What do you do to stir up the competition in a market saturated in dual-cores? How about offer three cores for the price of two. This is exactly what AMD hopes to accomplish with their aggressively priced, tri-core Phenom X3.

Only three months after the release of the award winning NH-U12P, Noctua is back with a more compact 92mm version, the NH-U9B. Mike puts the NH-U9B through its paces in the Icrontic lab.

Mike takes an in-depth look at five 1066MHz kits from Corsair, Kingston, OCZ and Crucial. PC2-8500 kits were once out of reach of the every day consumer. Today, with all of the DDR2 price cuts, they are an affordable alternative for those looking to get the most out of their systems.

Following Icrontic’s epic heatsink roundup last month, two more heatsinks have found their way into the lab. Today, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at Noctua’s brand new NH-U12P and SilverStone’s Nitrogon NT06-Lite.

The nature of the Core 2's design may be baffling, particularly to users exiting the era of synchronized Athlon XP buses, and we intend to cut through the haze and serve it straight - Icrontic style.

At first, I was not sure if I wanted to complicate the review with both socket 775 and AM2 results but in the end I am very glad that I did. It is not safe to assume that a heatsink will perform as well on AM2 as it does on 775.

The Black Edition processors offer something that AMD has historically reserved only for the most elite (and expensive) processors: multiplier-unlocking.

What we're going to discuss, the terms we'll use, and a few feature descriptions.

Starts with discussions of power, heat and cooling, OC in a nutshell, and the HTT bus. Continues with the math you'll need, CPU Multipliers, CMOS, bus locking, memory modules and timings. Ends with a discussion of CPU stepping codes, CPU selection, the Mobile Athlon 64, and other hardware.

The tools you'll need: Prime95, OCCT, Memtest86+, CPU-Z, A64 MemFreq 1.1, AMD64 MaxTCase, Monitoring Tools, Clockgen, A64 Tweaker, and several benchmarking products.

Steps 1 & 2: Qualifying your system, and finding the maximum CPU clock. We'll also do some longer-term stability testing.

Step 3: Finding the maximum memory clock at the best possible timings. Know your memory! Then we'll look at stability in the operating system, which is very different than surviving a benchmark.

Step 4: Balancing memory and CPU clock. We select a safe maximum CPU and memory clock with long-term stability testing. We conclude with benchmarking and some final thoughts.

There is a generally accepted rule that for every 10C decrease in temperature, a CPU should be able to increase its operating frequency by about 3%. Of course this math does not always work out terribly well, but simply put: "The colder the better". This is one of the most powerful CPU coolers available on the market: Asetek's Vapochill LS [AC]