Among the numerous DDR memory modules with 1GB capacity available today on the market, modules on Infineon's revision C chips seem to be the best. Such modules can work with 2-3-2 timings at frequencies near 200MHz (400MHz DDR), with 3-3-2 timings at 250MHz (500MHz DDR) frequency, and with "bad" timings at 280MHz (560MHz DDR) and higher.

Among the products we have reviewed today, the pair of OCZ PC4000 EB Dual Channel Platinum Edition modules features such chips. And it is this memory kit that has shown the best overclockability and maximum performance in our tests.

We'd want to draw your attention to the Corsair TWINX2048-3500LLPRO kit, too. Although the overclocking potential of these modules is lower than of the OCZ PC4000 EB Dual Channel Platinum Edition, they boast better stability with the aggressive 2-3-2 timings at frequencies over 220MHz (440MHz DDR). Moreover, these modules look cute and have a LED indicator on the top edge. On the other hand, don't forget about the possible problems that may arise due to their really huge size.

So, which one do you buy? Ultimately, it depends on what you're looking for, and whether you're looking for a video card with a games bundle. If you're looking for something with a bundle of games, the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX looks to be the best choice out there. The extra L1 asking price over Club 3D's Radeon X1900XTX well worth it if you're after a good solid bundle. Having said that, Club 3D's bundle is pretty good too and it was the best-packed card of the bunch with its foam cutout protection.

Connect3D's card is also tremendous value (for a high-end card) at L400, especially when you consider that NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX 512 costs well over L500 if you can find it available in the UK. Overclockers are selling BFG Tech's card at a whopping L646.19 including VAT. At least it's available, though. There's nothing to write home about when it comes to Connect3D's bundle, but it's adequate and has everything that you're going to need to get the card up and running in the latest and greatest games.

PowerColor's Radeon X1900XT is also pretty good value and the performance is generally very close to the performance delivered by the Radeon X1900XTX cards. Our sample overclocked to Radeon X1900XTX speeds, but it didn't go any further than that. Of course, overclocking is a lottery, so we can't guarantee that every Radeon X1900XT will overclock to XTX clock speeds. By the same token, other Radeon X1900XTs might overclock even further than the one we've got here. The bundle doesn't come with any games, but it does come with a decent amount of multimedia software.

The one reason not to get a Radeon X1900XTX at the moment would be ATI's CrossFire technology. It seems a little strange that ATI chose to use the Radeon X1900XT clock speeds on the CrossFire Edition card, as it means that the Radeon X1900XTX will be clocked down to the same 625/1450MHz, rendering the additional cost for an XTX a little pointless if you've got the vision of moving towards CrossFire later down the line.

Issues Resolved in Catalyst Software Suite 6.2:

• BattleField 2 Special Forces: A blooming or ghosting effect is no longer noticed when playing the game in night vision mode. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21648
• City of Heroes: Running Shadertest 7 no longer results in slow performance being noticed. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21463
• Dragonshard: Playing the game under Windows XP Media Center Edition with CrossFire™ enabled, no longer results in the screen becoming out of sync, and a scrolling display image occurring shortly there after. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-20975
• Fable: The Lost Chapters: Playing the game under Windows XP MCE may result in the shadows found within the game appearing jittery, when the desktop resolution is set to 1024x768 32bpp, and all the game options are set to default. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21184
• Half-Life2: Enabling Catalyst AI no longer results in the outer edges of the water appear dark or black in color. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number. 737-21649
• Pacific Fighters: A stuttering effect at certain levels of the game is no longer noticed when playing the game with CrossFire enabled. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21650
• The Fall: A VPU Recover event or the operating system failing to respond no longer occur when playing the game. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21651
• World of Warcraft: Pixel corruption is no longer noticed when playing the game on systems containing an ATI Radeon X1600 series. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21652

Western Digital has addressed the shortcomings of its previous models with the addition of a 16 MB buffer, NCQ, and native SATA implementation wrapped in two different packages depending upon your tastes and budget. With the upcoming transition from the parallel SCSI Ultra320 interface to the new Serial Attached SCSI interface, the drive stands a very good chance at competing successfully in the entry-level enterprise market. The SAS standard offers interoperability with the current SATA standards. In fact, both standards utilize the same physical connectors, while SAS host adapters can control SATA drives. This also offers the opportunity for the drive to become a standard in the workstation market where, historically, SCSI has competed well against SATA based upon performance to price ratios.

The FX-60 is the fastest processor out there, and Intel's offerings really aren't coming close in the big picture. Our benchmarks clearly show that this new FX model gives better performance compared to AMD's own Athlon64 X2 models along with Intel's new Pentium-D processors. While Intel has improved performance and efficiency with their new 900-series chips, and they can even win a benchmark here or there, it's still pretty clear that AMD owns the dual-core arena. The FX-60 really is the best of both worlds, as the chip provides excellent performance in both workstation-class application and games.

However, the limitations of the FX-60 chip also reveal potential kinks in AMD's armor, most notably dealing with their manufacturing process. The FX-60 is based on 90nm technology, and AMD is pushing the limits of how far they can take their design while manufacturing at this level. The FX-60 chip chews quite a lot of power, creates noticeably more heat than its predecessors, and generally does not overclock well, all three are signs that their current architecture is reaching its limitations. That's not to say that AMD couldn't refresh their chips to last a little longer, but if they don't do something fast, it's unlikely that they will be able to get beyond 2.8 GHz on their current 90nm tech. Luckily, AMD has 65nm tech in the pipeline, and all signs point to them making the switch sometime this year.

None of these minor nuisances should keep potential buyers away. The price-tag, however, certainly will. The FX-60 is a tough pill to swallow at roughly $1200, especially when AMD just dropped prices on their Athlon64 X2 lineup, and the (still very fast) X2 4800+ processor is nearing half that level at around $700. The FX-60 is certainly not a winner in the price/performance realm, but the FX lineup never has been. It's excessive and un-necessary, but if you're looking for the best, well, here it is.

MobileMark 2005 perfomance

Performance wise the Lifebook P7120 is no scorcher, but it compares well to similar machines. However, the Sony Vaio TX1XP offered about the same performance and had longer battery life, but at a higher price. Still, with seven minutes short of five hours battery life in MobileMark 2005 it's hard to complain and the DVD playback test was two minutes short of four hours.
This doesn't mean that the Lifebook P7120 is a bad notebook by any means as there are few that can touch it in terms of battery life in its class. Considering that you can pick ono up for L1,397.08 this is a pretty good value proposition for anyone that needs an ultra portable machine with a built in drive. Fujitsu-Siemens has once again shown that the Lifebook P family of ultra portable notebooks is one of the best

Issues Resolved in Version 81.98:
- Removed the Direct Access functionality from the driver user interface.
- Low Viewperf 8.01 scores occur with Dual Core and dual processor systems.
- Dual Core Processors: Corel Paint Shop Pro X does not work.
- Rendering problems occur in Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
- GeForce 7 Series: Ground textures in Flight Simulator 2004 do not render correctly when using “Ultra High” settings.
- GeForce 7800 GTX 512: The system cannot resume from Standby.
- GeForce 7800 GTX/GT: Running F.E.A.R. hangs the system on the Apple 30ʺ Cinema display when Monitor Scaling is used.
- GeForce 7800 GTX/GT, GeForce 6800/6600: Ground and water textures are corrupted when zooming out in Civilization 4.
- GeForce 7800 GTX/GT, GeForce 6800: Shadows fail to render in Splinter Cell 1.
- Dual GeForce 7800 GTX/GT: Everquest 2 launches to a black screen when antialiasing is set to 2xQ at 1920 x 1200 resolution.
- GeForce 7800 GTX 512: Chronicles of Riddick does not run at resolutions higher than 800x600.
- GeForce 7800, GeForce 6800: Corruption is seen in Flight Simulator 2004.
- GeForce 7800 GTX, GeForce 6800, Quadro FX 4500: The system slows down with the Liquid Edition SD time line.
- GeForce 6800: Wrong colors appear when playing QuickTime trailers using the non-native video resolution.
- GeForce 6800 Ultra / GeForce FX 5950 Ultra: Battlefield 2 has corruption or crashes when a player switches from zoomed commander view to zoomed sniper view.
- GeForce 6800: Shimmering or cropping of the full-screen video mirror occurs when covering the video window with another window.
- GeForce 6150/6100, Windows XP Media Center Edition: The driver does not recognize display connection changes that occur during a system shutdown.
- GeForce 6100/6150, Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2: HD modes are listed as available when a TV is connected using S-Video.
- GeForce 6150/6100, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: The display remains inactive when resuming from Suspend mode.
- GeForce FX 5200: Textures disappear in CrimeLife v105.
- GeForce4 Ti 4200, Windows 98: Java applications crash when calling OpenGL

Given that all six manufacturers included in this roundup used the exact same cooling design, being the NVIDIA reference cooler, there was not a lot that could be compared here. The biggest alterations here had to do with the graphic plastered to the cooler. Even the PCB designs were identical with almost all of them using the same components. Furthermore, all were able to achieve a core clock of over 500MHz and a memory frequency of 1.2GHz. This leaves us with only the price and package for comparison.

The first question you have to ask yourself is do you need to purchase a pre-overclocked graphics card? I guess to do this you first need to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages to such a purchase. The advantages to a pre-overclocked graphics card are better performance, although limited improvements they are there nonetheless. Another would be the fact that the manufacturer guarantees the overclock and it does not affect the warranty. Finally the last advantage is inexperienced users get the extra performance without the "daunting" overclocking procedure.

Okay so the disadvantages are? Well first and foremost the price, manufacturers seem to charge at least another $20 US for the overclocked variant. The performance increase on average was about 5% while the price increase was in some cases a 20% rise. Although some users may consider overclocking to be daunting this really is not the case. Most graphics cards even come with user friendly overclocking software these days. Nevertheless, the coolbits registry hack is the quickest and easiest way to overclock any NVIDIA based graphics card.

Therefore I strongly do not believe there is any value in purchasing a pre-overclocked graphics card if the same manufacturer sells a standard card for $20 US less. More often than not the memory is the same, the PCB design is the same and the cooling solution is the same. Therefore consumers are paying potentially $20 US more for a procedure that should take no more than 5 minutes. Squeezing another 55MHz out of a GeForce 6800GS core is extremely easy and I do not believe there is a 6800GS card out there that cannot achieve this.

The GeForce 6800GS is designed to be the ultimate performance vs. price graphics card. Therefore if I were to be purchasing one I would be aiming to pick up the cheapest version possible. This would leave me with the eVGA e-GeForce 6800 GS, Gigabyte GV-NX68G256D-B, MSI NX6800GS-TD256E and Leadtek WinFast PX6800 GS TDH. The prices of these four graphics cards will vary depending on where you look, though they should all be around the $190 US mark. While I am a huge fan of the MSI and Gigabyte cards I really like what the Leadtek WinFast PX6800 GS TDH has to offer at the price point. Therefore I am going to give this Leadtek graphics card the Legion Hardware Value Award!

RAM provides a significant fps rate increase. In the best case (when you have 1GB modules installed) the performance gain may reach up to 10%

Well, it's high time we summed up the results of our today's discussion. 1GB of RAM will be enough for almost any mainstream system. This amount of system memory guarantees comfortable work in all contemporary applications. You will even be able to run a few programs at the same time without much trouble when switching between them. The previous generation games will also run without delays with the maximum quality settings, and the latest games released in the end of last year will work fine with medium texture settings.

However, high-performance systems have to get 2GB of RAM. Gamers feel the need for this amount of system memory more than anybody else, if they want to be able to play the latest games with the high-quality image settings. Moreover, 2GB of RAM or even more than that will be very handy for professionals working in “heavy” applications processing large amounts of data.

The image quality of the Dell 2405 is stunning. The once king of the large LCD displays, the 2001FP, looks downright dim when placed side by side. The 500 cd/m2 brightness rating makes whites bright and colors vibrant. The 1000:1 contrast ratio gives deep blacks and rich color transitions. And with a 12ms response time, even the fastest motion is as smooth as butter. Compared to the Apple 23-in. Cinema Display, the 250 cd/m2 brightness, 400:1 contrast ratio, and 16ms response time look second rate. The HP L2335 23-in. display uses the same panel as the Apple display, but improves the backlighting slightly, with a 500:1 contrast ratio. We used the 2405 with Quake 4, City of Villains, and Counterstrike: Source, and never observed any ghosting or smearing. We watched parts of The Matrix and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King to test dark scenes and earth tones. We could find no shortcomings in image quality. The dot pitch is .27 mm, which is a little high, and accounts for the 1-in. vertical difference between the 2001FP and 2405FPW, since both have the same 1200 vertical pixel count.

The one glaring omission is an HDMI port. Without HDMI, and HDCP, protected high definition content such as HD-DVD and Blue-Ray Discs will not play at native resolution under the upcoming Windows Vista. An updated version of the 2405FPW is rumored to be in the works to add HDCP, but that doesn’t help owners of this display. We feel that if your primary use of the monitor will be for anything other than a high definition video display, you shouldn’t worry about the lack of HDCP. To be cautious, it might be worth waiting for the rumored 2407FPW with HDMI.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250: The Deskstar 7K500 is easily the fastest 7200 RPM drive around. A bit gets lost in translation, however, when moving down to the 250-gigabyte model. The T7K250 lags the WD Caviar WD2500KS by a bit in the Office DriveMark and places fourth overall. Hitachi's drive finishes first or second in all other performance tests, however, and as a result is the fastest overall drive featured in this roundup. Its seek noise and active power draw, however, remain on the high side when contrasted with the competition.

Maxtor DiamondMax 10: This aging design seems to have a lot of pep remaining, especially evidenced by the smaller but more recently revised 250 GB drive's besting of the slightly larger (but older) 300 GB flagship. Maxtor's drives tend to enjoy a cost advantage... at the time of this writing, it is the only unit in the roundup with a best-case price tag resting just under $100. A decent performer, the DiamondMax 10's power dissipation levels and seek noises, like the Deskstar, sit slightly above the rest of the pack.

Samsung SpinPoint P120: Samsung's flagship no longer stands contrasted against competing units twice its size. In our productivity suite, the drive offers decent performance, placing near the top in both the Office and High-End tests. For gaming purposes, however, Samsung's design languishes near the bottom of the charts. On the plus side, even when going up against same-size competition, the SpinPoint's noise levels and power consumption are among the best around.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9: In its flagship 500 GB incarnation, the Barracuda 7200.9 is a middling performer at best. The loss of half its capacity and half its buffer leaves the 250-gigabyte 'Cuda a relatively poor performer. Though it offers environmental and gaming performance on par with the SpinPoint, Seagate's drive does not match Samsung's strong productivity scores. The Barracuda's server scores, on the other hand, lead the pack. No discussion of the 7200.9 is complete without mentioning that Seagate remains the only manufacturer to back its SATA drives with the same robust 5-year warranty that protects its SCSI line. While we do not necessarily believe that a longer warranty automatically translates into a more reliable product, it is clear that many readers do- if you are looking for peace of mind, get a Barracuda.

Western Digital Caviar WD2500KS: The WD2500KS is built on an older platform, evidenced most clearly by its less dense, 83-gigabyte platters. It nonetheless offers above-average performance and manages to capture the number one slot in the Office DriveMark as well as our World of Warcraft trace. The drive's idle noise floor is not nearly as loud as objective measurements may suggest. It also offers the coolest overall operation of all drives in the roundup. The Caviar is the only review drive that does not offer NCQ - while this is no drawback in single-user applications, the drive's scores suffer under multi-user patterns.

We would be remiss without noting that, overall, performance differences between all five contenders remain relatively small. These days, 250 gigabyte SATA drives are commodities; all players have honed their offerings down to levels where distinguishing between them on the basis of performance, environmental factors, and price can be quite difficult. Absolute fastest? Hitachi. Least expensive? Maxtor. Quietest? Samsung. None of these factors matter? Choose your favorite brand.

Unlike on the GeForce 7800 GTX, though, the G70 graphics processor on the 7800 GS isn't operating at full capacity. In its wisdom, NVIDIA has seen fit to disable vast portions of that big GPU you see pictured above. They've chopped down the G70's 24 pixel shaders by two "quads," so that 16 pixel shaders remain. Two of the GPU's eight vertex shaders have been lobotomized, leaving a total of six. And they've nixed half of the ROPs responsible for pixel output, so that the 7800 GS has only eight.

Turns out the GeForce 7800 GS OC isn't unequivocally the fastest AGP card around. It split the difference with the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition-and by proxy the X850 XT that runs at the same clock speeds-in our tests. The 7800 GS is probably the better choice overall because of its support for Shader Model 3.0 and 16-bit floating-point blending and filtering. These capabilities will no doubt make the 7800 GS more future-proof, as contradictory as that may sound for an AGP card. The 7800 GS OC also looks to be cheaper than the Radeon X850 XT, if street prices work out as NVIDIA has suggested they will. That pretty much makes the 7800 GS king of the AGP upgrade market-but if you cast off your Radeon X850 XT in favor of one of these, you need your head examined. The X850 XT may lack a few bullet-point features, but it's clearly the same class of graphics card.

The value comparison between the 7800 GS and some of NVIDIA's own current offerings is less flattering. At about $200, the GeForce 6800 GS boasts the same basic feature set as the 7800 GS without that much of a performance penalty. I'm not sure I'd pony up the extra $100-150 for a 7800 GS unless I were really serious about hanging on to my AGP system for quite a bit longer. And hanging on to that system starts to look foolhardy when you consider the PCI Express-based graphics options, such as the GeForce 7800 GT, a superior performer than the 7800 GS that's selling for about $300 at various online shops. That's the low end of the projected price range for the 7800 GS. The grass is indeed greener in PCI Express pastures. NVIDIA says it has no plans to produce a GeForce 7800 GS for PCI Express, and we can see the logic if the pricing looks like this.

We didn't have much success overclocking our sample, but we're sure that others will fare better with retail products. It's also impossible to say that BFG Tech's GeForce 7800 GS OC is a generally poor overclocker based on the results from one card. It's quite possible that you would be able to reach the heights of 490/1400MHz with one of BFG Tech's 7800 GS OC video cards, so you have to ask yourself whether you're prepared to pay an extra £60 for an 18% core speed improvement.

Quite naturally, the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB consumes a lot more power than the rest of the graphics cards used here in both idle and high-performance modes. In fact, its power consumption is close to that of premium solutions, but so is its speed in games. Nvidia's GeForce 7800 GTX consumes more power than the rest two boards, but outperforms both significantly too. The Radeon X1800 XL and the GeForce 7800 GT consume approximately similar amount of energy and their performance is also close to each other, as we know from widespread benchmark results.

The Radeon X1800 XT 512MB is not only the most power hungry high-end class product among tested today, but also the biggest and the heaviest one. It is longer than the GeForce 7800 GTX and uses dual-slot cooling system. On the other hand, it outperforms the 7800 GTX and also sports two dual-link DVI outputs unlike the rival. While the Radeon X1800 XL does not produce much noise, it is much longer than the reference GeForce 7800 GT, which may prevent it from installation into certain computer cases. On the other hand, it also sports dual-link DVI and can control its fan speed, whereas the GeForce 7800 GT sports neither of these two capabilities.

It is interesting to note that on the most-recent Catalyst 6.1 driver power consumption of the Radeon X1800 XT and X1800 XL was down compared to measurements conducted on the Catalyst 5.9 driver with Radeon X1000 support. We do not know the reason for that.

From these benchmarks, the GeForce 7800 GS at stock speeds performs close to a Radeon X850 XT, usually being slightly faster in some tests, and slightly slower in others. It is only when the 7800 GS is overclocked where the performance is a bit better than the X850 XT. I am still hoping that a future revision of RivaTuner or some other pipe unlocking utility will be able to unlock the disabled pipes on a 7800 GS AGP, but I am somewhat wary of that being possible, considering that there have been no successful reports of unlocking pipes on a 7800 GT, so the same may hold true for a 7800 GS.

Clearly, ATI offers better video support in their latest graphics cards than Nvidia does. They dominate the HQV benchmark tests, offer much lower CPU utilization for DVD playback, and offer solutions for acceleration H.264 and DivX (though one requires a specific codec and the other a specific player). In really tough video scenarios, like those with odd cadence patterns or noisy DVDs, ATI delivers better quality. Their de-interlacing algorithms seem just a little bit better, too.

This is the rub: Most users will never run into those situations. The vast majority of users only ever encounter reasonably well-made DVDs that only require 3:2 pulldown or none at all, and have no interlaced images. Odds are, most computer users will only very rarely run into a situation where the visual quality between ATI and Nvidia's latest graphics cards is different enough to notice, and that's if you stick your nose up to the screen and start to scrutinize the video very closely. Users that have TV tuners in their PC will certainly appreciate the good de-interlacing and noise reduction in the Radeon X1000 series of cards.

Warning: Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003.

The AIW X1900 puts in a strong showing here, edging out the 7800 GTX

The value proposition for the All-In-Wonder X1900 is quite good, all things considered. The card's performance in 3D graphics matches up well against NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX, and the GTX is currently selling at online retailers for about $489. At $499 list, the AIW X1900 looks like a steal by comparison. The only reason I can think to buy the GTX instead is if you hope to upgrade in the future to a multi-GPU config; the GTX can do SLI, but the AIW X1900 can't participate in the ATI's CrossFire scheme. Beyond that, all of signs point to the All-In-Wonder X1900 as the smarter choice. Not only can the AIW pump out fluid 3D graphics and gaming at high resolutions for that price, but it also packs a TV tuner, all manner of video input and display options, a programmable RF remote control, and software to tie it all together. These extras and the video card would almost certainly cost more if they were purchased separately (although that's a very theoretical argument until ATI delivers a less expensive version of the Radeon X1900.)

The AIW 1900 also moves the overall AIW concept ahead with the addition of ATI's latest GPU, the incorporation of the Remote Wonder Plus with its superior button layout and Windows Media Center mappings, and the inclusion of Adobe's Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements. All of these things represent progress for a product line that's totally unique and has very little competition from NVIDIA or anyone else.

Yet I can't escape the impression that the AIW X1900 isn't all that it could-and should-be. ATI's Multimedia Center is dreadful compared to Windows MCE or even Snapstream's Beyond TV. The EazyLook interface desperately needs more work, especially more integration with the program guide, before any AIW product can bill itself as truly suitable for the living room. Even then, the AIW X1900 probably shouldn't be pitched as an HTPC-type solution. With current games, this big, hot GPU is overkill for any common TV resolution except maybe 1080p, and its cooler makes too much noise for the living room. We might be willing to overlook those things if the AIW X1900 had hardware-assisted MPEG2 encoding, but it doesn't. Add in the bugs we found in the Remote Wonder software and the Media Center encoder, and the AIW X1900 just doesn't make sense outside of a more traditional desktop PC.

Of course the wireless ability is just icing on a very tasty cake; even without it the P1 would be a superb camera by any standard. The weather this past week hasn't been exactly conducive to high-quality photography, with grey overcast clouds and lots of rain, but the P1 has still managed to produce some outstanding shots, with bright rich colours, plenty of fine detail from that big 8.0 megapixel sensor. The exposure metering is absolutely perfect, capturing the subtleties of the light early on a frosty morning better than many semi-pro cameras that I've tried. A close-range wide-angle shot revealed some barrel distortion at the shortest end of the zoom range, but just stepping back a few feet and zooming in slightly eliminated this effect. Noise control at 50 and 100 ISO is superb, with clean images at both lower speeds. There was some problem with noise at 200 and 400 ISO, but it wasn't too bad.

Even without the wireless technology, the P1 would be an outstandingly good camera, although it does make it a little expensive compared to other cameras at this end of the market, such as the Olympus mju 800 or the Canon IXUS 55. The wireless connectivity is certainly more than a novelty, and it can match anything else in its class for picture quality.

Logitech has put together an exceptional package with the MX5000 Laser Desktop. Using Bluetooth 2.0, Logitech has united their classic MX1000 Laser mouse with a brand new MX5000 keyboard sporting a touch sensitive panel and a dot matrix display. The MX1000 comes with a built-in battery pack and a charging station with a small footprint. The use of Bluetooth in this package also allows other Bluetooth devices to connect to your computer through the included Bluetooth receiver. I was thoroughly impressed by Logitech's unique approach to designing the MX5000 keyboard and found it to be above and beyond the competition in every regard.

The MX5000 Laser Desktop has an MSRP of $230 CAD (approximately $200 USD) but can be found for as little as $150 CAD (approximately $130 USD). This is definitely something that is worth the investment if you're looking for comfort, functionality and the latest cool gadgets in one complete package.

For your information, fps shown on the diagram is a geometric mean of fps in four different games: Far Cry, DOOM 3, Painkiller, and Unreal Tournament 2004. For this article we decided to use the diagram with the total score for 800x600 and average quality settings, as our shootout includes quite a lot of low-end CPUs. Besides, here we use testbeds with different video cards, one of which is noticeably weaker than the other. So theoretically, a relatively low resolution and an easy graphics quality mode should smooth differences in video performance and bring CPU performance to the foreground. You can easily see that top three places are taken by AMD processors only. That's not surprising, as we all know preferences of modern games. Top ten game results deal a final blow to NetBurst: there are only three processors from Intel in top ten, two of them being... Pentium M! Only the top Pentium 4 eXtreme Edition managed to break through to Place 8(!).

The ten bottom positions are a coup de grace: eight processors from Intel, including all Celeron models tested, and just two AMD Semprons, both for the outdated Socket A (they were tested with a less powerful video card than, for example, Celeron D xxxJ). Thus, the situation in games is so straightforward that it requires no wordy comments. In this very comparison, it would have been very difficult to change the layout of forces, even by adjusting test software: if you read reviews from other independent test labs, you'll understand that AMD processors are leading in practically all modern games, not only in those included into our test procedure.

ATI's new Radeon X1900 CrossFire solution is the most exciting CrossFire platform we've seen yet. Performance scaled particularly well in Call of Duty 2 at 1600x1200, as well as Half-Life 2 Lost Coast with HDR at 2048x1535, where performance was up by a factor of 1.5. We have a strong feeling that the numbers will only go up with a faster CPU, as a card as powerful as the Radeon X1900 XTX finds itself CPU-bound in a lot of cases all by itself, let alone once you combine two cards together to run in CrossFire mode.

But this is where ATI's Super AA mode kicks in. In cases where you're being held back by the speed of your processor, simply turn on Super AA to experience nearly jaggie-free visuals. As you saw in the benchmarks, ATI's 8x Super AA mode comes with a very minimal performance hit at lower resolutions, and even delivers playable performance at resolutions as high as 1600x1200 in Half-Life 2 Lost Coast. Even ATI's 14x AA mode performs well. NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 graphics cards don't scale nearly as well at the higher AA modes. NVIDIA's 8xAA mode delivers very fluid performance at lower resolutions, but by 1600x1200 the SLI cards are tapped out. Even the mighty GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB, with its super high-end 850MHz GDDR3 memory doesn't have the bandwidth to game adequately at these resolutions with 8xAA, while the 16x mode runs like a slideshow at hi-res.

The compatibility question is stil up in the air. You saw how Radeon X1900 CrossFire performed with IL-2. Considering how new the platform is, we wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for a lot of obscure titles. The problem is that ATI's only had enough time to build in CrossFire support for a limited number of games, the rest haven't been optimized yet. NVIDIA provides built-in tools in their driver that allows SLI card owners to add SLI support to games that haven't been optimized by NVIDIA directly for SLI. Unfortunately at this time, ATI doesn't provide this for CrossFire owners -- either it works or it doesn't. This is a limitation of CrossFire that ATI needs to address quickly, as many gamers will not want to wait for a driver that may or may not come to add CrossFire to their favorite games. As one of the readers in our comments put it "With crossfire all you can do is turn it on or off, nothing more. You can sit and pray that the game runs faster, and if it doesn´t, live with it and wait for the next driver..."

The issue, according to Microsoft, concerns the asynchronous scheduler component - a part of the USB 2.0 driver that determines when devices can access local memory. With the revision to that driver implemented in Windows XP Service Pack 2, the scheduler can inadvertently be left running. As a result, Windows' internal task scheduler (a separate item) treats the asynchronous scheduler as a running process involving the attached device, and thus stops itself from ever giving the processor the signal to power down, or power lower - to slip into one of its ACPI sleep states. Because the scheduler is running, Windows thinks the system is continually busy. As a result, the computer can use more battery power.

While Microsoft's Knowledge Base article is conclusive and states that the current ACPI driver is a "known problem," we are still scratching our heads why only our Core Duo/945-based platform provoked the error and not the Sonoma or the AMD/ATI Radeon platforms

According to Myers, Intel has asked Microsoft "to fix the registry to make the problem go away." In the meantime, he said, Intel is working to fix the issue by itself: "We are doing additional work on our end to see if there is anything we can do to overcome the same challenge Microsoft is having," Myers said.

If the patch can be as simple as a modification to the registry, the question arises why Microsoft hasn't issued a registry patch. We were not able to reach Microsoft representatives to answer this question and Myers said that he was unsure why the problem has not been fixed so far. "Battery life of Napa is a big deal for us. Microsoft said it is investigating and looking into this issue."

Radeon X1900 XTX

GeForce 7800 GTX 512

They also contacted ATI and they confirmed that were able to duplicate it themselves. Pixel shader programs are compiled in the graphics driver, of course, so ATI should be able to fix the problem with a driver update, and that's exactly what they expect to do.

Crucial to the team's success is the Opteron processor. Why? Because so much of the car's design and engineering relies on high-powered computing systems. AMD is being used for:

- Telemetry: During every race and practice session, data from the onboard computers are sent back from the car to the pit garage. This data needs to be crunched and analysed very quickly so that the engineers can extract race-defining information. Pit stop strategies, tyre decisions and fuel loads are all based on computer simulations of the race extrapolated from telemetry data.

- Car design: The precision required to design every millimetre of the car obviously requires a high-powered CAD/CAM programme running on a meaty workstation.

- Wind tunnel: Crucial to the speed of the car is the aerodynamics of the wings and the body shape. To test this, the team uses a wind tunnel and then records how the air flows over the car. By recording the airflow, they can work out how to make the car sleeker. This data recording is called Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD for short.

AMD is involved in all these areas. Opteron machines populate the pit garage, and AMD's pair of technicians are always visible hunched over machines on race day. When it comes to design, Opteron-based workstations run the sophisticated software required. Wind tunnel data is analysed in a new state of the art facility built especially for the purpose, populated with a mammoth 400-node cluster of dual-core Opteron machines.

The software running in the data centre is called Fluent, which is the leader in CFD analysis. With the help of AMD, it's been written to take advantage of the extra memory allowed by the 64-bit processors that AMD has. AMD has also been able to significantly up Ferrari's computing performance over the last year. Just as many of you will have upgraded to a dual core AMD processor, merely flashing the BIOS to enable the extra functionality, Ferrari has done exactly the same thing - times 400. Because Fluent is a threaded application from the ground up, dropping in effectively another 400 processors literally doubles performance. That's a pretty cool real world application of the technology.

As you might already have guessed from the specifications the EN7800GT Top Silent this is a rather fast card. It might not compare to the GTX's or the latest X1900 cards, but then again neither of those are passively cooled. 131.2fps in Doom 3 at 1,024 x 768 is in itself quite impressive but the EN7800GT Top Silent scores 107.78fps in Half Life 2 and 102.8fps in Far Cry at the same resolution. Asus has definitely managed to squeeze a lot of performance out of this card.

It's only in F.E.A.R. that it doesn't manage to break the 100fps barrier, but this is an extremely demanding game. Considering that the EN7800GT Top Silent was tested using an AMD FX-57 processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS Xpert PC3500 memory, you might not hit these numbers on your PC. I doubt most people would be disappointed with the performance of the EN7800GT Top Silent regardless of their computer.

Metal Storm Area Denial Weapon System (ADWS)

Metal Storm's technology revolves around the principle of using electronically ignited ammunition stacked along a barrel. The traditional magazine is replaced by rows of ammunition in the barrel that are fired in sequence. There is no delay while another projectile is chambered, so the electronic ignition can fire the next round immediately after the previous one. The extremely high rate of fire makes Metal Storm weapons likely candidates for defense against other high speed projectiles, such as mortars. The Area Denial Weapon System (featured right) may be the US Army's solution to destroying enemy mortars in the sky.