From the Labs, on the Slab: HD2900XT, 8800GTX Ultra!

Close encounters of the lab kind...

Leading up to Computex in June, hardware companies start announcing stuff. That means this month we've had a veritable deluge of new gear dumped on us from a great height, causing us to say 'cool!', followed by a post event 'ow', while we hold a nearby hard drive to the skull to stop the bleeding and start the benchmarking.

Two such beasts to enter the hallowed realms of the Atomic labs are the fabled R600, now known as AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900XT, and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800GTX Ultra.

The NVIDIA part is industrially groin tingling in black, or as Ben calls it 'the last of the V8 Interceptors', while the ATI part screams speed with chromed flames licking down the sides. We're talking serious muscle car type sexiness here.

We've also got a few Intel P35 boards, which means we're starting the transition into the dark world of DDR3. Then there's the Hitachi Terabyte hard drive that should be on the way very soon...

It's all fresh, it's all new, and all in issue 78 of Atomic.

Mmmm, video cards...