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THE TWO CONTENDERS in the quad-core PC world are duking itout today on Extremetech. Although you’d argue this is a bantam weight match,this fight involves AMD’s top performer, the Phenom X4 9850 vs. Intel’slightweight, the Q9300. Extremetech included an E8500 for relativity. Theseguys... Well, it appears that even Intel’s cheapest Quad has AMD’s best pinneddown under heavy fire. Intel dominated the benchmarks, but Extremetech is prettycoy about it stating that performance is “as you’d expect it”. What you dofigure out by the end of the day, is that an E8500 will perform better than aQ3000, is fairly cheaper and really, really kicks AMD in the nether regions. Oh,one word about the Phenom... it runs pretty cool.Carryon.
Cowcotland (don’t mind the zany name, it’s a French site) had access toAlienware latest saucer... uhm... laptop. The 15.4-inch m15x laptop has a 8800MGTX under the hood, as well as a Core 2 Duo T9300. You probably can’t get muchbetter than this in a laptop these days, so just to tease you, let’s say thebeast almost reached 10,000 marks in 3DMark’06. Would you like toknowmore? (English,here)
Every now and then a piece of hardware comes up that makes us hit outforehead with the palm of our hand in disbelief and sheerI-should’ve-thought-of-this-first-ness. That happened to the Hardware Canuckswhenthispiece of hardware landed on their workbench. It’s a Thermaltake Blacx HDDocking Station... yes, a docking station for internal HD’s. Just slide in any2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA hard drive, and you’re in business. HC liked theperformance even though it’s USB 2.0-based. Just avoid knocking stuff aroundyour desk if you’re using one of these.
Hardware Logic is reviewing some serious high-speed kit from Kingston, theHyper X PC3-13000 two-by-ones. Even though Kingston really made a name foritself as a mainstream and value memory manufacturer, the Hyper X series hasmade some progress in the enthusiast market, as you can readhere.Overclocking these pieces of silicon was a dream, effectively taking them up to1.85GHz at 8-8-8-20 timings. That’s >225MHz over the factory setting, nottoo shabby, eh?
Jason at Big Bruin did a nice review of another Kingston kit, the Hyper XPC2-9600 2x512MB. Effectively rated at 1.2GHz, this memory is targeted at thehighest end user that hasn’t yet migrated to DDR3. This memory will match upnicely to Wolfdales and Conroes with 333MHz or 400MHz buses, because of itsnature. It’s performance is an iota away from DDR3 speeds... Final speeds were1280MHz with a “mild” 80MHz overclock – but enough to smash the competition.Read about the bombshellhere.