The benchmark you all been waiting for - MSI 8600GT in SLI mode!

Nvidia's latest G84 and G86 cards are doing the rounds on review sites at the moment, and because of this they are rather hard to come by. Fortunately, we have managed to get hold of a second 8600GT. Let's see what these bad boys can do in SLI.

Interestingly, the canted cooler proved problemamatic again when setting up SLI. We had the same memory clearance issues but the SLI bridge was also not quite able to fitted correctly due to one of the pins running through the fins sitting slightly too high on both cards. It all still worked correctly, but surprising that this was not noticed in testing.

Conclusion in short:
The performance gained from adding a second of these cards is clearly pretty impressive. These cards scale extremely well when moving to SLI from a single overclocked card. The 8800 series still retains the performance crown, but the 8600s together nip on the heels of the GTS 320s and completely dominate the x1950 series of cards from ATI/AMD.

The fact that SLI performance on these cards is so good means that those with small cases can have near 8800 performance without space problems, those who want DX10 support can get it relatively cheaply with a worthwhile upgrade solution of another card down the line and those who want near 8800 performance with a passive card can now do so.
More

SLI in Centrino - just what I wanted to see!!

Well my wishes are partially becoming true! About 10-15 days ago I complained that Intel doesn't have any type of support of SLI technology on their motherboard chipset. But from what I have read before, it isn't Nvidia fault, it's because Intel favours Ati :-(
But it seems things are changing a bit!
This text was just in from Chilehardware... it's translated from Spanish with google services, so you can expect some minor errors in translation


SLI in Centrino By means of the use of southbridge nForce 100 in its future platform Santa Rosa, Intel tries to give complete portable computer support of great size (DTR: Desktop Replacements) with configurations NVIDIA SLI. Historically Intel has decided to become attached to configurations multiGPU of the deceased ATi Technologies, that is to say, CrossFire, and not because they were not according to seating to talk with NVIDIA, but rather because these last ones preferred to exclusively offer this type of graphical acceleration in their own logics for plates mothers. Nevertheless after which ATi was bought by AMD, the conversations retook importance and the first officially sera boarded platform the portable one. Let us hope that it is time thing nothing else so that NVIDIA allows that the future plates mothers based on Intel logics for writing-desk are able to make SLI.

Original article (in Spanish)

Heh... why you should use SLI? Because she says so.. :-)

Well we are still waiting for some news from vr-zone.. on announcing the contest winners.

So surfing around the net I found one great article on xfx website, why you should use a pair and not single graphic card :-)

And besides, and one song goes... 'one is the lonliest number' :-)

More

ZEROtherm GX700 and GX710

ZEROtherm are a relatively new player in the cooling market. They have a number of different heatsinks including the odd Butterfly range and flower coolers; all of which feature at least one heatpipe. Today I have two of their universal GPU coolers, let’s see how they perform…

These coolers are compatible with pretty much all of the ATI and nVidia cards on the market bar 8800’s:
Geforce 6600 series (not AGP)
Geforce 7600 series
Geforce 6800 series
Geforce 7800 series
Geforce 7900 series

The lack of support for 8800’s is not only due to the mounting hole positions, but the fact that these aren’t the biggest coolers in the world. The 8800 series is very hot, hence the ridiculously sized stock cooler that you get with it.

I didn’t even need the manual to install it was that easy. It’s done in less than 10 minutes, with most of the time spent removing the old heatpaste.
The cooler is slim enough for it to be used in SLI/Crossfire setups which is good news for gamers.

More

ATI RV630 may follow in G84's footsteps

While I've been out in Taiwan, I've been talking with a number of manufacturers about what is coming over the next few months.One of the hottest topics being discussed at the moment is AMD's upcoming R600 family of graphics processing units. Up until Tuesday though, most of the talk was about how R600 was looking; nobody was really willing to talk about AMD's mid-range and low-end chips with any kind of authority. There was obviously a reason for that though, because Nvidia hadn't unveiled its mid-range. That obviously happened on Tuesday, and now AMD's partners can talk with a little bit more confidence about RV630's prospects in the mid-range. At the moment, feelings are somewhat mixed in Taiwan. At least, amongst the various sources that were willing to talk to us about the upcoming parts. So, while our various sources in Taiwan weren't willing to disclose specific performance numbers, they did indicate that we can expect it to be a similar story to GeForce 8600 GTS.
More

Two Powerful Gaming Notebooks Compared

A few months back we paired off the Killer Notebooks Executioner against the Eurocom Divine Duo and ended up with some surprising results.
The Killer Notebooks Executioner is back and this time it has an even more powerful graphics chip, the Nvidia GeForce Go 7950GTX (the last time out we tested a unit with Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX). Once again, we've paired it off against a competitor built on an identical chassis and similar specifications, the WidowPC Sting 517D.
As tested, both units had the same chassis, battery, CPU, motherboard and graphics card though they were configured with different memory, cooling and hard drives.

More

OCZ GameXStream 1010-watt Power Supply

Over the past few years OCZ has proven itself to be a company that has a tremendous impact on the PC Enthusiast market segment by offering cutting-edge products that provide best of class performance and technology. It’s no wonder then how a company like OCZ can offer its latest 1010-watt power supply at pricing that’s ultra competitive and offers excellent power for just about any hardware scenario you can throw its way.
While most of us in the hardware business often lament over the more “sexy” products such as CPUs and GPUs it doesn’t mean that we should – for a second – forget about the very backbone of what keeps the PC humming along – the power supply. Its chore is a thankless job that so easily is taken for granted; however is ultra crucial to the overall performance and stability of ones PC experience.

More