll finish school fast enough and have enough time for my international ramblings.

Killer K1

Bigfoot Networks, is the company behind the KillerNIC. The Killer NIC is a wired network adapter with a powerful programable processor and 64MB of DDR RAM. The RAM is used as a buffer, this way if you are downloading something it will go into your buffer first, and after that be moved to your hard drive, it´s programable processor (called NPU, network processing unit) runs Linux so basicly the possibilities are endless. But defnitely the coolest thing is it has it´s own USB port, this way you can hang an external harddrive, and store all your bittorrent downloads without CPU usage. Bigfoot Netwoks just announced a cheaper version of the KilerNIC, called the Killer K1 which has a MSRP of U$149.99 a 100 bucks less than their first version M1. The new Killer K1 has a slower processor, but for 100 bucks less than the M1, this is a product you might want to give a try.

I knew the guys behind Bigfoot at The Tech Zone´s CES Kick Off Party, where they not only showed off the wonders of the KillerNIC, but also gave out some cool K bling bling.

Image property of The Tech Zone

New build

Even thought you could think that someone who has a hardware review site has plenty of computers, it is not always the case. Well I have lots of hardware parts, but the deal is we use a lot of them for reviews, all the time. I have a benching rig, which is a high end computer without case, but used only for testing. In the past I used my benching rig as my primary computer too, that is working, studying, gaming and using it as a review platform. The problem was that two times I lost all my saved games, documents, music and important stuff when things went wrong, and trust me when you try unreleased stuff on beta drivers, things usually go wrong. So I bought a notebook and built a basic computer for daily use. Once I had both, I started to use a lot my notebook, so I gave my brother my computer. Unfortunately my notebook screen is broke, so meanwhile I wait my new portable computer – which I hope I´ll get for free – I will build a new computer for daily use.

I have almost all the parts ready, I´m just waiting the processor. I´ll stick to a Biostar T-Force 965PT, 2 Gigs of RAM (anything I can borrow from our review inventory), a Core 2 Duo E4300, an ATi Radeon X1900XT I have lying around, and I have to get a case, optical drive and a big hard drive. Intel will send me the processor, I asked for it because I really look forward to test it, it´s a new low end Core 2 part, with 2Mb cache and 800MHz FSB. And the FSB is what I like the most, I will have plenty of headroom for a nice overclocking. I´ve been waiting this CPU for two weeks, they have sent two processors and both where not what I asked for. The first one was a Xeon 3210 A1 Engineering Sample, nice chip but quite unstable (three revisions before it made it out of their factory), the second one was a Clovertown 771 2.66GHz server processors, both are great chips, but I received them as a mistake. Let´s hope the new toy arrives this week