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AMD today announced it is advancing application performance with stunning imagery through the introduction of the first commercially available 3D workstation graphics card with DisplayPort support. The ATI FireGL V7700 professional graphics accelerator provides superior rendering speed, 3D performance and color fidelity for Computer Aided Design (CAD), Digital Content Creation (DCC) and Medical Imaging professionals. ATI FireGL V7700 delivers the top-quality image quality needed to create photorealistic visualizations of real-world objects and environments —like the design concept for a new aircraft or a home remodel—by providing designers with The Ultimate Visual Experience.

The new ATI FireGL V7700 workstation graphics accelerator with DisplayPort support brings The Ultimate Visual Experience to life. The card features a 10-bit display engine that can produce more than one billion colors at any given time, delivering unprecedented image fidelity at a lower cost. “Our customers are eager to adopt the latest standards like DisplayPort and PCI Express 2.0 that make their environments more productive while delivering next-generation display capabilities today,” said Peter Chen, president, Exxact Corporation.

VIA Technologies today announced the VIA NAS 7800 board, specifically designed to meet the needs of thin server and NAS segment system builders. The VIA NAS 7800 is powered by a VIA C7 1.5 GHz processor with optional fanless VIA Eden-based skus available to project customers. Scalable storage needs are more than adequately met with the support for up to eight S-ATA II ports with 1.5Gbits/sec and 3Gbits/sec data transfer rates, and for Native Command Queuing. Network support includes Gigabit Ethernet ports and an optional integrated IEEE-802.11g VIA wireless module. The board can be seen below!

owered by a low heat, energy-efficient 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor, with an optional fanless VIA Eden sku, the VIA NAS 7800 board also features a proprietary MFX module for comprehensive wake-up scheduling, allowing IT managers to power servers down at nights or weekends for considerable savings on electricity usage. The VIA NAS 7800 uses a unique 19cm x 14.3cm form factor, same size as a standard optical disk drive, with I/O aligned to allow easy integration into standard drive-sized chassis or even in multiple configuration within a 1U server, offering an innovative approach to NAS systems for small and medium sized businesses.

Introduction

Palit is a new to the US company that has been churning out enthusiast level graphics cards in Europe and Asia that are starting to turn heads here in the states, and for good reason. Palit puts great thought and engineering into each of their products and it shows. From the PCB up, Palit marches to the beat of its own drum, meaning no reference model designs here. This speaks well to the old adage of “listening to your customers.” So while you might spend a little more money than on a similar product from other vendors, it’s not the same design as other companies offerings with a “me too” game and bundle. Legit Review’s first experience with Palit hardware was with their 9600 GT Sonic. The card featured a unique Orange cooling solution along with increased core and memory speeds. It also came with a who’s who of connectors, including dual Dual Link DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, and even an optical SPDIF. Right there, the little extra money you spent may be the perfect investment for those that don’t upgrade their video card that often, but may be looking at a new monitor with one of these connectors. Most times you would have to locate and purchase a special edition of an existing card at an inflated price to get HDMI and/or DisplayPort.

So while we thought highly of the 9600 GT Sonic, Palit had more in store for us. They recently sent along a pair of their own “limited edition” graphics cards based on the 8800 GTS 512, only with 1GB of memory on each one. These cards also ship with higher clock speeds, not only the core but memory also. Paired with the great cooling heatsink and card design the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is a dream-come-true for high-end gamers.

The first thing you spot on the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is that orange casing on the card. You might also notice that it has a red PCB which you'd expect to find on an ATI card, but rarely see on NVIDIA flavors. Like all 8800 GTS cards the Palit 1GB is a dual slot design that only requires a single PCI-e power connector.

Moving around to the backside of our card we see something radically different, a giant back plate that also functions as a heatspreader for the additional memory added to the back side of the card. However, we ran into a couple of challenges due to this, more on that later.

At the heart of our 8800 GTS is the G92 core clocked at 730 MHz which is a generous step up from the 650MHz that comes on most 8800 GTS 512MB cards. Not only does our card have double the memory, it’s clocked higher than the standard 512MB cards as well, coming in at 2100MHz versus 1940MHz for the standard card.

Finally, out back we see that our cards have the standard connections with dual Dual-Link DVI and the S-Video style connector that allows you to connect an adaptor to it to display on a display with RGB connections.

Box, Bundle, and Test Setup

The box Palit ships the 8800 GTS 1GB in is pretty nice looking and very prominently displays what type of card it is, that it is overclocked, and the fact that it’s a limited edition.

On the back of the box there is a nice table of assorted 8000 and 7000 series cards and what is best for certain applications. This is a nice touch for those that don't follow graphics cards closely and just need an idea of what they should be looking for.

The included bundle is quite nice as they have included a DVI to D-Sub adaptor, a DVI to HDMI adaptor, a molex to PCI-E 6-pin adaptor, and the fore mentioned RGB connector. We also have the usual “Quick Install Guide” that covers installing the card and drivers, the driver CD, and they also included Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I haven’t yet had time to fire it up but if it’s anything like TR: Legend it will be a lot of fun!

Right, so let’s get to why we are writing this article, how do these bad boys perform?!

Test Setup

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. NVIDIA Forceware 169.28 beta drivers were used on all of the GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB graphics cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used. Memory timings were set to 1000MHz 4-5-4-15.

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is a Western-themed first-person shooter from the Polish developer Techland. First released for Windows in 2006 as a DirectX 9 title, it was re-released on June 12, 2007 as a DirextX 10 game title. Call of Juarez was one of the first games to utilize Microsoft's DirectX 10 and it is included in our testing for this reason.

Benchmark Results: As you can see this benchmark pushes DirectX 10 graphics cards to the breaking point with high quality settings at 2560x1600. Our Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is significantly faster than the 8800 GTS 512MB in this benchmark and outpaces the 8800 GTX both in single card, and SLI.

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Xbox 360 , Playstation 3 and PC. It is the fourth installment in the Call of Duty video game series. It was announced on April 25, 2007 and was released on November 6, 2007 in North America. The single player game can be completed in well under seven hours, but the graphics are awesome.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs on a proprietary graphics engine, and has features such as true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth-of-field. "Bullet Penetration" is calculated by the engine, taking into account things such as surface type and entity thickness. Certain objects, such as cars, and some buildings are destructible. This makes distinguishing cover from concealment important, as meager protection such as wooden fences, thin walls and such no longer provide sufficient protection. The bullet's speed and stopping power are decreased after penetrating an object, and this decrease is calculated realistically depending on the thickness and surface of the object penetrated. The game also makes use of a physics engine, which was not implemented in previous Call of Duty titles for the PC. Death Animations are a combination of pre-set animations and ragdoll physics. Some mistook the game's graphics to be DirectX 10 based, but it is stated that the graphics use DirectX 9.

Results: Once again with Call of Duty 4 we see SLI add tremendous playability at maximum in-game settings with 4xAA. We see again that the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is neck and neck with the 8800 GTX, and is just slightly faster in SLI.

3DMark 2006

3DMark 2006

3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and the latest version in the popular 3DMark series! 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.

Benchmark Results: At the default resolution of 1280x1024 we see that both of the 8800 GTS cards are faster than the 8800 GTX. In SLI that lead grows just a little more. If you live and die by your 3D Mark score the newer G92 core cards are for you.

Benchmark Results: With the monitor resolution cranked up to 2560x1600 we see much of the same with the GTX at the bottom of 3D Mark scoring. Again, this is why it's very important to look at other tests instead of relying solely on 3D Mark.

Overclocking & Conclusion

Overclocking

With the card coming clocked at such high speeds already, we weren’t expecting much of an overclock. I’m still unhappy with most of the overclocking tools available in Vista so we went with a new program that Palit has developed, the VDO Tool. This program is on the driver CD included with their Sonic line of graphics cards. After a bit of testing different speeds we settled in at 783MHz core, and 2250MHz memory. While this isn’t a huge increase it is still an impressive 53MHz core and 150MHz memory increase over an already substantial overclock. We were able to maintain these speeds while blasting through Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 during multiplayer madness! As you can see in the picture below, there are a lot of options including full fan control, as well as Core, Memory, and even independent Shader clock sliders!!

You can see above the temperature that the card reached while running a short stress test. We were never able to break 60c even while gaming for hours. If this were an aftermarket cooling solution it would be considered one of the best on the market, the fact that it's on a retail card from the factory makes it all the more impressive! Kudos to Palit for including a great cooling solution.

Conclusion

First off, we have to dish out our dislikes about the card, and it's an extremely short list.

Beneath the back plate is the additional 512MB of memory that makes these cards unique. Keeping that memory cool requires the heat spreader. This is the only qualm that we have with these cards, the back plate/heat spreader causes a few issues on motherboards with capacitors on the top side of the PCI-E slot. On the 780i motherboard used in our testing we had to tilt the capacitor to get the card to fit. The next problem we ran into was adding the second card for SLI in our 780i meant we had to use 16x PCI-E slot number 3. In itself, this isn’t a huge ordeal but there are going to be boards out there that will not be compatible with this card. A quick list would be most 939 nForce 4 boards when running SLI and the Intel "Bad Axe" line even with only a single card due to the memory slots being so close. A quick stroll through Newegg shows that some 650i SLI boards may be affected as well. The back plate isn’t all bad though, as it does function well as a heat spreader and protects all of those tiny resistors on the backside of the card. Anyone that has accidentally knocked one of those off an 8800 GTX knows how horrible a feeling that can be (yes, that would be me).

Overall the card is a great performer that consumes less power and therefore puts out less heat. At times in SLI it outperforms the 8800 GTX SLI and even 3 of them in triple SLI but it’s not a consistent win across the board in single card or SLI configurations. Obviously if you’ve got an 8800 GTX or Ultra a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is not going to be much of a change aside from power and heat. For those with large LCD’s or who have CRT’s capable of high resolutions and building a new system or upgrading from just about any ATI card, and NVIDIA cards lower than the 8800 series I would recommend a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB.

There is also something else special about these cards that we will be seeing in the near future, and that is that the clock speeds these cards carry is faster than the rumored speeds of the forthcoming 9800 GTX, which is rumored to use the same core. While nothing can be confirmed until the 9800 GTX becomes available, anyone buying a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB can rest assured that they are getting a very high quality card and top of the line performance at a great price. Our Palit 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic is priced at $369 at the time of this article. As games become more and more dependent on the size of the frame buffer, graphics cards will steadily keep increasing memory size and I have no doubt we’ll be seeing 1GB of memory arriving on all high end video cards very soon.

Credit By www.legitreviews.com

The high-definition format wars are over – and you won: Dell customers can now get a Blu-ray laptop for under a $1,000. Available today on dell.com, movie buffs can pick up the Inspiron™ 1525 with optional Blu-ray disc playback starting at $879.

The award-winning Inspiron 1525 laptop features a 15.4-inch high definition wide aspect display with 720p resolution. It also includes an HDMI port for easy connectivity to high resolution displays and HDTVs. The Blu-ray player disc drive is fully backwards compatible, and will play as well as burn traditional DVDs and CDs. Consumers can also chose a Blu-ray burner drive, which is great for backing up and storing important files like digital photos, videos, financial records, etc. A Blu-ray disc will hold up to 50 GB of data, vs. 8.5 GB available on the typical DVD disc. Dell Inspiron 1525 laptops with Blu-ray disc drives incorporate Broadcom Media PC technology that allows PCs with integrated graphics to play high definition video. The high-definition video playback is enabled through a built-in dedicated accelerator located in a mini-card slot.

AMD today announced the availability of AMD Phenom X3 8000 series triple-core processors, providing gamers and digital media enthusiasts with exceptional performance at mainstream price points. AMD Phenom X3 processors are designed to improve multi-threaded application performance over dual-core processors at the same clock speed. As the world's only triple-core x86 processor, AMD Phenom X3 processors bring multi-core technology to a broader audience in search of desktop PCs that easily handle today's digital entertainment workloads.

AMD Phenom X3 8400 and AMD Phenom X3 8600 processors can improve performance over dual-core processors on single-threaded applications and can scale with the same applications that scale with quad-core. AMD Phenom triple-core processors can also increase performance for multitasking usage models and multi-threaded applications, aligned with similar benefits available with AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processors. AMD will be collaborating with ZT Systems to premiere the first system featuring the new AMD Phenom X3 triple-core processor on QVC during the Computer Shop broadcast, which is scheduled to air March 31 at 10 p.m. EDT.

S3 Graphics today released WHQL-certified drivers for Microsoft DirectX 10.1 API as part of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to take advantage of new graphics features brought to market by Microsoft. This milestone allows software developers to start DX10.1 development on S3 Graphics Chrome 400 Series hardware using the latest March 2008 DirectX SDK. This is a shocker to us here at Legit Reviews since ATI was the first with graphics cards on the market to use DirectX 10.1 API. In the long run this doesn't really matter as I don't know of any game titles that use DirectX 10.1 that are currently on the market.

“S3 Graphics has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure full DX10.1 WHQL compatibility for our latest generation of Chrome 400 Series GPUs for current and future operating systems,” said Iming Pai, Vice President of Software at S3 Graphics. “With Windows Vista and the latest immersive rendering technologies introduced by Service Pack 1, our customers and partners can be confident that S3 Graphics hardware is ready to take advantage of the new graphics features of DirectX 10.1 for upcoming applications

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad-SLI Testing

Last week, we got a chance to look at the XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card and found that it was a very powerful card for gaming. At the conclusion of that article we stated that we couldn't show Quad-SLI numbers as NVIDIA had them under NDA. The gag order has finally lifted, so we can share with you our thoughts on Quad-SLI with a pair of XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards and, of course, we also have a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics cards for some Quad-CrossFireX testing to go along with them.

Since we have already reviewed the Radeon HD 3870 X2 the GeForce 9800 GX2 and CrossFireX we can move right on to the good stuff.

It's been nearly two years since NVIDIA has produced a dual PCB video card design and they feel they have a winner in the works with the GeForce 9 series. One of the reasons NVIDIA feels so strongly about the GeForce 9800 GX2 is because they have a whole new approach at how the video game frames are being rendered. The first generation Quad SLI technology seen on the GeForce 7950 GX2 back in 2006, used a hybrid mode of split frame rendering (SFR) and alternate frame rendering (AFR) to enable concurrent rendering on four GPUs. With the latest games utilizing complex shaders, inter-frame effects, and multi-pass rendering, SFR becomes less efficient.

The GeForce 9800 GX2 features a new video bridge and a re-architected driver to allow for four frames to be rendered concurrently, but there is a catch. The OS framework required to support four frames in-flight is only available in Windows Vista. With the new 4-way AFR technique, geometry, texture, and shader processing all benefit from GPU scaling. Just how much does it scale? We will get to that in a second!

To get Quad-SLI enabled, we just added a second card to the system and went to the NVIDIA control panel to set the SLI configuration. After a few flickers and flashes, the software enabled Quad-SLI and we were able to reboot the system and get testing.

The Test System

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. ATI CATALYST 8.3 drivers were used on all the Radeon HD graphics cards and NVIDIA Forceware 174.53 drivers were used on all GeForce graphics cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used.

The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 GPU-Z Screen Shot:

The Video Cards:

• EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 (600MHz/2000MHz)
• ATI Radeon HD X2 - 1GB (825MHz/1.800GHz GDDR3)

An Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 'Yorkfield' processor was used for testing as it proved to be the best desktop processor when it comes to game performance. The test system was also loaded with 4GB of memory and water cooled to ensure throttling of the processor or memory wouldn't cause any issues. The ATI CrossFireX test platform had the DDR2 memory set to 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings and the NVIDIA Quad-SLI used DDR3 memory at 1333MHz with agressive 7-7-7-20 timings.

Crysis

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago.

The full retail version of the game Crysis was used with patch 1.2 for benchmarking. FRAPS was used over the internal benchmark utility to help avoid driver enhancements. Legit Reviews has just NVIDIA data for this game as we just recently updated the game to version 1.2 and picked a new scene to run FRAPS on and didn't have time to re-test all the cards in time for this article, but managed to get a number of the high end cards tested.

Results: With the latest patch of Crysis and the game set to very high quality settings with no AA the video cards had a hard time rendering the game. The GeForce 9800 GX2 didn't scale that well when the second card was added to the system and Quad-SLI was enabled. A 3% framerate increase is not significant, which is a shame since the second GeForce 9800 GX2 will set you back another $600. The ATI Radeon HD 3870X2 was able to scale by 40%, which is nice, but it wasn't enough to catch up to one GeForce 9800 GX2.

3DMark 2006

3DMark 2006

3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and the latest version in the popular 3DMark series! 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.

Default 3DMark06 settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1280x1024 was used.

Benchmark Results: The GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad-SLI setup didn't seem to like 3DMark2006 too much and turned in a score that was just 317 points higher than a single GeForce 9800 GX2. The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 showed over a 1,000 point increase when moving from a single card to Quad-CrossFireX

Benchmark Results: The SM 2.0 and 3.0 scores show what we would expect other than the SM 2.0 decreased on the Quad-SLI setup.

Power Consumption and Conclusions

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Seasonic Power Angel. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the measurement. For load numbers, we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running the game World in Conflict at 1920x1200 with very high graphics quality.

Power Consumption Results: When it comes to power consumption the ATI cards use less idle and load. Power consumption varies from game title to game title, but this is a good idea of how much power will be consumed at load.

Final Thoughts

NVIDIA has done a great job with Quad-SLI and with some driver improvements it should only get better. The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards running in a quad-SLI showed increased performance in every application we tested versus a single GeForce 9800 GX2, which is something that can not be said about the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 as they had some driver issues on Tomb Raider: Anniversary. We almost didn't include Tomb Raider: Anniversary in our testing, but our two store-bought DVD versions of Bioshock say they have been installed too many times, so this game was a last minute addition. If you were wondering where BioShock wasn't included you can thank the idiotic DRM they use, which limits you to five installs (SecuROM, please respond to our emails). Overall, Quad-SLI is impressive, but mostly on older game titles. We played a bunch of older game titles like The Sims 2, Quake 4, Doom 3 and Star Wars Legos without finding any issues with Quad-SLI. This is good news and far better than when Quad-SLI originally came out back in 2006.

Introduction

Today we bring you a round up of a few of the recently reviewed coolers. From inexpensive to high end, light to heavy, short to tall, all are compared to Intel’s stock cooler. In the process of updating the LR test bench we had to re-benchmark all the coolers, so why not do a round up with the collected data? So, today we will show you how the LR stable of coolers stack up to one another.

After-market coolers (left to right) that we will be looking at today are the Noctua NH-U12P, Zalman CNPS9700 LED, ZEROtherm NV-120 Nirvana, and Spire Verticool III, and at the bottom the stock Intel cooler.

First, let’s have a quick overview of the stats of each cooler.

Test Setup and Procedure

To test all the coolers, they were run on our Intel Core 2 Duo test platform which was then run at default and overclocked settings. As a baseline, all coolers will be compared to the stock Intel cooler. All of the temperatures were obtained by using Core Temp 0.95 after sitting at idle for 30 minutes and then again under 100% load for 30 minutes. To obtain 100% load, I ran four instances of Super Pi 32m calculation with the affinity of each set to a different core. I used two profiles to test each of the coolers and they are listed below. The room temperature was kept at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees C) for all benchmarking. All of the coolers were tested with Arctic Silver Lumiere as the thermal interface material.

The rest of the system is as follows

• Motherboard: Intel 975XBX2
• CPU: Intel Q6600
• Ram: Kingston Hyper-X DDR2 KHX9600D2/1G
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 250gb
• SATA Case: Ultra M998
• Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad Crossfire Edition

Profile 1: The Normal User (No Overclocking)

• CPU Multiplier: 9x
• CPU voltage: 1.2000V
• FSB Voltage: 1.20V
• FSB: 1066MHz
• Memory Voltage: 2.20V
• Final CPU Frequency: 2.4GHz

Profile 2: The Average Enthusiast (Mild Overclocking)

• CPU Multiplier: 9x
• CPU voltage: 1.435V
• FSB Voltage: 1.30V
• FSB: 1336MHz
• Memory Voltage: 2.24V
• Final CPU Frequency: 3.0GHz

The Results

First, we will look at the stock Q6600 temps. At idle the ZEROtherm NV-120 takes the lead at approximately 14 degrees cooler than stock. In second place is the Noctua NH-U12P, and in a close third place is surprisingly my old Zalman CNPS9700LED.

Under full load, however, the Noctua NH-U12P is the winner -- only beating the NV-120 by a very narrow margin. Still, both coolers come in a whopping 20 degrees cooler than stock!

Results continued

With the Q6600 overclocked at 3.0 GHz and idling we have the Noctua cooler in front, with the ZEROtherm in second, and and the Zalman in third. All are doing very well at almost 20 degrees cooler than the stock Intel cooler.

With the system under load we have more of the same. In the lead is Noctua, followed by ZEROtherm and Zalman. I was suprised to see the stock cooling holding up to the overclocked Q6600; I fully expected the temps to be in the low 80's. Even though I still do not consider low 70's to be a healthy temperature for long-term use.

Conclusion

With the numbers in we know where all the coolers fall temperature-wise. If we go by that alone the winner is the NH-U12P from Noctua, but we have a few other things to consider, such as looks, price, and availability. Yeah, the cooler is great, but only a few retailers are carrying it. On top of that, the cooler runs about $60. Then, there is the not-so-easy-on-the-eyes fan; it’s beautifully silent, but the color is horrid. It’s not so bad for those who do not have a side window, but the hue is atrocious for those who do. For these reasons the NH-U12P is in second place.

I picked the ZEROtherm NV-120 as the over-all winner in our little gatheing of coolers today. Its look is easy on the eyes, the finish combined with the LED fan makes it almost art. Those who have a window will be proud to show it off, and those who don’t will want a window so they can. Then there is the price, at around $45 it's $15 cheaper than the NH-U12P, and then the icing on the cake (so to speak): there’s a very good chance that your favorite online retailer carries it.

In close third is the Zalman CNPS9700 LED. Back when I first purchased this cooler it was my first high end air cooler and set me back $65. Now you can find it for around $50. Now if you don’t like the all copper look and prefer a finish like the Nirvana, have no fear. The 9700LED has a brother: the 9700NT LED sports a gun metal finish like the Nirvana and a green LED fan. I also highly recommend this cooler to those running small cases. I run this cooler on a regular basis in a Cooler Master Centurion 541 mATX case. There is no way that either of the ZEROtherm or Noctua coolers would fit due to their height.

So if you are not quite ready to make the jump to water cooling, but still need to cool down that new dual or quad core, I think you would be happy with any of the coolers we have looked at here today.

AMD demonstrated at the CeBIT electronics exhibition its first 45nm quad-core chips running multiple operating systems and a range of processing intensive applications. The processors were produced in Dresden, Germany, in AMD’s Fab 36 300mm manufacturing facility, using an advanced 45nm process co-developed with IBM. Shown below is a picture of multiple 45nm quad core dies.

AMD 45nm transistors are engineered to enable greater performance-per-watt capabilities in AMD processors and platforms. AMD combines new processes and materials with leading edge technologies, such as immersion lithography and AMD’s fourth-generation strained silicon, for a highly-manufacturable, highly-efficient production process. This important milestone is the first of many as AMD moves toward delivery of 45nm products later this year. The first 45nm chips demonstrated by AMD include the “Shanghai” product for server and “Deneb” for desktop platforms.

OCZ Technology today unveiled the OCZ Vendetta 2, an efficient new CPU cooler with a powerful 120mm fan design for maximum performance. Utilizing a distinctive stacked fin design and trend-setting heat-pipe direct touch (HDT) design combined with a large low-noise fan, the Vendetta 2 is built to solve the cooling challenges of today’s most powerful processors.

Utilizing the proven performance of the latest HDT design, the Vendetta 2 has direct contact with the processor using three copper heat pipes to ensure the most rapid heat transfer. The dimple micro-configuration of the stacked aluminum fins adds turbulence, reducing the skin effect of air flow for more efficient circulation within your case. The versatile and user-friendly Vendetta 2 is compatible with AMD AM2/939/754/755 and Intel 775 sockets and can be installed quickly and easily by end-users at all skill levels. Quiet and efficient heat dissipation makes the OCZ Vendetta 2 the top choice to cool the latest processors.