[H]ardNews 7th Edition

Western Digital Caviar SE16:

If you are out shopping for a new hard drive, our friends at The Tech Report have a review of the Western Digital Caviar SE16 posted that you should check out. Not the most favorable review, price being one of the biggest issues they had with the drive.

I suppose it's impressive that the Caviar SE16 performs as well as it does; after all, it's little more than a new logic board strapped to old drive technology. Still, it's not nearly fast enough to be that much more expensive than the competition.

Intel 945P Mobo Shootout:

HotHardware has pit the Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2 against Gigabyte's GA-8I945P-G in a little head to head review action. I’m not going to give it away and tell you who “won” the shoot-out but both boards seemed to score very well.

Today, we are going to take a look at two new Intel 945P motherboards designed for the Pentium D series of processors from Foxconn and Gigabyte. Both Foxconn and Gigabyte have delivered interesting 945P series options with a lot of features.

HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II iTurbo:

The crew at Bit-Tech are saying that if you don’t have the money to plop down on a new GF 7800GTX then the HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II iTurbo is a great video card to go with.

The first thing that immediately stands out is the massive cooling solution on HighTech’s Radeon X850 XT iTurbo. The cooler is a familiar design, in that we’ve seen it many times before on previous HighTech cards. It is based on Arctic Cooling’s Arctic Silencer series of coolers, and it is in fact the ATI Silencer 5.

Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GTX:

Speaking of plopping down cash and the GF 7800GTX, those of you who can afford a new high-end video card will no doubt be interested in the Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GTX review at Legion Hardware. You can see our GF 7800GTX preview here for comparison purposes.

The performance of the Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GTX is impressive to say the least. The ability to deliver an extremely playable gaming experience at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF enabled in the latest gaming titles is simply amazing.