[H]ardNews 5th Edition

MSI GFFX 5700Ultra:

Bjorn3D has a review of the little red card that could, the MSI GFFX 5700Ultra TD128. The bright red PCB and spanky looking copper heat sinks on these bad boys also make them popular with case modders and folks with windowed cases as well. Have a look:

The FX5700 Ultra is certainly successful in addressing the shortcomings of the FX5600 cards. It fits nicely in the middle ground between the price leader FX5200's and the top end FX cards. As usual with NVIDIA graphics cards, it is ultra-stable and compatible. Head-to-head tests with the ATi 9600XT confirm that essentially the two cards are even in terms of performance. The 9600XT has a slight visual edge, however, at least to my eyes.

PowerColor Radeon 9800XT:

Proof positive that the PowerColor Radeon 9800XT kicks much ass no matter where you are in the world. This review isn’t in English, but the universal benchmarks say it all. Here is a translated quote from the full review:

Its impediment is its raised price, but if it will not be able to pay for a plate of these I think that it can always go for example for one 9800Pro that she is consideravelmente cheaper and it offers a similar performance to this 9800XT. Penso that nobody will go to justify its purchase alone for the capacity to read the temperature of Core, Overdrive, or the cooling most advanced, since the price exactly is too much raised to only have these things in relation to 9800Pro.

CPU Comparo:

Sudhian has posted a workstation CPU round-up of sorts that compares the Barton to the Opteron and Intel Xeon.

When it’s all said and done, AMD and MSI have done a terrific job building products that can stand up to Intel’s Xeon 3.2 in both performance and stability. Having worked with both Xeon and Opteron workstations for weeks now, we can safely say we wouldn’t’ hesitate to deploy either solution (though we would junk the Xeon’s default fans).