As time goes by, I look at the computing world, and see a change I currently don't enjoy at all - everything is going mobile. OK, I have nothing against mobility, but there's gotta be a limit, and when it gets down to gaming, I think this is something you do on your desktop computer, in the office(only during breaks, of course!) or in your living room, on the couch, using a gaming console, and now I just heard about the Radeon HD 3850, a pretty powerful video card, going mobile...


I know, I know, the picture above shows a desktop version of the HD 3850 card from Sapphire, but don't worry, you've got another thing comin', and it's an impressive one! Think about a laptop with a powerful CPU, a lot of memory, and a mobile version of the HD 3850 card, all inside a case that looks like... you'll see that right away, but first, let's check some interesting details, shall we?

The story goes like this - while AMD didn't say anything yet, Diamond Multimedia and Smooth Creations announced the Smooth Creations "Broodling" notebook, and its configuration includes the mobile HD 3850 card, so we're probably only a few days away from the official launch.


Just look at this beauty! Jim Saling, president and chief executive of Smooth Creations, said "We’ve been developing these custom painted cases for years and this notebook is testament of Smooth Creations commitment to bring a completely outside of the desktop approach as a notebook solution."

The idea is this - if they manage to bring the mobile HD 3850 really close to the desktop version, we'll finally see some decent gaming computers that won't chew away your battery in less than an hour. After all, we've all heard about mobile SLI or CrossFire setups, but I never saw one at work, and I don't even want to think what kind of cooking machine would such a notebook make!

"Today, Smooth Creations decided to merge and unite gamers, enthusiasts, and professionals with a single solution Mobile platform that is scalable, robust, and powerful. The next round of high performance notebooks could very possible be a Skulltrail Notebook. And we are already working on that," concluded Mario Gastelum, lead engineer at Diamond Multimedia.

This world is moving faster with each day, and when talking about computers, higher clock speeds require better cooling. One of these days, I was talking with a friend of mine about its next upgrade - he's going to get an Intel E8400 CPU, and intends to push it somewhere past 4GHz, on water cooling. We didn't talk about the video card he should use yet, especially since he doesn't have much time left for games, but I am sure the BFG 9800 GTX w/ ThermoIntelligence Copper water block would be a great choice for him, and maybe even for some of you, as we're going to see right away...


As you can see in the image above, this card looks great, and it won't take up too much space inside your case, either. The water block on the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX H2OC 512MB graphics card is a custom one co-developed by BFG and Danger Den, and you can bet they overclocked it to the highest stable level, but you can always try to go higher, of course!

"With the addition of our custom high-performance water block, we’ve been able to safely overclock the 9800 GTX to an unprecedented 780MHz on the core clock, and 1944MHz on the shader clock. Each card is hand-built by a trained BFG technician using Arctic Silver® thermal compound, and is exceptionally cool and totally silent—delivering up to a 28°C lower GPU operating temperature than reference cooling solutions," said John Malley, senior director of marketing for BFG Technologies.

Since I am sure you were wondering about it, here you have the frequencies:
- Core Clock: 780MHz (vs. 675MHz standard)
- Shader Clock: 1944MHz (vs. 1688MHz standard)
- Memory Data Rate: 2320MHz (vs. 2200MHz standard)

Unfortunately, the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX H2OC 512MB graphics card is available only in limited quantities at leading online retail outlets throughout North America and Europe, so you shouldn't think to much about it - grab it or miss it!

Despite the fact ATI is still far from having a clear lead in the discrete graphics market (they don't even hold the first position, anyway), they always managed to arrive first in some areas - first cards using GDDR4, then first cards with DirectX 10.1 hardware support, and now even the first cards with GDDR5 support! The HD 3xxx generation of video cards is still pretty fresh, but it seems we already have the specifications of the upcoming goodies, the HD 4870 and HD 4850!


Regarding the standard dimensions, it's enough to say both cards will have the same length, and that is 23 cm(9 inch). UVD 2 promises to allow hardware decoding for Blu-Ray 1080p content, and even beyond, while the on-chip HDCP feature allows easy playback of HDCP protected content. At last, there's the HDMI support we're already used to, but wait and see the real goodies, because we're just getting started...

The memory to be used with these cards is going to be GDDR3/GDDR5, probably depending on the manufacturer of a certain model. The DirectX support is still at 10.1, probably waiting for NVIDIA to catch up(;)). The 256-bit memory interface isn't something out of this world, but dynamic geometry acceleration and game physics processing sound really great, together with the 24X custom filter anti-aliasing.

No, I have no idea about pricing yet, but rumors say that the R700-based cards, including the HD 4870 and HD 4850, should arrive in August. If this proves to be true or just a rumor, that's what remains to be seen, but you'd better start saving now, because I have the feeling we're going to have a 9800GTX killer from ATI for less than $250!!!

Summer is almost here, and if you're not living in a cold area, or you're not using conditioned air, your computer may have to be prepared for another hot season, especially if you're overclocking your CPU. Since installing air conditioning equipment may not be that good for your health, grabbing the beauty below and installing it in your computer is a much better idea, in my opinion!


Coming from Arctic Cooling, the Freezer XTREME is a cooler measuring 130 (L) x 100 (W) x 131 (H) mm, that features no less than 102 aluminum fins, four double-sided copper heatpipes, and a 120mm fan placed in the middle of this great twin tower design. The fan spins between 800 and 1500RPM, so you won't have to pump up the music's volume when the CPU is at full load. Depending on the fan's speed, the air flow can go between 35.7 to 60.7 m3/h.

With a weight of 608 grams, the Freezer XTREME is compatible with virtually all LGA 775, Socket 939, AM2 and AM2+ processors, since Arctic Cooling claims that 160 Watts is the cooling capacity available, but no processor for these sockets was able to reach that far yet.

At last, you should know that this new cooler arrives with preapplied MX-2 thermal compound, being backed up by a lifetime warranty(I guess that doesn't cover the fan too...), but it's not yet available. Expected to arrive in July, the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme CPU cooler will be priced around $40, so there's plenty of time to set aside those money...just be sure not to fry your CPU until then!

Today, I have chosen a special subject to write about - my own motherboard. Why do I call it special? Well, it took some time until I got completely happy with it, but it was worth the wait. I will tell you about this, and why would you use the MSI K9N Neo V3, also known as MSI NEO-F V3, to build a computer, while giving you the technical specifications and features at the same time, so get ready!


Let's start with my story... I had to choose between an ASUS motherboard, and the MSI NEO-F V3, and despite my previous (all positive) experiences with MSI products, I was thinking about buying the M2N-E instead of the NEO-F V3. There was also a Gigabyte board to think about, but in the end I decided to go with the NEO-F V3.

Basically, this is a budget board, but you get a lot of things for your money, especially the 3 years warranty and the all-solid capacitor build, which promises to deliver a very long life to your computer (obviously, you may end up seeing a system based on this board in a museum around 2020, since my old MSI motherboard has some inflated capacitors on it and has been running 24/24 for almost 2 years this way - and it's not dead yet!).

Due to the chipset limitations, you won't be able to run Windows 98/ME on a computer using this montherboard, but I don't think this should be a problem. After buying it, I noticed that a lot of options were not in the BIOS. "OK, this is a new board, so we'll update the BIOS," I said, but I ended up with more options, and a little disaster - memory performance went down the drain. Fortunately, the version 2.5 of MSI NEO-F V3's BIOS solved that issue, and now this baby runs fast as a shark, but I'll get to that part a bit later.

My suggestion is to use this board for a low-end gaming system, since it has decent overclocking capabilities, but there are already a lot of great new ones available, and processors with a TDP over 89W are not supported.


As you can see in the image above, the PCI Express x16 slot is placed below those two PCI Express x1 slots(which you won't use for sure), and a video card with a larger cooling system won't allow you to use properly any of the 3 PCI slots, without any overheating risks. Even more, a video card that's a bit longer may be a problem when you are going to use the SATA ports, but let's get to the good parts, shall we?

If a big video card may lead you into dropping the idea of using any PCI card, it's good to know that the onboard network adapter and the HD sound, both from Realtek, do their job wonderfully. As a side note, the network and sound parts on the mainboard are the only ones not using solid capacitors, but that shouldn't be such a big deal.

Now, let me tell you a few words about performance and overclocking. Last month, when I built a computer using a budget ASUS board, I was shocked to see that I wasn't able to set memory timings manually, so I ended up with a system running 4-4-4-12 DDR2 memory at some default (and really lame) timings. Congratulations, ASUS, you (don't) rock!

Speaking for myself, I managed to easily push my AMD X2 4000+ processor from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz by increasing the FSB to 230MHz on default voltage, but I heard about people achieving stable 250MHz FSB on this board. Anyway, I am not crazy about reaching the limits, I simply overclocked enough to have my memory run at 800MHz. Regarding the memory, I have to tell you that the maximum voltage that can be set in the BIOS is 2.3V, and this could help some people achieve tight timings or pretty high frequencies.

Getting back to the features, I should also mention that RAID is supported, but Firewire is missing. These being said, I guess it has come the time to draw the conclusions...

...so here we go: the MSI NEO-F V3 is a great budget board, with good overclocking capabilities, uses solid capacitors, and performance is very good, no matter if you want to overclock or not. On the negative side, I must quote the uninspired board layout, and the lack of Firewire connectors, because I can't think about anything else bad, at this time.

At last, if you were wondering...this board is Vista certified, but I must give you one last advice - be sure to get the latest drivers from the official page, and don't use the included software overclocking utility. If you have any problems, I'll be sure to help you, and if I can't help you, there's always the official MSI user forum.

Since currently this great board can be found for as little as $78, I think the MSI K9N Neo-F V3 still has some time left until becoming obsolete, although you won't build any record breaker using it. After all, we're not all trying to run Crysis at 1080p resolution, or get insane scores in 3D Mark...

Later edit:

Detect networking problems earlier with network assessment services which can diagnose for potential issues.