[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

Chaintech FX-71 GFFX5600 Ultra:

With everyone flocking over to get ATi based boards right now and their free copy of HL2, there are still some mid-range boards getting high praise like the Chaintech FX-71 GFFX5600 Ultra in this review by TweakNews.

Chaintech has released THE most refined FX5600 Ultra based videocard on the market. With not a single corner cut, the great looks and industry leading cooling technology coupled with great performance and a great software and accessory package makes the FX-71 an excellent videocard to put on your short list if you are considering a mainstream targeted videocard.

ABIT IC7:

ExtremeMHz has the plain jane ABIT IC7 on the test bench today. A great board even with though it isn’t one of the MAX versions. Check out the review:

What can I say, we were completely impressed with this board. Abit has a reputation for making some high quality, high performing motherboards. The Abit IC7-G is no exception. Its got just about everything an enthusiast would look for in a motherboard. It’s a full-featured board with an excellent hardware bundle and appealing design.

7 Free Radeon 9600s:

I have seven Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 128MB cards up for grabs over the next seven days over on my alter-ego website Hypothermia. These are your basic OEM style cards, no Half-Life 2 with them, just the cards..but you can’t complain about free video cards, now can you? Go get you some.

I have those seven Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 128MB cards on the block in my next one a day for a week contest. While these are not ultra high-end Radeon 9800XT cards, they are still very capable and would be a great card for someone that needs DX9 capabilities in their secondary rig, or someone upgrading from last a generation GPU. Get in it to win it.

Albatron K8X800 Pro II:

If you are contemplating the big move to the Athlon64 platform, reviews like this Albatron K8X800 Pro II review at Legion Hardware might be of interest to you.

Recently, I reviewed the Gigabyte K8VNXP employing the VIA K8T800 chipset. This was the first AMD Athlon64 supportive motherboard to appear on Legion Hardware. Since then I have been eager to test other boards based on the K8T800 chipset in particular. Already the K8T800 is a proven product for both the Opteron and Athlon64 processors.