IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 16/04/2010

Elite Bastards review: CoolIT ECO A.L.C. water cooling system

Over the past year, the market for easy to install yet high performance water cooling kits for CPUs has grown markedly, largely thanks to the success in the marketplace of CoolIT's Domino unit which blazed trails in terms of both pricing and ease of use. Today, we take a look at what could well be considered CoolIT's successor to the Domino, the ECO A.L.C., which boasts an even lower price and an easier installation process, while promising similar cooling performance and noise levels. Can it deliver on those promises however? We find out.

As per the Domino, CoolIT's ECO ships with its own 120mm fan firmly attached to the cooler's radiator. Whereas fan speed on the Domino was controlled by a button on the unit itself which allowed you to cycle through three performance profiles, this time around the 120mm fan is controlled via a four-pin PWM header on the motherboard itself, allowing the ECO to adjust fan speed dependant upon CPU temperature up to a maximum of 1800 RPM. We're a big fan (with every pun intended) or PWM-controlled fans here, so in our book this is a definite improvement over the manual controls offered by the Domino, although of course your mileage may vary.

CoolIT ECO A.L.C. water cooling system review

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AMD Catalyst 10.4 preview driver released
If you're a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics board owner who has been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 of late, then you'll almost certainly want to grab this pre-release version of AMD's latest Catalyst 10.4 graphics driver, which promises to fix long map loading time issues with the game for these users, while a further driver is also on the way containing a similar fix for anyone using older AMD cards.

If you want to download this driver (which is available for Windows XP, Vista and 7) then you can do so from the AMD support web site.

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Intel begins shipping samples of Sandy Bridge

We won't be seeing actual products based upon it until next year, but according to Intel the company has already begun shipping samples of its latest 32 nanometre Sandy Bridge architecture to customers, suggesting that it's well placed to continue along the road of its recent successes.

Intel Corp. said on Tuesday that it had begun sampling of its code-named Sandy Bridge processors with customers in Q1 2010, about a year ahead of the actual commercial product launch. In addition, the company indicated that its 32nm fabrication process technology is the fastest manufacturing process ever.

“We began volume sampling [of Sandy Bridge processors] in Q1, shipping thousands of samples to a broad range of customers and we are planning [to begin] volume production later this year,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive officer and president of Intel.

X-Bit Labs has the full story.

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