[H]ardNews 1st Edition

Gigabyte GA-8INXP:

Here is some Intel mainboard review action from the fellas at ModFathers. The Gigabyte GA-8INXP is the focus of this quick and dirty one page review.

For a office use then definitely, for a home user with a taste for tweaking definitely. For your power hungry benchmark number cruncher, you can get better. However for those that want to look at extreme cooling and overclocking it's worth considering. Its strong stable and can certainly handle the juice and speeds you are going to want.

Memory 101:

OCAddiction has an article posted today aimed at helping you understand all things memory. They discuss the cool stuff like memory bandwidth, latency and timings to help give you a better understanding of what makes your memory work for you, not against you.

"How is memory addressed?" is another common question. This one is quite simple. Think of a matrix, a collection of rows and columns. Each cell containing a 1 or 0 is defined by a location that is the intersection of a specific row and column, within a certain "bank". The older i845 Brookdale chipsets only had 4 banks, and could only address 2GB of memory. Newer Springdale and Canterwood chipsets are capable of addressing 8 banks, with a total of 4GB's maximum of memory.

HIS Excalibur 9800Pro:

Hardavenue has reviewed the HIS Excalibur Radeon 9800Pro today. Good looking card with a unique cooling solution that places the fan at the back of the card blowing the opposite way a normal cooling fan blows. Worth looking at.

As expected the HIS 9800Pro Ice-Q offers standard 9800Pro performance matching the Sapphire 9800Pro frame for frame, while also offering a slight enhancement with the cooling and value. Despite the fact the Ice-Q system takes up an extra PCI slot, most people do not tend to use the PCI slot right next to the AGP slot anyway for IRQ allocation reasons, so in reality this should not pose as a huge issue for most.