WITH INTEL'S P45 officially launching in June, Bit-Tech went to the bottom of the chipset making the most of some time spent with MSI engineers and Mr. Leach from OCZ. Apparently overclocking on the P45 (and we’ve seen something about Nehalem OC-ing, somewhere... honest) will be a lot of trial and error with minute tweaking and frustrating (we’re sure of it) results. Don’t take our word for it... that’s what the engineers are saying.

Maingear’s Axess HTPC is on review at Computer Shopper. It’s main goal is to make you forget it’s a PC, which it does seem to achieve to some degree. Kitted with a Phenom X4 9550+780G combo and a 1TB hard drive, the Axess also offers HD-DVD, Blu-ray and a TV Tuner. You can imagine it isn’t the greatest gaming machine on earth, but a definite piece of design. It does carry the hefty price of $2379, though, but that’s the price you pay to have a cool PC in your living room. Read the review here.

Benchmark Reviews is affording readers an in-depth look into the nuances of DDR3 memory. This is one of those “de-mystification” editorials, as there are a lot of misconceptions about DDR3 floating on the web. The article also covers some previous memory tests performed by Olin, and some interesting overclocking numbers. Olin concludes there’s a lot of things going on with DDR3, and the brainiacs behind it, and some might warrant more of the consumers’/reviewers’ attention... Read lots of aeronautical jargon over here.

OCC has two bits o’ interesting news today. First of all they’ve announced they’ve merged with DIY-Street, secondly they’ve published this here review of Mushkin’s Ascent XP3-16000 2x1GB kit. Mushkin has been pretty tame in its DDR3 offering, but the Ascent breaks some new ground with the Celsia vapour-chamber-based “nanospreader” – this sucks out a lot of heat directly from the memory modules. Apparently latencies are also pretty tight for DDR3. Still expensive. Read it here.

The Lords of Linux - Phoronix – have a geeker’s guide to overclocking an Nvidia Quadro graphics card (an FX1700). This is based on the soon-to-be-extinct G84 core, and represents the Quadro low-end. Using CoolBits gives you instant gratification for zero cost (+10%/+25% core and memory, respectively). Results are more or less equal to the amount of overclocking. This is good news indeed for the CAD/CAE Linux crowd.

TechARP has a review of WD’s 1TB Caviar GP (green power) SATA drive. The GP marchitecture says this is really what you should be sticking in a low-power PC, HTPC, or business machine (where low power consumption is important). It’s not the highest performing part on the market, not by a long shot, but if Green matters to you (or you need big storage on a little budget), we think this is interesting enuff.

There’s a duel at sunset taking place at HotHardware today. They’re facing off Asus’ and a HIS’ OC versions of the HD3650s. This is like kitting out your small hatchback to make it go faster, but just how fast will it take you. Well, the Asus is rated 800/900 while the HIS is 790/890. Performance-wise don’t ex pect great results, but sometimes you just can’t spare $200 for a new graphics card. Catch it here. µ