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A little over 1.5 years ago I wrote about Asus launching an external graphics card for laptop consumers. Remotely locating the hot and power hungry GPU to a desktop located platform would bring laptops up to speed with desktops in the one department they are seriously lacking. Current performance GPUs easily chew through 75 to 125 watts which is easily double the power consumption of your average laptop computer. AMD is hoping to tap into the mobile market with an external graphics card with a custom graphical port permitting consumers to render images on both the internal laptop screen or up to 4 external displays.

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I believe it’s been a lengthy 5 months since I’ve slapped together one of these guides. I’d say I’m a bit overdue, so here we go.

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I just feel obligated to call to everyones attention that Nehalem looks to be a multi-threaded monster. While at Computex in Taiwan, Anandtech managed to snag two Nehalem systems, one at 2.66Ghz and one at 2.93GHz. Using pre-production boards with some serious bugs slightly impacted the scores recorded but even with these penalties, Nehalem bested an equally clocked Yorkfield. Roughly guessing from these results, Nehalem will walk all over AMD’s Phenom and quite possibly the 45nm Shanghai shrink unless the cache latencies are addressed. I look forward to the Nehalem launch, it promises to be as big as the original Conroe launch that seems to be so long ago.

Today I have a long put-off review of the Gigabyte 8800GT. The 8800GT happens to be rather “old” card in the grand scheme of things however it’s still a very powerful card and very attractive in it’s current price point. The 8800GT was originally launched in October 2007 and over the course of 7 months it’s drastically dropped in price will still being a powerful player in the midrange GPU market. Gigabyte has re-worked the PCB used with this card and features a factory overclock, do these extra features make this card even more competitive?

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I typically hate to get into the rumor industry however these figures posted over at NordicHardware sound very believable. They aren’t drastically larger than the past generation yet appear to offer enough performance to perform as expected. The RV770 core, which will form AMD’s HD4850, HD4870, and HD4870X2, will consist of 480 shaders, 160 more than RV670. There will be 16 ROPs, same as RV670, but 32 TMUs, double of RV670. The HD4850 will operate at 625MHz core with GDDR3 operating at 2286MHz on a 256-bit bus. The HD4870 will operate at 850MHz core with GDDR5 operating at a whopping 3970MHz on a 256-bit bus. Due to the sheer speed of GDDR5, RV770 will have gobs of bandwidth, 127 gigabytes per second to be precise. RV670 had only 72 gigabytes per second of bandwidth so this significant jump should help keep this larger core happily fed.

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During my recent trip to California, Corsair hooked me up with some of the DDR2 and DDR3 Dominators. Prior to this I have more or less stuck with OCZ since my DDR1 days however I simply couldn’t pass up these sticks. For the following week I was jittery in anticipation, these sticks had the potential to really unlock my DDR2 platform. My CrossFire benching has jumped onto the DDR3 bandwagon however my SLI platform is still utilizing a 780i motherboard, hence all my excitement. So how do these sticks hold up? Are they worth they price tag and wicked heatspreaders?

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During Gigabyte’s Spring Break they presented a slideshow to us, highlighting upcoming technologies in their P45 launch. P45 really will be a remarkable chipset but not due to the actual chipset performance itself but the features that come with it. Gigabyte has a slew of features that’ll be a part of their P45 series boards, some pertinent to overclockers and some to the average consumer. What I find most impressive about this entire slideshow though is the focus Gigabyte has turned towards the enthuasiast sector.

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I spent last week in California making new friends and visiting various hardware venders. While traveling through the San Francisco area I had a chance to stop by Corsair in Fremont. I had spoke with Robert Pearce, one of Corsair’s Marketing Specialists, and he arranged for some time to tour Corsair’s offices in Fremont. I actually rode the BART train in from downtown San Francisco at 7am with Michal Nowicki aka bachus_anonym so I had an early start that day. When we finally arrived 45 minutes later, I was decently surprised with the amount of equipment and testing that occurs at Corsair.

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