the long awaited ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT aka R600 Performance Benchmarks finally shows up some scores.

I guess it deserves all that waiting =)

It's been quite a while since I've published a review of the workstation platforms from AMD and Intel, but, with all the changes in both platforms recently, it's high time. This brings us to this review of the Intel Xeon 5300 series processors and the AMD Opteron 2200 series processors. Intel's Xeon line has gone through some major changes that provide us with a new quad-core chip and a refined chipset, designed to maximize many different aspects of the systems' communications.

Since ASRock was established in 2002 with the 3 C's--Creative, Considerate, and Cost-effective--we have seen their motherboards continually improve. Even while their low price point remains the same, the designs for these motherboards are constantly improving as we have seen over the past year.

phoronix.com:

The Abit KN9 Ultra is backed by the NVIDIA MCP55 Ultra and supports IEEE-1394a, Dual Gigabit LAN, and all of the other Abit extras we are delighted to see back. The KN9 Ultra certainly looks like it may stack up well on paper, but let us see if Abit has truly returned to their famed past.

Complete Review

Intel was first to adopt DDR2 memory when they had launched their LGA-775 socket nearly two years ago with the Grantsdale and Alderwood Chipsets. Intel Corporation is first again to introduce the latest in memory technology: FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is short for Fully Buffered Dual Inline Memory Module, and is primarily designed for mission-critical server environments that require maximum performance with minimal errors. FB-DIMMs are designed to bring the best traits from DDR2 memory while combining a new point-to-point serial memory interface. Some of the key benefits for Fully Buffered DIMMs include enhanced reliability, greater bandwidth, improved scalability, and higher capacity per memory channel.

Complete Review

Creative Lab's open-source website has been updated with word that they are working on Linux drivers for their X-Fi lineup of high-end sound cards, which have been quite popular with Windows gamers. However, these closed-source Creative drivers will not be available for Linux until second quarter of 2007. These proprietary drivers will have full support for ALSA and OpenAL v1.1. EAX will also be supported by these closed Creative drivers. This announcement can be found here. No word yet when the open-source Advanced Linux Sound Architecture will support the Creative Labs X-Fi series.

Continuing on from our Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and Sempron 3400+ Linux benchmarks, today we have looked at AMD's DDR2 performance with their Socket AM2. Using the system we used to deliver our initial AMD AM2 performance results, we have run a matched pair of Corsair XMS2-5400UL DDR2 through its paces at different frequencies. Used for the memory benchmarking under Linux was RAMspeed, which is an open-source cache and memory benchmark, and has been part of our Phoronix Linux benchmarking suite for some time now.

When looking at some of ASRock's recent motherboard offerings, we at Phoronix have been stunned by their budget yet creative products. These motherboards range from the 939SLI32-eSATA2 to the 775XFire-eSATA2. Today at Phoronix we have the 939NF4G-SATA2 motherboard. The ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 motherboard uses NVIDIA's GeForce 6100 and nForce 410 MCP Chipset. Other features for this AMD Athlon 64 motherboard include integrated NV44 video, ASRock Hybrid Booster, PCI Express x16, 7.1 channel audio, and Serial ATA 2.0. We have run the ASRock 939NF4G-SATA2 through its paces under Linux and now we have our results to share. As this motherboard has been around for a few months today.

At the beginning of last month we published our preview of the ASRock 939SLI32-eSATA2, however, now that Fedora Core 5 was released two weeks ago, and we have in our hands the NVIDIA 1.0-8751 Beta Linux display drivers, we are prepared to deliver the remainder of this article.