Wednesday News

Fan noise is considered obnoxious to some, so constant under-volting fans, rheobuses, bay buses, etc, have been used to keep PC noise down. But here is an interesting one; why not just get a quiet fan to begin with? And that is what we have on the review bench today, one of Vantec's 80mm Stealth fans. It promises to be quiet, but does noise come at a cost of CFM? I'll cover that too. Don't take my word for it, go listen to the microphone readings I took..

One look through the Titan website and one fact stands out. Titan produces quiet cooling solutions for both AMD and Intel processors with not one heatsink generating over 33 dB(A). The Titan TTC-CU5TB may look "cool" but looks can be deceiving.

From the benchmarks above, we conclude that Soltek 75FRN-L's performance is very close to the big boys, e.g. Epox and Asus. This is quite an accomplishment for Soltek, considering the dismay performance of the 75FRV. The lacks of PCI lock and multiplier adjustment rule it out as an overclocker's board.

ABIT has been touting its 3-phase switching voltage regulator as superior to the 2-phase power solution used by some of the other manufacturers. Well, in a way, it is superior. A 3-phase voltage regulator will run much cooler than a 2-phase voltage regulator since the workload is divided into three phases or power channels, instead of just two. However, whether they improve stability or not depends on whether there's sufficient capacitance. It could very well be just another marketing ploy, feeding off a need to cut costs in capacitors. This is because the more phases the switching voltage regulator has, the smoother the flow of power. In a two-phase system, larger capacitors are used to even out the flow of power. Because the three phase system itself provides a smoother flow of power, less capacitance is actually required for a stable power supply. Therefore, ABIT may have taken the 3-phase road to cut costs and not to improve stability. Let's take a look..

MSI (Micro-Star International) was founded in August of 1986. Today, MSI makes a variety of high performance motherboards and video cards. Their plan is to be one of the top 3 mainboard manufacturers in the world. MSI has also stepped into the fiercely competitive graphics acceleration market. MSI is a partner of NVIDIA and produces all of the Geforce 4 Ti 8x line of video cards. Included in their line are the GF4 Ti4200 8x, GF4 Ti4800SE, and the GF4 Ti4600. Today we have the MSI Ti4600 to take a look at. Oddly enough, rather than following Nvidia’s goofy naming scheme, MSI calls their card the Ti4600 8x. I personally think this whole 8x naming thing is a marketing ploy, and its nice to see MSI naming their cards appropriately!

What we at OCAddiction decided to do is attempt to put the argument to a rest by showing you, once and for all, the two chips in identical configurations head to head, clock for clock. We'll take the latest core from each manufacturer, clock them at identical multiplier x front side bus configurations and throw CPU intensive benchmarks at them. Numbers don't lie do they?