Review The current maximum write speed on a DVD±R is 16x, so Pioneer’s 20x drive has to be doing something special. Using 16x media, you should be able to see up to 25 per cent extra read and write speed.

Continued…

Review In appearance, the new Intel Core i7 - based on the 'Nehalem' microarchitecture - looks like a bigger, chunkier version of the Core 2 Quad but under the heat spreader and casing it has a radical design that breaks new ground.

Continued…

Review Western Digital offers its Caviar desktop drives in three varieties that are identified by a handy system of colour coding. Caviar Green is cool, quiet, eco-friendly and - to be frank - lacking in performance. In the mid-range, we have Caviar Blue, which offers performance and reliability with up to 16MB of cache and a maximum capacity of 750GB.

Continued…

Preview Intel won’t be launching its new Core i7 'Nehalem' processors and X58 - aka - 'Tylersburg' - chipset until some time in November, so we’ve got to tread carefully with this preview of the Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard. Register Hardware has reported on both the processor and chipset - however, we can’t reveal processor performance figures until the date of the official launch.

Continued…

Review AMD has been talking about its Fusion technology, which will combine the CPU and GPU in a single unit, for some time now. It's not due until next year, so we were taken aback when the first incarnation of Fusion turned out to be software, not silicon.

Continued…

Review Sapphire’s HD 4850 Toxic graphics card tackles a perceived problem of the reference AMD ATI Radeon HD 485 by changing the cooling package to lower the temperature.

Continued…

Review The P45 Express is Intel’s latest mainstream chipset for the Core 2 range of processors. In many respects, it's a refinement of the P35. However, it has developed in an interesting direction.

Continued…

Preview The mobo in our pics may look like a VIA SN18000G, which sells for about £150 with a 1.8GHz C7 processor, but it’s more exciting: it's a reference board for VIA's would be Atom-smasher: Nano.

Continued…

We've looked at a host of graphics chips, and while each new GPU generation has its fans who'll dash out and buy it no matter what, plenty of punters prefer to wait and see whether they're worth the money.

Continued…

Review The new AMD 'RV770' graphics chip that lies at the heart of Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 owes a great deal to the 'RV670' that we saw in HD 3850 and 3870. It uses the same 55nm fabrication process and continues to support DirectX 10.1, but the transistor count has risen from 666m to 956m.

Continued…

Review Nvidia has spent the past year waiting for AMD to give it a fight in the graphics sector. The G92 chip used in GeForce 8800 GT was little more than a die-shrink of the G80 that debuted in the original GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX.

Continued…

Review The birth of AMD’s quad-core Phenom processor was plagued with problems. After a gestation period more akin to an elephant than a CPU, the new silicon popped out puking and bawling but was clearly a bit of a runt.

Continued…

Review We started the year with a review of a Rock X770 gaming laptop. We used the machine to look at the Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX graphics chip, but it's time to look at the processor, now upgraded to Intel's 45nm mobile Core 2 Duo T9500.

Continued…

Review The basic version of Nvidia’s new nForce 790i chipset is the 790i SLI, with the 790i Ultra SLI coming in at the top of the line. Both chipsets have nearly identical features lists and they both support the latest 45nm Intel Core 2 'Penryn' processors.

Continued…

Review AMD’s 700-series chipsets covers all the motherboard options that a gamer could require for the quad-core Phenom processor. There’s the 790FX with support for CrossFireX to handle three or four graphics cards, the 790X that does CrossFire with two cards, and the 770 that combines Phenom with a single PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 slot.

Continued…

Review Intel’s old V8 gaming system used a chipset to support a pair of quad-core processors and a single PCI Express graphics card. Now the chip giant has added support for multiple graphics cards. The result: a new gaming board, Skulltrail.

Continued…

Review Everything about the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card is big, including the model name, so we’re going to stick to calling it the X2 here.

Continued…

Review The headline feature of the Asus EN8800GT 1GB is - as the name suggests - the fact that it packs in 1GB of GDDR 3 memory instead of the 512MB that you’ll find on standard GeForce 8800 GT-based graphics cards.

Continued…

Review Throughout last year, we ran a steady stream of news about the AMD’s Phenom quad-core processor, mainly because the chip was delayed. When the launch finally took place, AMD took us to Warsaw where we were told again and again about the virtues of its Spider platform: a combination of a Phenom processor, a motherboard with an AMD 790 chipset and a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards.

Continued…

Review Nvidia’s new nForce 780i SLI chipset is heavily – that’s HEAVILY – based on the nForce 680i SLI, adding just two key new features. The first is support for 45nm Intel 'Penryn' processors and the second is the addition of PCI Express 2.0 for top graphics performance. It’s safe to say that the 780i SLI is Nvidia’s answer to Intel’s X38 chipset, but it’s not a direct comparison as Nvidia is sticking with DDR 2 memory instead of making the shift to DDR 3.

Continued…

Review The basic version of the 17in laptop Xtreme X770 packed GeForce 8700M graphics. Rock recently offered GeForce 7950 Go GTX graphics with 512MB of dedicated GDDR 3 memory to give your games more oomph, but that’s history now, ‘cause the GeForce 8800M GTX is here.

Continued…

Review The AMD ATI Radeon HD 3850 uses the same chip as the HD 3870 with the core and memory clock speeds reduced from 775MHz and 2250MHz to 668MHz and 1650MHz. But the really big difference is the 600MHz gap in the memory speed because AMD has chosen to run the 3850 on 256MB of GDDR 3 while the 3870 gets 512MB of the Full Monty GDDR 4.

Continued…

Review The GeForce 8800 GT slipped into Nvidia’s line-up towards the top of the range by offering similar performance to the existing 8800 GTS with 320MB of memory. This was achieved with an updated version of the 'G80' chip called 'G92', which moved the fabrication process to 65nm, changed the memory controller, raised the core speed and increased the number of unified shaders - or Stream Processors.

Continued…

Review At first glance, Asus' P5E-VM HDMI looks like a regular Micro-ATX design with the usual crop of integrated features. But when you take a good close look you’ll see just how much Asus has managed to cram in.

Continued…

2007's Top Products Intel has been busy sending out a batch of 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processors to every tech site in the known universe, and if you take a look at some of the reviews that have popped up you’ll spot a common theme. The QX9770 is the first desktop processor to run on a 1600MHz frontside bus (FSB) but right now there are no desktop chipsets that support this new speed.

Continued…

Review AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT wasn’t a bad graphics chip but it spent too long in development and failed to take the fight to Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 series. But after a quick die-shrink from 80nm to 55nm, the Radeon HD 2900 XT has been reborn as the Radeon HD 3870.

Continued…

Review Nvidia’s new 'G92' graphics chip is based on the 'G80' used in the GTS, GTX and Ultra versions of the GeForce 8800, and is a die-shrink that moves from the part from its predecessors' 90nm fabrication process to 65nm.

Continued…

Review Intel’s 45nm 'Penryn' update for its Core 2 microprocessor family has been an open secret for many months. It's first desktop incarnation, the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, is due to be formally introduced on 12 November, but today we can tell you how it will perform.

Continued…

Review The Pro is the current feature-packed flagship of Abit's P35 range of motherboards based around - surprise, surprise - Intel's P35 chipset, and supports Intel's range of 1333, 1066 and 800MHz frontside processors, including the Core 2 Extreme, the Core 2 Quad and the Core 2 Duo.

Continued…