ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING bits of chip engineering to come out of AMD’s labs has been the 790GX. Guru 3D has a Foxconn A7DA-S based on this chipset in the office, and Hilbert is pretty enthused with the chip combo. The Foxconn mobo uses sideport memory to improve graphics performance, HDMI, DVI-D, VGA and the souped-up HD 3300 core. It also introduces several powersaving features that lower consumption considerably, and will even support the top end Phenom with 140W TDP. ‘Tis a good HTPC mobo, it seems.

PC Perspective unboxed a NZXT Tempest Crafted Series case (it resembles Antec’s own Nine Hundred case). The Tempest is a real wind-blower; it’s got six pre-installed fans to keep air circulation high, as well as some internal fans to keep components cool (HD cage, for one). You can fit pretty much everything you need in this one and if you need extra cooling, it even has pre-drilled holes for watercooling. Inexpensive, too. Get it here.

Hardware Canucks have rounded up some 9800GT cards, some overclocked, some not, and put them through their paces. Considering the 9800GT is essentially the same as the 8800GT, says HC, can we find a difference? Well, looking at the feature set it’s more a matter of which optional features did the partner implement to give it a minimal spin. HC can’t point anything really negative (except the extreme confusion coming from the transition), quite on the contrary, the 9800GT is at a decent enough price point and offers good performance for the buck. Naturally, not all 9800GTs are made the same…

OCC, in its hardcore enthusiast drive, is testing the Geil Ultra DDR3-1600 2x1GB kit. These have an XMP profile, which lets your XMP-enabled mobo correctly identify the memory profiles on the chip. Performance is nothing to sneeze at, but the DDR3-1600 kit requires a bit more power to operate than other DDR3 out there, 1.9V. It’s moderately overclockable and carries a lifetime warranty which will give you some peace of mind. No info on pricing tho’. Read about it here.

Wolfking markets the Timber Wolf gaming keyboard which is on review at Benchmark Reviews. Of all the odd-shaped keyboards out there, this one takes the cake. It sports a secondary WASD keyboard to the left of the main keyboard, with additional keys for special moves and weapon switching. It also has a USB hub with a couple of “outs” so you can plug in minor USB devices there. It’s also damn quiet and not too expensive. Wolfking seems to be on track. Get it here.

There’s an interesting bit of tech at Legit Reviews. It’s called the IstarUSA XAGE-N99-US USB 2.0 HD docking station. It operates hard drives much the same way you’d pop your Ipod in its dock and is SATA II compatible. You can slot either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives, which makes it a great tool if you’ve got lots of older drives hanging around outside a case. There’s an eSATA version too, in case you’re interested. Read about it here.

802.11n networking still hasn’t completely matured but that hasn’t stopped companies from churning out new products like this TRENDnet TEW-624UB 300Mbps Wireless N USB adapter. This is a very cheap (compared to other 802.11n) USB dongle which seems to have a decent feature set, but poor-ish range and no support for Vista 64bit. Mixed opinions all over. µ