Looking for a new standard case...

The Antec 900, which is our standard case you see in all of our photos on this site, has served us well, but we're shopping around for another case to suppliment it with. One case we really liked that made an appearance at CES in Las Vegas last month was the Cooler Master Cosmos S. We've built custom orders for customers based on the popular Cosmos case, but we always felt the appearance could be better (black instead of silver?), and we prefer to not have a swinging door on the front of a PC, so the drive bays can be easily accessed, and bay devices can be seen. Lo and behold, Cooler Master thought the same thing: Not bad. This might very well be the next standard Uberclok case. We have to get our hands on one (in late March) to see how it handles cooling and noise.

On the subject of standard components, we're transitioning the Reactor's motherboard from the 680i to the 780i chipset. There isn't a whole lot of difference, except that the upcoming Wolfdale-based quad core chips won't work in the 680i. The 780i also offers support for PCI 2.0 cards (not very important yet, but possibly later in '08) as well as slightly more robust Tri-SLI support (another technology that hasn't yet fully matured.) We'll continue to offer both boards in the Reactor for now, until we see more details on the upcoming 790i chipset.

Welcome, and some processor news...

Well, here it is - the Uberclok blog. In addition to offering superior performance at lower prices, our other main mission is to make it easier for you, the customer, to understand what choices you face. AMD or Intel? ATI or nVidia? 32 bit or 64? There's a LOT of information out there, and we're here to break it all down for you in brief, comprehensive bite-sized chunks so you can get on with the important stuff (GAMING of course.) Now that we have a blog, we can bring you up-to-date on a daily basis. Like now!

As expected, Intel announced a new CPU line-up at CES in January, and we're in the process of migrating to them. These are the "Penryn"-based "Wolfdale" chips that are built on a 45nm process, as opposed to the older 65nm. As you may know, we offer three different CPUs in our gaming PCs:

1. Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 (Ion only)
2. Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (Ion or Reactor)
3. Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Ion or Reactor)

The E4500 has a clear successor in the newly-announced E4700, but the entry-level CPU in the new E8xxx line, the E8200, is only about $30 more, and would allow us to bring three times as much L2 cache (6MB), a native FSB of 1333 instead of 800, and a 45nm chip to our default Ion configuration. We'll have to wait for both real-life test results and real-life pricing to emerge, but we might finally bid adios to the E4xxx line.

The E6xxx line has been completely replaced by the E8xxx, and we have already replaced the E6850 with the E8400. When the E8500 is available, we might shift to that instead if it makes sense (based on performance testing.) For about the same price we now have a faster chip with a bigger L2 cache, which offers a modest increase in gaming performance.

A similar fate awaits the Q6600, which will have had a spectacular run. Either the Q9300 or the Q9450 will take its place as our Quad CPU of choice. The 9450 is a bit above our desired price point, but the 12MB L2 cache might make it worthwhile. Again, real-life pricing and performance testing will decide.

The E8500 should become available this month, with the other changes happening in March.

- Thomas Glen