Tuesday news *2*

Today with all of the case modding going there has been a lot of very interesting products showing up. Everything from cold cathode tubes in any color, even ultra violet, to rounded IDE cables of every color. CoolMax has decided to take it one step further with a lighted IDE cable.

The nForce2 and Granite Bay motherboards are here! These new AMD and Intel motherboards are loaded with the latest and greatest technology has to offer. One of the new features these new motherboards have to offer is something called "Dual Channel DDR". Let's take the nForce2 for example. The nForce2 based motherboards have incorporated two fully independent 64-bit memory controllers, which in turn provide a 128-bit memory interface. What does this mean to us? More memory bandwidth and better performing systems!"

Want your cake and eat it too? Tired of having two or more optical drives, and you are looking to cram your system parts into an XPC or similar MiniATX case? You have but two choices – drop three C-bills on a new DVD-RW or +RW drive with all around mediocre speed and performance ratings, or hand out a respectable sum one third that of DVD recorders and have stats that are shockingly good. Introducing the Samsung SM-348B - a 48/24/48x CD-RW + 16x DVD-ROM Combo drive.

MSI uses 2.8ns Samsung or Hynix RAM for the 4600-8X. The card is clocked at 300Mhz core and 660Mhz memory, though PowerStrip reported that the actual clock speeds were closer to 297Mhz and 648Mhz respectively. Compare that to say, the original MSI Ti4600, which was clocked at 300/500 core/memory - this gives the 4600-8X a memory bandwidth advantage already against its previous incarnation.