With the launch of Intel's Core Duo at CES, we were intrigued by the promises it made. Initially, at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), the company changed focus from pure performance to performance-per-watt. We were not exactly sure if it was a serious strategy on Intel's part or whether it was merely a face saving measure, though something told us that Intel was serious.

Last year, we took a look at HDA's first entry into the discrete sound card market, the X-Mystique, and were mighty impressed. HDA, coupled with new company Auzentech, have now released their successor to this board - The X-Plosion, which brings all of the features that made the X-Mystique what it was to the table and more besides.

With extreme hardware and extreme cooling the hunt for extreme results has just begun. First up is going further than anyone else has ever gone before; I.e. setting new world records. In this series of articles we will follow Kinc and Crotale's escapades where they will do their best to push ATI Radeon X1900 XTX to the limit using both the Intel and AMD platform, to achieve as many fantastic results as possible. With loads of detailed pictures, videos and detailed reports we will see where they are about to take us. At the moment the journey has just begun, but already four different world records have been achieved with the 3DMark tests, where both Intel's Pentium 955 Extreme Edition and Athlon 64 FX-60 has had a chance to show what they can do.

If you're looking for a good high-performance motherboard for your AMD system, boards that support dual graphics are a great option. We look at three contenders, each with unique strengths and weaknesses.

ExtremeTech

XSPC is fairly new to the water cooling world. Their first water cooling kit has been knighted X20. The kit is both compact and compatible with most motherboard sockets. In this respect X20 may be the ideal entry level kit.

When opening a package from Cooler Master for another review I noticed that they included a little something extra for me to check out. They sent along a package of their new NanoFusion Thermal Compound for me to check out.

PCApex

MHW has a brief review of the new Socket 939 Venice core AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, as well as a bit of info on what someone upgrading can expect.

Since these days the Athlon 64 3200+ isn't a just released CPU and AMD seems to have once again forgotten to send me my twenty page PR folder with the pretty graphs and a listing of all the new architectural innovations most sites get , I figured I would focus this review on the areas that I thought most of the readers--as well as myself--would be interested in: price, performance, overclocking, and temperatures.

We've been waiting for that refresh for a couple of years now, and Western Digital finally tipped its hand in January when it announced the Raptor WD1500. The drive retains the Raptor's 10K-RPM spindle speed and Serial ATA interface, but adds a beefier cache, larger total capacity, and support for Native Command Queuing. Just days later, Western Digital pulled back the curtains on the Raptor X, a version of the WD1500 with a window on the drive's internals. That's right: a hard drive window.

OCIA.net takes a look at the Sunbeam Solar Illuminated Keyboard in their latest review. Below is a direct quote from the review:

As mentioned earlier, the outer area of the keyboard is constructed of aluminum (or so it seems). If you look at the area around the keypad, you'll notice that above and below it is plastic, surrounded by a thin layer of aluminum. It seems that the entire keyboard is made out of plastic with a thin overlay aluminum skin on the surface. This overlay is very well done and I had to look several times to see that it wasn't completely made out of aluminum.

Diskeeper is back with their top notch Defragmentation software. The new version takes a lot of features that have helped make the software so great, and made them even better. You now will even have the capability of defragging computers on your network. Let's take a look at the latest version and see if it's worth your hard earned money. TechGage

Western Digital?s first released its Raptor in 2003 and was significant in a number of ways. For a start it was its first SATA hard drive. However WD did something far more interesting than taking one of its Caviar drives and simply nailing on a SATA interface.

Aerocool is one of those companies that are taking the enthusiast market by storm. Their coolers have being a big hit over the last three years or so. I remember using their HT-101 in many system buildups I have done. But now their cases are making a big splash just like their heatsinks. Boasting a 25mm side panel fan and also a 14cm front facial fan, the Aerocool ExtremEngine 3T is extreme.

Intel has been dominating the high performance segment of the motherboard market for long. Recently NVIDIA decided to enter the Intel market as well and with them they brought loads of faetures and of course SLI. Recently they launched an updated series of chipset where the high end one was used by ASUS to make the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe.

External hard drives are becoming more and more popular, the need to transfer large amounts of data between locations and PC's is more common than ever, and all of us know that we should backup important data, but so few of us do. RaidSonic has been very active on this market and has solutions in every shape and format. On of these exciting products is the ICY BOX IB-281U USB 2.0 external 2.5" drive enclosure, which is part of a growing family of external storage solutions.

In the beginning of week ? on the best day for starting a scandal ? Nvidia Corp. was accused in seeding shills into forums and communities to promote its products.

DV Hardware today took a look at the ToughPower 550 Watt power supply from ThermalTake. This NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire ready PSU features independent voltage circuits and promises a voltage regulation of less than 3 percent. The PSU has a black cover and features a large 120mm fan to provide quiet cooling. Read on to see how this PSU performs on an overclocked AMD Opteron 148 based rig running at 3GHz.

Today 3DXtreme has the pleasure of reviewing a gaming device for the hardcore in the Mystify Claw. Everyone is trying to make the gaming experience easier and more ergonomic and that?s where the Mystify Claw comes in. But do these devices really make the gaming experience better or is the learning curve of getting used to something new not worth the hassle? Let?s have a look?


Terratec Mystify Claw Review @ 3DXtreme

With clock speeds of 460MHz core/1350MHz memory, EVGA's e-GeForce 7800 GS CO Superclock is the fastest GeForce 7800 GS AGP card on the market right now. But how much additional performance does the card's boosted clocks buy you?

Enter the new Sound Blaster X-Fi series, a truly new soundcard release from Creative in several years. Based on a completely new audio processor, the X-Fi offers significant architectural changes such as the Ring Architecture, S-SRC, Quartet DSP, as well as 24-bit Crystalizer, and CMMS-3D.

TechSpot

Regular readers will know that we recently carried out a review of the Noctua NH-U9 heatsink, we now follow on with another slightly larger brother heatsink, their NH-U12. Noctua are a new company to us and are probably to you also. Review Thx JackAss