The News

Wow, it's been almost 2 months since my last post! I've got to change that. Needless to say, it's been busy around here, but that seems to always be the case.

I've been playing with some new tech over the past few weeks, so I thought I'd let you in on the results. I'm going to hit up the good old unordered list for this one:

• Intel E8400: My new favorite processor after the E6750 of last year. The 45nm shrink has really opened up the flood gates on Core, and this is a prime specimen. We are seeing around 3.8ghz is totally doable on 1.4v, and in our systems, temperatures are in check below 60c. How much faster is 3.8ghz than 2.8ghz? Let's just say I've shaved 45 minutes off of my DIVX encodes and Crysis is playable at Very High now.
• NForce 750i/780i: I'm going to throw the two of these together, although they are very different beasts. The 750i is a tame board that is really an excellent replacement for the P35 if you want SLI support. 780i is the big dog, complete with Triple-SLI, Dual-NIC, etc. etc. etc. I must admit that both of these boards have very similar overclockability, coming in just below 500mhz with the right processor. They both also offer the same excellent SATA performance that I really missed with my P35 board.
• GeForce 9600GT: When I first got mine from NVIDIA, I sat on it for a very long time. I plugged it in to my test bed, and the fan's noise blew me away. I thought I was sitting on another 8800GT, but it turned out that the drivers control the fan speed like back in the 7-series days. Once Vista loaded, the fan was completely inaudible, and I began testing. I'll have a full wrap up at some point, but let's say breaking 10k in 3DMark 06 was way too easy.
• Seagate 7200.10 250GB: This one was a hard one to swallow, but Seagate really hit a home run on this drive. 16MB Cache plus a single-platter 250GB design allows for incredible speed from a sub-$100 drive. It even rivals the 150GB Raptor in sequential read speed, which counts most for gamers. We like this drive so much that we've replaced all of the 320GB drives with it.

I'm going to do some specific write-ups on these and more topics in the days to come, so be sure to check in with us often. Until then, take care and happy gaming!