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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and 670 round-up: which overclocked card is the one for you?
Happy first-quarter birthday, Kepler. Your reference design is old enough for companies like EVGA, MSI, ASUS, Zotac to push your various clock speeds to the limit, while using custom coolers to avoid meltdown. Arguably the time to upgrade is now and that's why Hot Hardware has done a full-on round-up review, comparing some of the best GTX 680 and GTX 670 packages against each other and against the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. If you prefer your morning news fresh and unspoilered, jump straight to the source link below. Or, if you just want the gist of it, click Read More.
An early look at Ivy Bridge motherboards: or, the side order without the main
Ssshh. Ivy Bridge is officially still a mystery, remember? Nevertheless, through some quirk of chronology, the accompanying Z77 chipset for motherboards has already been announced. If there's a reason for this early entrance, it's probably because Z77 is backwards compatible with Sandy Bridge, which means that the latest crop of motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte, Intel and MSI can be considered fully-fledged products in their own right. Well, kind of, anyway. In reality, some of the key selling points of Z77 won't get activated until you clamp on Ivy Bridge silicon -- including PCIe 3.0 support (hitherto only found on X79 big-momma-boards), so the real testing can't begin in earnest until the new kid arrives. With that caveat out of the way, read on for a quick review round-up.
Corsair's Sandy Bridge E-compatible liquid coolers get plumbed in and tested
You'd be crazy to embark on a Sandy Bridge E upgrade without anticipating all the costs involved. Some might argue you'd be crazy, period, but that's only because they're haters. The fact is, if you can drop a grand on an i7-3960X (or $600 for a more sensible i7-3930K), then you can probably find some spare brass for a decent liquid cooler. So, which to get? The crew at HotHardware just reviewed Corsair's LGA2011-compatible H80 and H100 water systems, spiced up with a look at Intel's own RTS2011LC cooler for comparison. They concluded that both Corsairs were a cinch to install and easily surpassed Intel's offering by allowing higher stable overclocks without excessive decibels. However, they also cautioned that the hefty $90-$120 investment in a Corsair or any other high-end liquid cooler won't necessarily yield quieter performance than an air system, because you end up with fans and a water pump chugging away in your rig. See the source link for the full results and then click 'More Coverage' for Bit.tech's review of the H80.
HotHardware surveys the Cougar Point motherboard horizon, spots a winner
There's an ocean of possibilities when it comes to choosing the right Socket LGA 1155 board to mother your Sandy Bridge processor. But a roundup review at HotHardware funnels it down to just five rivals within a $179-$267 price bracket and based on Intel's P67 chipset: two offerings from Asus, plus one each from ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI. The reviewers found clear favorites depending on what you're looking for: The ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional and MSI P67A-GD80 can both bring serious aesthetics to your super rig, and the former has a particularly good bang-for-buck ratio. The Asus P8P67 WS Revolution stands out with four full-length PCI Express lanes for crazy graphics, while the more conservative Asus P8P67 Professional has the lowest idle power consumption of the lot. Click the source link now if you'd prefer to discover the overall winner for yourself. Otherwise, all we can say is, viva la Revolution.
