Nvidia marketing at its worst: 9600GSO 768MB confusion

ow, reviewers are becomingpretty annoyed at what they see as a Nvidia marketing doing its worst... andreviews are reflecting this. Well this GSO comes with a non-standard cooler,dual-slot, for increased airflow. Being a Sonic version of the card, it’s alsoslightly OC’d, which means, in the end, it performs almost as well as a 9600GT.Now Shane thinks the 384MB version will throw a wrench in the gears (or justconfuse people even more), and rightly so. Nvidia gets the “Crap Naming Scheme”award of 2008, innit? Catch TT’s reviewhere.
In Win has a new case on the market, the Metal Suit GD. What makes the caseunique is its “VGA cooling duct” that sucks air from slits cut into the side ofthe case and sprays it over the expansion bay area. Sleek design, nice blue ledand the fans make very little noise. Cooling performance on the cooling ductdoesn’t seem to do a very good job, but you should read OCC’s reviewhere.
Every graphics card brand comes up with a nice bit of marchitecture to win alittle edge over the competition. Sapphire’s own is the “Toxic” line, ofVapour-X Technology that improve heat dissipation and allow the card to comefactory overclocked... the toxic design also has the advantage of keeping thecard single-slot. Big Bruin has a Sapphire Toxic HD3870 on their bench andthey’re putting it to the tong and hammer. The specs are lower than the AsusHD3870 TOP, but the Toxic cooler made it an excellent overclocker. Jason tookthe GPU all the way up to 885MHz. Interesting lit,here.
After testing some compact CPU coolers, Xbit has moved on to compactwatercoolers. Right. Well, these little coolers don’t really make much of animpact on your system (cooling-wise) but look great and are pretty easy toinstall, however, they lose on most counts to standard air and water coolers.Sergey does say it’s a first step towards better cooling. Not to be greatcommercial successes, such are the pitfalls of pioneering. Catch the reviewhere.
The mighty Church of CNET has published a review on the Synology Disk StationDS-107+. Yes, it’s a NAS, but according to the review, it’s also much more. Ithas PS3 and Xbox media center functionality, is relatively cheap and supports upto 1TB HDs. It’s also smallish, as it’s a single HD unit. If you’re a securityfreak, you can also network up to six cameras (although you pay extra for eachcamera license after the first) and use it as a video recording device. Gives ussome ideas,doesn’tit?
OCZ Reaper HPC DDR3 is one of many “supercar”-class kits available toenthusiasts with deep pockets. OCIA has tested the 2x1GB DDR3-10666 and taken ita bit beyond spec whilst on the bench. 1500MHz was the top speed, but you paytop dollar too, so it’d be a surprise if you couldn’t play around with thespeeds and timings. They gave it a big thumbs up,apparently.
Those zany canucks that fiddle with hardware have benched the AsrockPenryn1600SLIx3-WiFi motherboard. Like everything Asrock, it’s a mix-match oftechnologies that end up spawning an equally odd name – and as Asrock mobos go –it is quite expensive ($170). This is basically a Nvidia 680i tri-SLI chipsetthat can take Extreme Edition CPUs from Intel, but sticking to DDR2 memory – that alone sounds powerful enough towarranta read. You can’t fiddle around much with overclocking, but the systemitself already runs pretty hot.