Posted 01/14/08 at 06:24:37 PM by Michael Brown

We were so pleased with the price/performance ratio of AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 that we awarded Asus’s implementation of it a 9 Kick Ass verdict in our January 2008 issue. We’re not nearly as impressed with the gaming performance of the architecture’s cheaper cousin, the Radeon HD 3850.

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Posted 01/10/08 at 06:42:18 PM by Gord Goble

The PCI Express 2.0 spec was finalized one year ago this month, and we're finally seeing hardware designed for it. Let's look at PCI-E's evolution.

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Posted 11/30/07 at 06:18:12 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

We’ll be the first to admit that we were unimpressed by DDR3 when we first tested it last year, but there’s finally a glimmer of hope.

What changed our minds? Asus’s spanking-fast P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP@n mobo, which uses the enthusiast-oriented X38 chipset. The X38’s main highlights are apparently useful DDR3 support and PCI Express 2.0 support. We say “apparently” in reference to DDR3 because we didn’t have a DDR2 version of the board for a direct comparison, but from our tests, the X38 with DDR3 is a winning combination. Also good to have but not a proven performance boost yet is PCI-E 2.0, which doubles the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.0 from 8GB/s to 16GB/s. But does PCI-E 2.0 matter?

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