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After a two-week absence, the TR staff has lots to talk about in the latest episode of The Tech Report Podcast. Conference news dominates the discussion as Scott and the gang discuss the announcements coming from IDF and Nvision 08: Nvidia to allow SLI on the X58 chipset, Lucid’s exciting new take on multi-GPU load balancing, and Nehalem's turbo mode and power saving features. During the intermission, Joshua Buss talks about his first case review for TR, the Hiper Osiris, and his background in the enclosure world, trends he sees in the case market, and more. Finally, our editors cover AMD’s digital TV sale to Broadcom and doping among pro-gamers.

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Listener mail:

Dual core or quad core? (0:03:16) - from Peter (Aphasia on the forums):

"This question really springs from the last week when I built a new comp for myself. I read reviews, searched forums, had a few forum discussions. And one subject that is pretty controversial for some, not so much for others is the Dual vs. Quad core. In my case Intel. A good example of this is the Intels E8500 vs. say the Q9450 and Q9300 that was discussion in the TR review of the Q9300. The benchmarks for these is certainly depending on which application that is tested, but the Quads isn’t that bad, even less then what their per-core disadvantage in clockspeed would suggest. Although it might be that the extra cache manages to alleviate the clockspeed difference somewhat. So my question is really if you could do a piece with something of the following.
-Dual vs. Quad, when, if ever, will Quads be able to really be on par with duals even in non-optimized applications.
-How are the overclockability between the two technologies?"

Tech discussion:

Nvidia to enable native SLI on certified X58 motherboards (0:19:15)- Read more

Lucid's GPU load-balancer storms IDF (0:29:07)- Read more

Hiper Osiris enclosure review with Joshua Buss (0:43:21)- Read more

Nehalem updates – Turbo mode and power-saving features (1:05:58)- Read more

AMD sells its digital TV unit to Broadcom (1:17:53)- Read more

Is doping popular among pro gamers? (1:22:16)- Read more