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Today I have in my hands a rather unusual card. I don’t believe I have laid hands on such an underwhelming card but I figured it’d be a hoot to play with and potentially become my new benching card, for CPU benching that is. This 8400GS comes equipped with a G86 GPU core complete with 8 shaders, 4 ROPs, and a 64 bit memory bus. Compared to the G92 8800GTS 512MB with it’s 128 shaders, 16 ROPs, and 256 bit memory bus and the 8400GS looks a wee bit underpowered. Enough slamming this card though, for $35 it’ll be a bit of cheap fun and I might even be mildly shocked in it’s performance on my bench.

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Yesterday I had the chance to test this motherboard under some sub-ambient cooling and I was blown away. I’ve got a high-end board arriving later this week so I figured I’d go out in the garage and check up on the cascade and tune it for the Q6600. After a slight delay in which I had to repair a small leak on the suction-line, I vacuumed down the second stage and put a rough 50/50 charge of propane and carbon dioxide into the system and fired it up. Rather than test on a load-tester, I dragged out the Neo2-FR, Q6600, Firestix, and fired the system up. This was more of a cascade test rather than hardware test but the results were great. The cascade idled around -70C, loaded around -60C, and only drooped under -60C while running wPrime1024m which utilizes all four cores.

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Microsoft releases security patches and bandaids for Windows on a nearly daily basis but rarely do they roll out an entire Service Pack. Typically when I am benching I try to stick with a minimalistic installation in hopes that the fewer background processes will help create a more efficient platform. Last month I was informed that there was a Windows XP Service Pack 3 release-candidate available to the public so naturally I felt the urge to test out the new spin on Windows XP. Given the fact that XP will easily be with us for a very long time, it seems natural to check out what’s in store for us in advance.

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I feel awfully bad coming out with this review considering how this board has been available for quite some time, but here it goes. Today I’ll be reviewing MSI’s P35 Neo2-FR motherboard with a slew of benchmarks stressing memory performance, harddrive performance, and 3D performance. The Neo2-FR is by far one of the cheapest P35 motherboards available on the market but it shares the same PCB and components with it’s higher priced sibling, MSI’s P35 Platinum. Today I’ll be looking solely at what I consider to be “normal” overclocking in that all the tests will be performed under my current air-based heatsink, so nothing too extreme today, sorry to disappoint.

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It seems to be very late in the DDR2 life cycle to be reviewing a set of high-end sticks considering however DDR2 will live on for at least another year in the enthusiast market so fear not, this review was not done in vain. DDR2 on Intel motherboards is still capable of performing within a very close margin of current DDR3 motherboards and AMD will be solely using DDR2 until late 2008/early 2009. Currently unless you have very deep pockets or an unlimited budget then high-end DDR3 is out of your price-range which leaves you with what some would consider to be old technology. I think however that when you see the results of the pinnacle of the DDR2 era you may be swayed if you were part of the previously mentioned concept. Without further ado, here’s the review of the Buffalo Technology PC2-8000 Firestix, clad in flashy red heatsinks.

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Rarely do I get excited about non-essential hardware in association with my computer. Monitors, mice, keyboards, none of this stuff really gets me excited like a new processor or motherboard does but the Logitech MX Revolution made such an impression that I don’t know if I can safely make the above statement anymore. My previous mouse was a Logitech SBD69, it was so old that I cannot find a valid reference of it online anymore. The old mouse was a decent wired two button + wheel laser mouse and did a decent job but it started to act quirky and I decided it was time to pull the trigger on an MX Revolution. When the Revolution arrived I immediately realized this was a mouse designed for my hand and not just a clunky piece of plastic. Besides the mouse the package included a driver CD, a USB dongle, and the charger for the mouse. After popping the mouse into the charger for a half-hour charge I started putting the mouse through it’s paces.

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Here we are, the game I have been waiting for since I put down Diablo II in 2004. Hellgate:London is the closest thing I believe we’ll see to a Diablo III unless Blizzard decides to put down the cash cow that World of Warcraft has become. Hellgate:London, launched on October 31st, 2007 contains a decent blend of FPS and RPG elements that complement each other to form a rather addictive albeit repetitive style of gameplay. Flagship Studios launched Hellgate:London to coincide with Halloween but I wonder how the launch would have been had they been given a few more weeks. In addition to this written review there is a video review recorded by yours truly which is a short 11 minutes of me discussing a few attributes of the game. If you’d like to skip to this then click here or scroll to the bottom of the page.

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Lately I’ve been in a sort of gaming binge in which I pick up a game for a week, play the hell out of it and then drop it for something else. This is rather unusual for me as I usually know which game I want to play and I’ll play this game for months until something else manages to wrench me away. The one benefit of this cycle is that I’ve had the chance to experience some unique and different games. Today I’m going to take a look at Stranglehold, a blockbuster title with John Woo assisting in development and a crack cast of actors including Chow Yun Fat as Inspector Tequila Yuen. Just when I thought hilarious Chinese cop stereotypes wouldn’t cross the divide into gaming I was proven wrong, to much pleasure.

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