3dfx Zone has released an updated driver package for 3dfx accelerators, version 6.17.0065.0001 (SFFT 1.5), published today. The driver is based on a unified architecture, meaning the same driver would work for a whole range of 3dfx GPUs, Voodoo3 and upwards. This includes Voodoo3 2000, Voodoo3 3000 and Voodoo3 3500 cards, as well as all 3dfx VSA-100 products and so Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 and Voodoo5 6000 cards, is on line.

This driver extends support to Windows 2000, Windows XP (both 32bit and 64bit). Apparently there isn't a Windows Vista driver, possibly due to the newer driver model. 3dfx Zone also publishes Set3Tile and Set4Tile Utilities that tweak the texture-handling capabilities of the accelerators. For more information, visit this page.

DOWNLOAD: 3dfx Zone SFFT 1.5 | Set3Tile and Set4Tile Utilities.

Back when Redmond was gearing up for the launch of Windows Vista, the PC hardware industry had its own plans, of brandishing support for the new operating system. Microsoft then came up with its "Windows Vista-Capable" hardware tag, which eventually put the company into an embarrassing situation where users would rant about their hardware, more so branded PCs and notebooks, being anything but capable of the OS. That was because vendors sold PCs with dated DirectX 9 supportive hardware, which didn't quite qualify to be "capable" of the DirectX 10 API the OS shipped with. The company even saw itself facing charges for false marketing.

To avoid that happening with the next release of the OS, Windows 7, Microsoft shaped up the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP10). WARP10 is a component of the DirectX 10 API that provides software rasterization for all DirectX 10 calls, using every available hardware component the PC has. Think of it as 100% software acceleration in the absence of compliant hardware. It is shipping in beta form in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. Now, even a Pentium III 800 MHz will be "capable" of rendering Direct3D 10 scenes, as Microsoft puts it. With this, Microsoft guarantees that any and every PC or notebook carrying the "Vista Capable" sticker would be able to use every single feature the OS has to offer, including DirectX 10. WARP10 benefits from multi-threaded and multi-core CPUs, with specific benefits coming out from the availability of SSE4.1 instruction sets. Microsoft claims that even the CPU in Windows Vista's minimum system requirements list will be capable of WARP10. The excitement however, dies down when you find out just how capable today's CPUs are in accelerating 3D: An Intel Core i7 was able to "run" Crysis, on a resolution of 800 x 600, churning out a proud 7.36 frames per second (at least it managed to beat Intel's best integrated graphics). To learn more about WARP10, visit this page.

HIPER has announced the availability of its high-end M1000 PSU. This 1000W PSU boasts of an 80 Plus Bronze efficiency rating. It offers semi-modular cabling, where the most important cables are fixed, while peripheral and PCI-Express power connectors are given modularity. It is NVIDIA 3-way SLI capable. It is backed by a 5-year warranty. It will be priced at € 169 in Europe. For more information please visit the product page.A list of features are as follows:

VIA Technologies, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today introduced the new Aristo Pico 840 mini-note, the latest model in the Aristo Pico Series to be based on the ultra low power VIA C7-M processor platform.
Building on the success of the Aristo Pico 640 and 740, the Aristo Pico 840 has been custom designed for both the professional on the go and the digital traveler looking for on-line entertainment on the move. Its A4 notebook size, crisp 8.9 inch 1024x600 screen and light weight, at just over 1kg, make it the perfect travel companion for short trips or long journeys.

EVGA has announced that it would be giving away free 21-day trials of the popular MMORPG, EVE Online. Owners of EVGA graphics cards and motherboards (products listed below) are eligible for the offer. To activate the 21 day trial, EVGA products must be registered. Users must proceed to My Products page to get your CD-Key. After that, visit the EVGA EVE Online link and input the CD-Key.The list of Eligible EVGA products is as follows:

Personal storage expert Plextor unveils the first truly pocket-sized external hard disk - one of the smallest 1.8-inch drives in the world. Weighing just 90g, this miniature device enables home users and business users to carry and share important data with them anywhere.
Perfect for PC and Mac users who find memory sticks too limiting, yet don't want the bulk of a full-sized external drive, the Plextor Pocket HDDs are only about the size of three memory sticks, yet offer much larger capacities - up to 120GB of storage. Plextor's pocket HDDs come in two sizes, the 60GB PX-PPH60U and the 120GB PX-PPH120U.

Corsair, swimming in accolades for its high quality power supplies, is taping out two new models for launch: TX850W and HX1200W. The TX850W is a slight improvement over the TX750W. It will come with 12V circuitry churning out 70A, and 30A each for the 5V and 3.3V circuits. It will offer four 6+2pin PCI-Express connectors. Retailers in Europe have already stocked this part, which is on offer for 132,55 €.

The other PSU in the works is Corsair's next flagship model: HX1200W. This modular PSU is an improvement over the HX1000W, but has changes in its +12V rail arrangement. While the HX1000W has two 40A rails, the HX1200W will have two rails rated at 20A each and two rails at 36A each (totaling 112A). It will have the 30A rails for the 3.3V and 5V circuits.

I-O Data released its newest lineup of portable hard-drives under the HDPS-U series. The drives come in capacities of 160 GB, 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB in black and white shells. Connectivity includes USB 2.0 for transfer speeds of 43 MB/s, 39 MB/s (read/write).

The shell encloses a 2.5 inch hard drive which is protected from mechanical damage by a reinforced frame with rubberised corner grips. The unit weighs around 170g. The company will be shipping these drives by mid-December in Japan, with price tags of roughly US $110, $121, $166 and $221 depending on the capacities in the above order.

PhotoFast is readying two new additions to its solid state drive lineup, with the G-Monster V2 series SSDs. These drives brandish high-performance and capacities by standards of SSDs. The two drives, models PF25S128GSSDV2 and PF25S256GSSDV2 come with capacities of 128 GB and 256 GB respectively. The drives offer read speeds up to 230 MB/s and 160 MB/s writes. They use the standard SATA II interface. The drives support all major operating systems, and sport durability in the form of a high MTBF of 2.5 million hours. The company is expected to start shipping these SSDs by the end of this year.

We all know that for years Thermalright was selling all its coolers without any fans. With the entrance of Core i7 and its LGA 1366 socket, Thermalright made one exception, releasing the Ultra-120 eXtreme-1366RT Cooler bundled with a 12cm fan and fan holder for it. Now Thermalright is launching a whole new line of 120mm fans, designed for multiple purposes. Coming in 4 versions, the fans measure 120x120x25mm and represent the work of Thermalright's partner ADDA. All 4 models feature Fluid Dynamic Bearings, 60,000 hours operational time and 3-year warranty. Let's have a look at the specs:

• TR-FDB-1000 - 1000 RPM ± 10%, 38.9 CFM airflow, 15.8 dB/A
• TR-FDB-1300 - 1300 RPM ± 10%, 50.0 CFM airflow, 24.1 dB/A
• TR-FDB-1600 - 1600 RPM ± 10%, 63.7 CFM airflow, 28.0 dB/A
• TR-FDB-2000 - 2000 RPM ± 10%, 80.5 CFM airflow, 38.0 dB/A

These fans are available now for as low as $12.99.

Elpida Memory, Japan's leading global supplier of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), today announced that its Board of Directors has decided to acquire a portion of the shares its strategic partner Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC) owns in Rexchip Electronics Corporation (Rexchip), a Taiwan-based manufacturing joint venture created by PSC and Elpida. Details of the share acquisition appear below.

The long rumored Jasper version of Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console has finally hit retail shelves. Up until now, we knew almost everything about Jasper, but non of us knew how to recognize the console, or if it was retailing at all. No official information was released, but xbox-scene report claims that Jasper Xbox 360s are finally arriving in stores. The revised console comes bundled with a new 150W (12.1A whereas old model draw 14.2A) power supply that is 25W less powerful than the power supply bundled with previous generation Falcon consoles. The new power supply is almost 100% proof that the console you're looking is Jasper. Also, according to the report all consoles manufactured after October 23rd 2008 with LOT number 0843X and manufactured from FDOU, should be a Jasper. At last, let us remind what Jasper means. That's the official code name for the last generation Xbox 360 consoles. Falcon consoles come with new 65nm GPU (90nm in previous generation) that produces less heat. Jasper consoles also should utilize new revised cooler and internals that will reduce the overall temperature and noise coming from it. Finally, with Jasper, we don't have to worry for the RRoD (Red Ring of Death) failure anymore.

Aeneon by Qimonda, the channel and retail brand of Qimonda, announced availability of its DDR3-1600 Triple Channel Kits (CL9) with 3GB and 6GB for the new Intel Core i7 processor and Intel X58 Express chipset. The new kits, coming with three memory modules per kit, will bring high performance memory with standard voltage to the next generation high-end desktop platform matching exactly the needs of the new Intel flagship.

Smoothcreations, a leading manufacturer of Custom PC gaming systems, desktop workstations, and Laptops, introduced today, in collaboration with Intel & BFG, are proud to announce the Smoothcreations "P90X" series.

Stop showing up to Lan parties with gaming rigs that look like some else's pc. Turn heads, and then shred them with the P90X series. The first Water cooled portable performance PC from Smooth Creations. Configurable options available in price point category platform solutions.

Buffalo has released an Intel-made solid-state drive (SSD), model SHD-NSMR 80G. The 2.5 inch, 80 GB drive is built on the multi-level cell (MLC) design, with rated sequential read speeds of up to 253 MB/s, with random read speeds of 241.7 MB/s. The drive uses standard SATA II interface. It measures 100 × 70 × 10mm (width × height × depth), and weighs 88g.

The drive bundles a decent set of related software by Acronis: MigrateEasy data migration software, TrueImage LE data backup software, DiskDirector LE partition management software, and DriveCleanser data secure-deletion software. The drive is now out in Japan and costs 103,950 JPY (about $1,090).

Lian-Li Industrial Co. Ltd is launching the EX-P3A (silver) and EX-P3B (Black) HDD bracket cooling kit. The bracket is made of aluminum and sits flush against the bottom plate of the hard drive, protecting the HDD from physical damage, as well as drawing unwanted heat out of the HDD. In addition the connector face protects the HDD SATA connectors from wear and tear while extending the SATA connectors. The HDD Bracket takes up the equivalent of 1x 5.25 bay internally and will be an excellent addition to systems that run hot and need the extra protection that Lian Li provides in this compact unit.

GlacialTech, the diversified provider of cooling, power supply, PC enclosure solutions for consumer and industrial applications, today announced the launch of UFO V51 range of CPU coolers for the and high-end AMD CPUs, designed for gaming and other high I/O applications.

Sporting a UFO like design, the UFO V51 coolers are made up of two 92mm ultra silent fans, four heat-pipes with 6mm and 8mm diameter, aluminum fins, long-life sleeve bearings and a stylish plastic encase. Available in 2 versions, UFO 51 Silent and UFO 51 PWM, the latest Glacialtech CPU coolers come with an Intel LGA 775 or AMD (754/939/940/AM2/F) socket and is compatible with Intel Core i7, Intel Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium Extreme, Pentium Dual-Core, Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron Dual-Core, Celeron D and Celeron; as well as AMD Phenom, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2 Dual -Core, Opteron and Sempron.

Sources in the industry point out that the 7 GT/s GDDR5 memory chip made by Hynix (model: H5GQ1H24AFR), which was announced earlier in this week, would make it to several major graphics board SKUs by both AMD and NVIDIA. The two companies have chosen TSMC and its 40nm fabrication process as the foundry partner for their upcoming 40nm graphics processors, namely AMD RV870 and NVIDIA GT212.

Both these chips would feature GDDR5 memory bus capabilities, and there are indications of the 7 GT/s DRAM chip being incorporated into graphics boards based on these GPUs. Additionally, there is also word that AMD will be using the said DRAM chip in its current flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the near future. Both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to have taped out their 40nm GPU designs within Q1, 2009.

DigiTimes reports that Intel is to phase out its most beloved 65nm 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor in the first quarter of 2009.

Intel is planning to start phasing out the 65nm Core 2 Quad Q6600 in the first quarter of 2009, prompting several PC and channel vendors to start planning to cut Q6600-product prices to clear their inventory before the end of this year, according to sources at PC vendors.
Intel will issue a product discontinuance notice for the Q6600 in the first quarter next year, and call end-of-lifecycle in the second quarter.
Acer has reduced pricing for its Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600-based desktops to below NT$13,900 (US$418) for the IT Month consumer show in the Taiwan market, and other vendors are expected to follow suit.

Yes, the title says it right. I just saw a YouTube video taken from Micron' headquarters, where the company's Joe Jeddeloh demonstrates the rough power of solid state technology. During the footage he demonstrates a prototype of comething called Washington solid state drive mounted on a PCI-E card that delivers read speeds of over 1GB/sec. Now we all know that these drives won't come in a month time, but they show how good the SSD technology really is. Maybe, this experiment also gives a hint how desperately we need a new SATA standard, current SATA 3Gbps drives no matter conventional or SSD can output only 300MB/s in theory. Back to the video, there two SSD PCI-E cards are running on a 2GHz eight-core Xeon system. Benchmarks of this configuration show output of 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). Although, you can't actually read these numbers because of the video's low resolution, Jeddeloh says that one PCI-E drive can read at around 800MB/sec, while a pair of cards can read at 1GB/sec. Micron claims that there's nothing special about the flash memory the drives use, in fact these are ordinary SLC (single level cell) drives. They're only "managed correctly." At the end of the video, Jeddeloh also shows a single 8x PCI-E card that features two SSDs on a single board, that he claims also offer "at least" 1GB/sec of bandwidth. Micron plans "wide availability of the product in 2010, but that its going to be targeted at enterprise customers first." For now this is only a quick look in the future. Watch the video over at Micron's Advanced Storage Blog.

Intel plans its own public demonstration of the overclocking capabilities of the Core i7 processors. This, in response to rival AMD achieving an overclock of well beyond 5.00 GHz, and booting at speeds above 6.00 GHz. The engineers at Intel reportedly carried out a large-scale binning of Core i7 processors, to cherry-pick the best performing part. The scale of binning could well be best of 100,000 units.

A chief engineer at Intel, Francoise Piednoel expressed his reservations regarding the 6.00 GHz overclocking feat AMD carried out with its upcoming Phenom II X4 processor last week, saying that the overclocking capabilities of the Phenom II X4 demonstrated do not reflect those of release-grade products, and cannot be replicated in a real-world setting. AMD may have disabled several sensors on the cherry-picked chip used in its demonstration, which facilitated that overclock. In response to this, Intel would be disabling the same sensors, in its special demonstration chip. The demo could be held at CES 2009. The professional overclocker chosen to achieve this feat would be none other than FUGGER from XtremeSystems. FUGGER could be set the task of taking the most desirable, binned Core i7 965 Extreme Edition chip all the way up to a stellar 7.00 GHz, if all goes well.

Razer, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end precision gaming and lifestyle electronics peripherals, today announced a new line of merchandise designed specifically for gamers who frequent LAN parties and gaming tournaments. This limited edition series includes tees, messenger bags, a gear rack, laptop sleeves and an accessory pouch that equips gamers with gear to bring their gaming rig around. The Razer Messenger Bag (Sling Edition) is a laptop bag that fits a 15" laptop along with an additional gaming mouse and headset for the essentials when gamers taking their gaming on the road. The Razer Messenger Bag (shoulder edition) goes all out with the packing capacity of a laptop, keyboard, mouse and headphones, allowing gamers to take their complete gaming arsenal to LAN parties and tournaments.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has sent a newsletter to its channel partners today, informing them for yet another price cut that affects the company's desktop processor line-up. Several Phenom X4, Phenom X3 and Athlon X2 processors will be 10 to 20 percent cheeper starting next month. The prices below are not the usual prices "in 1000-unit tray quantities", but approximate street prices.

Many hear about overclocking events around the world, mostly being held in exotic locations. AwardFabrik organized such an event in good old Germany, inviting some great overclockers to try their hand at pushing the systems during various contests and competitions. The event lasted for two days and the contestants use up a whopping 1.450 liters of LN2 during the time. Check out the link below for some great images and insight, as to what happens during such an event.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it is now mass producing 25 and 50 gigabyte (GB) solid state drives (SSDs) for performance-optimized server applications such as video on demand, web serving and on-line transaction processing.
Designed specifically for the enterprise market, the new Samsung single-level-cell (SLC) SSDs have about twice the random write performance of its standard 32GB and 64GB SLC SSDs.

AMD would be releasing its desktop 45nm CPUs, starting with two models under the Phenom II X4 banner. At this point in time, there is a great deal of uncertainty about when AMD plans to stock retailers with the new CPUs. The company's own roadmaps pointed out to a Q1 2009 launch, with several sources reporting then, that an early January launch was likely, but now it seems unlikely according to sources, who suggest these processors to stock up in March or later.

Meanwhile, a slide showing what looks like the the company's performance projections for the Phenom II X4 940, made its way to Expreview. The Phenom II X4 940 quad-core processor (Black Edition variant) would serve as the company's flagship desktop processor in the months to come, until it gets a proper AM3 refresh, and taken over by Phenom II X4 945. In the slide, the Phenom II X4 940 is pitted against two seemingly mainstream quad-core processors by Intel: Core 2 Quad Q9300 and Core 2 Quad Q9400. A percentage comparison in the gaming performance across some games and 3DMark06 is shown.

GeIL Memory USA debuts today no less than 22 new triple-channel DDR3 kits, yes twenty two indeed. These kits are part of the company's Value and Utra series. All kits come with lifetime warranty and aluminum heatspreaders. The full list of all memory kits follows below.

Lenovo today introduced its "e" netbooks, the IdeaPad S9e and S10e netbooks. Designed for mobile users from all walks of life, the new netbooks combine the portability of a small and light PC device starting under 1.2kg with Internet and multimedia functionality at an affordable price.
"Our new IdeaPad S10e and S9e offer Lenovo's unmatched end user experience and quality to whole new set of users in the market place." said Vincent Fauquenot, VP Transactional Business, Lenovo EMEA. "With the new netbooks, Lenovo introduces a very attractive design, price point, and specification that delivers affordable mobile computing for families and professionals."

Acer's Taiwan president Scott Lin confirmed today that Acer plans to launch 10-inch Aspire One netbooks in February or March next year. Despite the bigger screen and most likely the bigger keyboard, the 10-inch Aspire One will probably have the same specifications as the 8.9-inch One on the market today, including the Intel Atom processor and Microsoft Windows XP Home OS. Unfortunately, all this information has to be confirmed.

Acer plans to launch 10-inch Aspire One netbooks in February or March next year, according to Scott Lin, Acer Taiwan president. As for its 8.9-inch netbooks currently available, the 3.5G module-based Aspire One netbooks being bundled with Taiwan Mobile (TWM) services is expected to reach a shipment volume of 9,000 units in the Taiwan market in the fourth quarter this year, Lin said. Acer currently sells 10,000-20,000 Aspire Ones and 7,000-8,000 consumer notebooks monthly in Taiwan, he added. Lin also pointed out in Taiwan, notebook average selling prices (ASPs) are expected to continue dropping through the end of this year, with an average decline of 10%. High-end and lowest-cost models will feel less price pressure, while models within the range of NT$30,000-40,000 (US$900-1200) will see the largest price drops, he said. The company will also launch a 14.1-inch LED-based notebook priced below NT$40,000 during the upcoming IT Month-a local promotional sales event-and is preparing to launch 12.1-inch, 13.3-inch and 15.6-inch LED-based notebooks in 2009. Acer will also start selling a 13.3-inch notebook and all-in-one PCs based on its sub-brand Gateway during the show and the company expects the 13.3-inch notebook will fill up the gap in Acer's product range.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, today announced the HX450W, part of the newly-established Corsair Professional Series of enthusiast-class, modular power supply units. The new Corsair Professional Series incorporates the existing HX-series of PSUs, which includes the multi award-winning Corsair Professional Series HX1000W, and the new Corsair Professional Series HX450W is engineered to the same exacting standards.

Zotac released the Nitro OC Panel device back in August, making it proprietary for use by owners of Zotac graphics hardware. The panel provides quick-access controls to the video cards' clock speeds, and also keeps the users posted, on parameters such as fan speeds and temperatures. Being a proprietary tool, users of graphics cards made by other manufacturers couldn't use the device, since at its software back-end, the Firestorm software would run compatibility checks.

Italian website NextHardware discovered a trick to evade the compatibility check by simply holding down the "shift" key while clicking on OK when the dialog box showing compatibility failure appears. The latest version of Firestorm software that supports this hack can be downloaded from here.

For people that still experience the freezing problems with their 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, here is some relief for you. As previously reported here, Seagate has released a new firmware for the small number of drives with strange behaviour. Here's the official statement:

Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade. In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com) Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions. As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Again, to obtain the firmware first you need to find your HDD's model number, serial number, current firmware version using either Seatools for DOS or just look at the drive's sticker it should be written there, and finally you need to describe your system specs, operating system and the application in use when the disk freezes. After you have that information, please contact Seagate Technical Support, by email or by phone, they'll send you the new firmware and probably tell you how to update.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous leading-edge technologies and continues to lay the groundwork for derivative open source distributions throughout the enterprise.
"Fedora volunteer contributors and Red Hat engineers worked together to develop the cutting-edge features found in Fedora 10. Their widespread appeal, combined with Fedora's policy of collaborating with upstream free software communities, means that many of these features will be found in other Linux distributions in the future," said Paul Frields, Fedora project leader at Red Hat.

Covered exactly a week ago here and scheduled for December launch, the all black limited Cooler Master COSMOS already has two new pictures to show all its beuty and we want to share them with you. PCGamesHardware has acquired the two images which allow us to get a better idea of the case. Everything else you already know, the case will come on 11th of December, only 500 units will be produced, the clear side window is obvious from the pictures and the top fans of the case will be 140mm in diameter.

Cooler Master COSMOS Black official website

Elpida Memory, Japan's leading global supplier of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), today announced that it has completed development of a 50nm process DDR3 SDRAM. The new DRAM product features the lowest power consumption in the industry, 2.5Gbps ultra high speed and a 1.2V low voltage operation based on the industry's smallest chip size. The new 50nm process DDR3 SDRAM was developed using the industry's most advanced 193nm (ArF) immersion lithography technology and copper interconnect technology and has a chip size of less than 40mm2. Also, the new SDRAM is an eco-friendly DRAM. It operates on not only DDR3 standard 1.5V supply voltage but even lower voltages of 1.35V and 1.2V and contributes to the low-power operations of high-density memory systems such as servers and data centers.

BFG Technologies, Inc., the leading North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies, and other PC enthusiast products, announced today the BFG LS Series and MX Series modular power supplies.

The BFG LS and MX Series offer performance class features and benefits as well as typical efficiency of up to 85%, so more power is converted to DC than many other power supplies on the market. The MX Series is identical to the acclaimed BFG LS Series with the addition of modular cable management, allowing customers to use only the cables they need, providing better aesthetics and airflow.

high reliability memory and components, today revealed the first power supply models under the Fatal1ty series, offering gamers stable and efficient power for their mainstream or high-end rigs. OCZ is dedicated to delivering premium power solutions, and the Fatal1ty series options are the first step to creating an exceptional gaming system for the unique power and cabling requirements of today's gamer.

In addition to the newly released P6T6 WS Revolution workstation motherboard, ASUS has one more announcement to make today. From now on owners of high-end ASUS motherboards will have one more feature that will justify the price premium they pay over other brands. It's called ASUS Premium Service (APS) program and it will help consumers requiring RMA to cross-ship defective boards for replacement free of charge. In addition APS motherboards will be serviced faster and with higher priority so you won't have to wait months. ASUSTeK's current motherboards that support the Premium Service include most of the Republic of Gamers (R.O.G.) series boards as well as the Intel X58 iCore7 P6T Deluxe mainboard. The R.O.G. models included are: CROSSHAIR II FORMULA, MAXIMUS II FORMULA, RAMPAGE FORMULA, RAMPAGE EXTREME, RAMPAGE II EXTREME, STRIKER II NSE, STRIKER II EXTREME, and STRIKER II FORMULA. Effective immediately, owners of the above motherboards can benefit from the ASP if needed and contact the ASUS Customer Service or visit the ASUS Live Support.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system and notebook manufacturer, today has disclosed the remarkable achievement that the newly lunched X58B-A Black Series motherboard is creating the world record of overclocking. Reaching the B-Clock of 215MHz, ECS X58B-A has set up a mile stone of overclocking the latest high-performance Intel Core i7 processors among Intel X58 Express chipset based motherboards.

Instead of staying focus on pursuing the processor's core speed, ECS X58B-A provides another path to the wonderland of outstanding performance. With ECS's innovative design, the X58B-A motherboard is capable to reach the unbelievable B-Clock of 215MHz and to overclock the processor up to the core speed of 4GHz simultaneously. Performance extremists will experience dramatically increased computing capability which comes from the incredible core speed as well as the extraordinary QPI bandwidth under this configuration. Simply by using air cooling system, ECS X58B-A creates the world records of overclocking the B-Clock up to 215MHz that realizes the possibility of building an exceptional platform even without any additional efforts such as preparing those complicated cooling equipment.

Last week, AMD stunned the computer enthusiast community by displaying the overclocking headroom the upcoming Phenom II processors could offer. Sources among channel vendors then leaked it to the press, that at least two models under the Phenom II banner await a January 8~10 launch schedule across various markets. Sources tell OC Workbench that they are very skeptical about its availability as early as in January. The sources said that they expect mass-availability of the processors only by March, or even as late as June 2009, in time for next year's Computex event.

The ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution is the ideal foundation for a powerful workstation for Small Office usage, SOHOs and mainstream workstation users; with its unparalleled performance. Through ASUS' revolutionary and innovative design, the P6T6 WS Revolution is able to support three true x16 link PCI-E slots for NVIDIA's 2-way & 3-way SLI and ATi CrossFireX technologies to deliver extreme graphical processing performance. Furthermore, it is also equipped with 6 PCI-E Gen2 x16 slots onboard to provide users with high speed I/O and flexible graphic and computing options.

The P6T6 WS Revolution comes equipped with built-in 3-way SLI/CrossFireX on Demand technology for outstanding graphical performance. This revolutionary technology allows users to enjoy 2-way / 3-way SLI technology or CrossFireX support on the same motherboard. This means that users will be able to install up to three 3-Way SLI-capable graphics cards and retain the flexibility to run a CrossFireX setup. Whichever option they choose, users are guaranteed mind-boggling graphics performance for improved work efficiency. It can also support true @16 PCI-E Gen2 3-Way SLI technology, which will present the fastest and the most reliable graphic performance to users whether they are engaged in Mechanical/ Architecture/ Interior/ Aircraft/ Audio/Video Design or playing games in their leisure time.

Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media, today announced the immediate availability of Crucial DDR3-1066 (PC3-8500) and DDR3-1333 (PC3-10600) three channel memory kits in support of Intel's next generation Core i7 processors. Users ready to harness the power of three channel memory can find guaranteed-compatible Crucial DDR3 modules in 3GB, 6GB and 12GB kits at Crucial.

Have you ever thought of overclocking your shiny little netbook, probably not, but here's what might happen if you're wondering. In my humble opinion this is ridiculous, but it's possible. Overclocking experts from Team Australia, using an ordinary MSI Wind U100 netbook and a single Kingston 2GB DDR2 667Mhz SO-DIMM, have done the unthinkable, overclock the hell out of an Intel Atom N270 netbook processor. If you remember, MSI recently released a v1.09 BIOS for the Wind that allows overclocking. That's exactly what Team AU have done, dismantle an MSI Wind netbook, put some LN2 cooling and use the latest BIOS to max the Intel Atom CPU frequency. The end result is pretty good, they've managed to push the poor 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU to an amazing 2385MHz (FSB 199 x 12 multiplier) and take a CPU-Z snapshot. There's really no point in doing that, but it's pure fun. The full discussion thread for this insane experiment is posted over at XtremeSystems.

YouTube, the site that's everywhere around us for one reason or another, is finally widescreen ready. The first thing you'll notice when you enter YouTube today will be the new widescreen look of all uploaded videos and the slightly bigger aspect of the site. This highly anticipated widescreen update comes to replace the older 4:3 look of all videos. Now viewers can enjoy playing 16:9 videos in fullscreen. The site's width is also expanded to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos. The YouTube team also claims that all 4:3 videos will play just fine regardless of the new aspect ratio.

Micron on Monday said to CNET that it would start mass-production of its long-awaited RealSSD C200 256GB solid state drives early next year. More specificaly, a Micron representative said that the company will start volume production in March 2009, and although both Micron and Intel have just unveiled 34nm memory technology, the 256GB SSDs won't utilize it. Using the new 34nm process will allow both companies to deliver drives with over 300GB of storage space, but that's another story plus these drives won't come out until the end of 2009. According to some information given before, the 2.5-inch Micron RealSSD C200 256GB SSDs will read data at 250MB/s and write at 100MB/s. The new SSDs will have a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and will make use of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips. Previously, Micron said the drives were to enter mass production in Q4 2008, but the chipmaker is slightly behind schedule and won't make it until next year.

Patriot Memory, a global provider of premium quality memory module and flash memory solutions, announced their DDR3 3GB and 6GB Viper Series Tri-Channel memory kits are certified for use with Intel Core i7 processor-based systems. Intel has certified five Patriot Memory Viper Series Tri-Channel kits for use on various motherboards from Asus, Intel, MSI and Gigabyte, the most of any current memory manufacturer.

Intel Core i7 brings unprecedented system performance gains over previous Intel architectures. Viper Series Tri-Channel memory kits ship with Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP) that allow for easy, uncomplicated over-clocking for optimum system performance. "Viper Series Tri-Channel memory support of the new Core i7 processor is only possible by working closely with Intel," says Les Henry, Technical Director for Patriot Memory. Mr. Henry further stated, "The large number of skus and platforms these kits are certified on exemplifies Patriot's strong R&D and our dedication to the enthusiast market."

If you're still one of the few owners of an old AGP video card made by BFG Tech, here's what. As of today, BFG Tech is offering those AGP owners to trade in their current working AGP BFG graphics card for a BFG PCI Express graphics card. BFG only requires your BFG AGP card to come in good, working condition, and they'll send the PCI-E equivalent at no cost to you. If you want to upgrade to an even better performing card, add $50 and you have it. Please note, that the offer is for U.S. customers only. The chart below shows BFG AGP cards and their closest PCI Express equivalent. Find more information here.

Plextor, a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media equipment, announces new products as a part of its new 2008 lineup. Featured in the new offering are 6x Blu-Ray Combo drives, 22x Super Multi DVD±RW drives, and an 8x Slim External USB DVD±RW for PC and Mac.
"Plextor continues to strengthen its position in the optical storage market with the addition of these new drives to its already robust line of products," said Bob Gronski, vice president of sales and marketing for Plextor. "Now more than ever, people are going out less and taking advantage of home entertainment more, so it's a perfect time for us to introduce such an extensive line of products."

Cooler Master has consistently pushed the limits in the realm of power supplies with the first six-rail power supply and with the recent achievement of the world's first 80 Plus Silver certified power supply. Cooler Master now brings the leading technical know-how to our entry level power with Real Power Pro 360W, 400W and 460W, which is 80 Plus Bronze certified.

Cooler Master's latest additions to the Real Power Pro family include enhanced active PFC (power factor correction) circuit which reaches up to 85% efficiency. Higher efficiency also means lesser heat dissipation, which works seamlessly with intelligent 120mm fan speed control for ultra silent operation.

Intel Corporation and Micron Technology Inc. today announced mass production of their jointly developed 34nm, 32 gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory device. Developed and manufactured by the companies' NAND flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), the process technology is the most advanced process available on the market and enables the industry's only monolithic 32 Gb NAND chip that fits into a standard 48-lead thin small-outline package (TSOP). The companies are ahead of schedule with 34nm NAND production, expecting their Lehi facility to have transitioned more than 50 percent of its capacity to 34nm by year's end.

AMD has reportedly slated two models of its Phenom II series processors for January, 2009. According to Greek website hwbox.gr, the company will be launching two high-end processors from the Phenom II X4 series, on the 9th of January. Details of these processors available at this point in time are:

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (HDZ940XCGIBOX), 3.00 GHz, Socket AM2+, 8 MB cache (2 MB total L2 + 6 MB L3), 125W TDP.
• AMD Phenom II X4 920 (HDX920XCGIBOX), 2.80 GHz, Socket AM2+, 8 MB cache (2 MB total L2 + 6 MB L3), 125W TDP.

There is no word on the prices, at this point, though they are expected to be "much lower" than those of the Intel Core i7.

A-DATA has just become the next memory manufacturer to announce solid state products branded under its name. A-DATA's brand new XPG 2.5-inch SSDs are available in 32GB/64GB/128GB/192GB capacities and use SATA 3Gbps high-speed interface and an extra built-in mini-USB 2.0 port for external operation. A-DATA claims the drives are guaranteed to achieve transfer rates of up to 170MB/s read and 100MB/s write. In addition, A-DATA's SSDs provide built-in ECC (Error Correction Code) that ensures highly reliable data transfer and increases the system integrity. The mean time between failure for these drives is estimated at 1,500,000 hours. For more information, please read the company's official press release here.

ASUS, the world's leading producer of top-quality graphics solutions, today unveiled the ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) EAH4870 MATRIX/HTDI/512MD5 and EAH4850 MATRIX/HTDI/512M graphics cards; which sport the Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 GPU respectively. These world's most intelligent cards are equipped with ROG-exclusive technologies and features that unleash the full power of graphics cards, allowing gamers to enjoy an unrivaled in-game visual experience.

BIOSTAR has released a partial list of its existing motherboards that will support the upcoming 45nm desktop processors by AMD. The list includes all of its current motherboards based on the AMD 7-series chipsets, NVIDIA nForce 700a series and GeForce 8200 MCP. BIOSTAR has made available the appropriate BIOS firmware for each of the motherboards in the list, that expands the CPU support. Interestingly, BIOSTAR comments on the TDP rating system AMD is about to adopt. It says that 45nm AM2+ processors carry TDP ratings of 125W, while equivalent (drawn from inference) AM3 45nm CPUs carry 95W ratings. Visit this page for links to the BIOS updates and other details.

DRAM major, Hynix has announced the depelopment of 7 GT/s GDDR5 memory chips for use by the visual-computing industry. These chips are built on the company's 54nm silicon fabrication technology.

The 1 Gb (128 MB) chips labelled H5GQ1H24AFR operate at the fastest speeds so far: 7 Gbps (or GT/s), which is a 40% boost in speeds compared to the older 5 GT/s chips already in production. The chip handles up to 28 GB of data per second across a 32-bit wide interface. The incorporation of new fab. processes also means reduced power consumption at 1.35V power supply. The JEDEC-standard 1Gb GDDR5 graphics DRAM chip targets high-end applications such as game consoles and graphics cards. The company will commence volume production in the first half of 2009.

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has sold more than 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours of availability, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. This eclipses the previous record of nearly 2.4 million copies sold in 24 hours, set in January 2007 by Blizzard's first World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade. Wrath of the Lich King was simultaneously released in North America, Europe, Chile, Argentina, and Russia on November 13; Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand on November 14; and South Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau on November 18.

ASUS, a company that is as committed to environmental conservation as it is to innovation and quality, yesterday saw its sustainable computing efforts rewarded with the conferring of the world's first EU Flower Eco Award for computers on its N50, N80, N20, and N10 notebooks. This achievement validates the eco-friendliness of ASUS' N Series notebooks, which had already been honored with prestigious EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) Gold awards in October this year. On a broader note, it is also a reflection of the growing momentum of ASUS' sustainability drive-Green ASUS-which it initiated in 2000.

Samsung has come up with a new 23.6-inch, slick and stylish widescreen LCD monitor, the SyncMaster 2494HS. This one takes a step forward in overall look and feel, going away from the rather plain Samsung glassy design. The SyncMaster 2494HS features a modern 1920x1080 16:9 wide resolution, appropriate for movie lovers, an exceptionally high 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 300cd/m2 brightness and a 5ms response time. Vertical viewing angles for this screen reach 160-degrees and horizontal angles 170-degrees. There are also two 3W stereo speakers built-in. Inputs include HDCP-compatible HDMI, DVI-D, and single analog RGB. The Samsung SyncMaster will go on sale in mid-December in Japan for around 40,000 yen ($423).

Taiwan's SilverStone Technology has today announced that its big-tower Raven RV01 chassis will be available starting next month at a suggested retail price of €159 + VAT. The case has existed for a fairly long time, but until now it has been a protype. We have covered the design ideas inside the Raven here, but it's worth mentioning some of them again. One thing is for sure, when you first look inside the case you won't see anything familiar. The case is split into different compartments, and the motherboard is angled 90 degrees pointing upwards instead of out the back. This way the chassis which measures 280mm x 616mm x 660mm and weighs 15kg, will push air in parallel from bottom to top. Silverstone engineers also state that the case is suited for quiet operating PCs. In addition, the high-end chassis features a built-in cable management system, five push-button 5.25-inch drive bays, six removable 3.5-inch drive bays, easy-access top-mounted I/O ports, and pre-drilled holes for water-cooling. Click here to find more pics.

Computing giant HP has refreshed its workstation lineup with xw9400 series models running the new AMD Opteron "Shanghai" quad-core processors. Being workstations, they come with dual-socket configurations as options, and sport Opteron 2000 series processors. Options start at a 2.00 GHz processor, and go up to 2.50 GHz. Up to 32 GB of memory can be opted for. The motherboards use NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 or 3050 chipsets. A variety of options with NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics cards are offered. The system comes with a three-year warranty that includes parts, labor, and on-site service. A set of pre-configured systems are available by HP on its product page. Prices start at US $2,399 and can go up to $6,299.

MAINGEAR Computers, award-winning builders of high performance custom computers, is proud to announce the availability of the next generation of luxury gaming PCs. The F131 and ePhex, now featuring the Intel Core i7 processor family.

"We're proud to be an Intel launch partner," says Wallace Santos, CEO and founder of MAINGEAR Computers, "this revolutionary new chip is going to change the way people look at multitasking. It really puts your processing power where you need it most. Our F131 and ePhex lines will benefit from the ability to take on highly-threaded games with HyperThreading support across 8 cores. Also, it's anyone's game with either CrossFireX or SLI support on the same platform."

Microsoft's Ben Basaric, product marketing manager for Windows products, confirmed to PC Games Hardware that the next major update to the DirectX API, DirectX 11 would accompany Windows 7, the next major consumer operating system software by Microsoft. This, overwriting his own statement given to the website earlier that he wasn't sure if DirectX 11 would be ready to ship with the OS upon its launch. Furthermore, he also indicated that Windows Vista will have access to the updated API, although not sure at what point in time.

Following the startling revelation by AMD, on just how much overclocking headroom its upcoming Phenom II processors offer, the company is on course for the announcement of the AMD Dragon enthusiast desktop PC platform. The AMD Dragon platform consists of a Phenom II X4 processor and Radeon HD 4800 series based graphics setup running on a 7-series chipset based motherboard. Earlier, a slide confidential to its channel partners was leaked to the media, showing up to 280% increments in gaming performance over its predecessor, the AMD Spider platform. Legit Reviews took a quick snap of the platform logo for AMD Dragon, showing a dark dragon with red glowing eyes holding the AMD Fusion badge. It also reveals the company's slogan for the platform: "Fusing technology with strength." Throughout the product launch phase for its 45nm Opteron processor, AMD has been largely conservative about its performance expectations, though with its desktop variants, the Phenom II series, AMD has been a little enthusiastic off late, advertising it as something "Beyond Expectations". It remains to be seen as to how far the company lives up to delivering to all the hype that has been created so far.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the next step in its ongoing cooperation with the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

Building on the recent release of the VIA graphics driver available on the VIA Linux Portal, VIA is actively collaborating with the OpenChrome development team on their Open Source graphics driver - initially assisting with multi-head support and RandR function.

OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the first of its Intel Extreme triple channel memory series, qualified specifically for the Intel Core i7 processor / Intel X58 Express Chipset. Optimized for the Core i7's triple channel mode and featuring Intel XMP profiles designed specifically to enhance the performance of the X58 Chipset, these new 3GB and 6GB kits ensure optimal performance via an ideal combination of low voltage requirements, speed, and instantaneous "out of the box" overclocking with the specialized profiles.

"Intel's Core i7 architecture is superior in every possible way," commented Dr. Michael Schuette, VP of Technology Development at OCZ Technology, "and the world's best CPU deserves the world's best memory as a complement. OCZ's new Triple-Channel XMP kits are a perfect match for the Nehalem platform to unleash performance we could only dream of just a short time ago."

NVIDIA has had a fair bit of success with its MCP7A, MCP79 chipsets. Where the Intel-compatible nForce 730i/740i embeds a GeForce 9300/9400-class IGP, the AMD compatible nForce 730a embeds a GeForce 8200-class IGP. EVGA has released its offering based on the 730a (model 113-M2-E113-TR). The motherboard uses the typical EVGA colour scheme. It has an AM2+ socket, supporting the latest AMD processors with the HyperTransport 3.0 system interface.

The board features a single PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot. It supports Hybrid Power with compatible graphics cards. Display output from its IGP comes in the form of DVI, D-Sub and HDMI connectors. It provides 8-channel audio with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs. Depending on the processor used it supports DDR2 memory, with speeds of up to PC2-8500 (1066 MHz). The CPU is powered by a 5+1 phase power circuit. Six SATA II ports with RAID support are provided. For a complete list of specifications, please refer to the company whitepaper. The motherboard is available from the EVGA store for US $94.99 +shipping.

Intel Developer Forum, in its 11th year as Intel Corporation's largest technology conferences, returns to China, the United States and Taiwan in 2009. Beijing will host the first IDF on next year's schedule, April 8-9 at the Beijing International Convention Center. Next is San Francisco, Sept. 22-24 at Moscone Center West, followed by Taipei, Taiwan, Nov. 16-17 at the Taipei International Convention Center. Spanning the worlds of mobility, digital home, digital enterprise and technology and research, IDF focuses on Intel's directions for the next year and beyond. The events collectively draw more than 10,000 system developers, engineers, implementers and architects, among other technical audiences annually. More than 1,250 journalists and analysts covered this year's IDFs in Shanghai, San Francisco and Taipei.
Further information is available at developer.intel.com/idf.

During an event by AMD held at its facility in Austin, Texas, the engineers took an engineering sample of the unreleased Deneb core based Phenom II X4, installed a copper-pot for liquid nitrogen cooling, and dropped the operational temperature to -185 °C. They then jacked up the vCore to 1.90V, to facilitate a clock speed of over 6.00 GHz!

At this point the exact frequency isn't known. Cameras weren't allowed at the event, and so no clear pictures were taken. Earlier the company had released slides to its channel contacts, telling that Phenom II would overclock very well, and 24x7 overclocks beyond 3.60 GHz on air didn't sound unreal. At the same event, AMD showcased Deneb chips doing 4.00 GHz with air-cooling (with vCore set at 1.6V).

Shuttle Inc., market leader in the mini-PC segment and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions, today announces the availability of the Shuttle Barebone D10 which was presented at IFA. As the first mini-PC of its kind, the D10 comes with a 7" touchscreen display integrated into its front panel.

GeIL Memory has just released the new EVO Cyclone memory cooler. At first sight this cooler is like most other similar solutions on the market, but it has one unique feature. The single fan that cools the memory has a LED display and embedded thermal sensor, that displays the surrounding temperature and real-time fan speed. Apart from this, the 50mm cooler spins at 3400rpm and produces only 21dBa noise. The EVO Cyclone also comes with a height-adjustable clip designed that fits even memory modules with large heatsinks. GeIL is expected to ship the EVO Cyclone in the weeks to come. To learn more about the product, please go to this page.

Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it is shipping its high-capacity 64GB DataTraveler 150 (DT150) USB Flash drive. DT150 offers the largest capacity in Kingston's entire line of DataTraveler USB drives and allows users the room and flexibility to backup important hard drive contents, and transport and share complete collections of music, videos, photos and documents in one convenient device.

"The new 64GB DataTraveler 150 takes transportable storage to the next level with big capacity in a small package," said Jaja Lin, Flash business development manager, Kingston. "As file sizes increase with digital media content such as music and photos, the need for USB Flash drives with high capacities will continue to rise. The DT150 certainly addresses those needs today."

Taiwan's SPARKLE Computer announced availability of its new Calibre P980X+ graphics card, a highly customized GeForce 9800 GTX+ VGA. The Calibre P980X+ uses a 55nm version of the G92 GPU from NVIDIA, with raised core and shader clocks to 761MHz (738MHz) and 1911MHz (1836MHz stock) respectively. There's a 512MB of GDDR3 memory onboard, working at 1161MHz. Calibre customizes the card with the company's Dual Fly Fan System that consists of a copper base, two massive heat-pipes and two cooling fans situated at an angle. The Calibre P980X+ is also bundled with an overclocking software called SPA Tune. It will let users to choose between three modes of operation: Overclocking mode (OC), standard mode (STD) and green mode (GRN). There's no need to describe each one, their names are pretty self-explanatory. Each mode changes the card's clock speeds and fan rotation speed. At last, there's the back of the card where a HDMI, VGA D-sub and a DVI connector are lockated. Currently, there is no information on the availability and pricing of the card.

Sharkoon today introduced the third edition of its X-Tatic Dolby certified 5.1 headset. This new model has a new design, an improved microphone mount and enhanced functionality.

With eight speakers including two dedicated drivers for bass and a high-end amplifier, the headset envelops users with high quality, authentic surround-sound. Adjustable, padded earpieces and headband ensure the headset is comfortable to wear. The flexible, removable microphone can be adjusted to the most comfortable position. Volume controls are built directly into the 360cm long cable, allowing users to individually adjust the volume for each channel.

RivaTuner, the popular graphics card tweaking utility, was updated today towards version 2.20. In this release the development team have included a huge number of new stuff to keep you busy, with the biggest change beeing the added Multi-GPU (SLI/CrossfireX) support. This release also adds support for ForceWare GeForce drivers up-to 180.48 WHQL and AMD ATI Catalyst 8.11.

DOWNLOAD: RivaTuner Version 2.20

Spire Cooling is thrilled to inform you about their soon to market new TherMax cooling solutions. The SP676S1 TherMax and SP679S1 TherMax II cpu coolers are ready to cool all processors built on the new Intel 1366 Core i7 platform in combination with the Intel LGA775 and AMD AM2 platforms giving the consumers huge scope to use these coolers. Another welcome feature to build a completely silent system are the Anti-vibe rubber fan corners, these will absorb any vibration from the fan motor. The two models look similar but the specs in sizes of the fan and the materials used say it all:

Although Pine, the parent company of XFX, isn't new to making motherboards based on Intel chipsets, it could well be the first time it is using the XFX brand and design to sell an LGA 775 socket motherboard based on an Intel chipset, in this case, the entry-level G31.

The XG31i is an entry-level motherboard, in the mATX form-factor. It takes care of the essentials, using a single PCI-Express x16, and two PCI slots, dual-channel DDR2 memory supported by two memory slots, onboard Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 to provide display output through a single D-Sub connector, and 8-channel audio. Interestingly, the clear CMOS button, and diagnostic LED display is provided on the rear-panel. XFX plans to set a modest price to propagate this motherboard through the entry-level market.

S3 Graphics today announced its next generation Chrome 500 graphics processors, building upon the success of a product family based on the most power-efficient GPU architecture on the market. Today's users will now be able to enjoy the latest Blu-ray playback, streaming HD video, DirectX 10.1, and OpenGL 3.0 applications on Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms.

Today's PC users are demanding more application processing power than ever before as HD video and graphics accelerate the user experience. With the Chrome 500 Series, you can enjoy Hi-Def Blu-ray movies and watch bonus features with Picture-in-Picture while enjoying 8 channels of high fidelity audio with the S3 Graphics' built-in Dolby 7.1 digital surround sound processor. DirectX, OpenGL, and GPGPU applications can be efficiently processed with programmable shader cores to speed-up 3D and non-gaming functions.

Synced with the launch of Intel's latest generation Core i7 processor and X58 chipset, ASUS is presenting the ROG CG6190 Gaming PC. This outstanding piece of hardware features Intel's latest platform and provides top-notch solutions to deliver the ultimate in gaming experience-catering to the most demanding gamers who are constantly seeking the best in gaming PC features, performance, and stability. Furthermore, the unique exterior design is inspired by ancient and modern armor with both Eastern and Western influences, and presents an aesthetic appeal that exudes pure power!

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing 256 gigabyte (GB) solid state drives for use in notebooks and desktop PCs. With the addition of the high-speed 256GB drive, Samsung now offers the most extensive line of SSDs in the industry with 8, 16, and 32GB SSDs for low-density designs and 64, 128 and 256GB alternatives for the higher densities.

During my most recent eggscursion, I came across the EVGA 512-P3-N879-AR. The card is a non-reference GeForce 9800 GTX+ model. EVGA took the advantage of the lower thermal footprints of the 55nm G92 core, and developed this shorter card that makes do with a single 6-pin PCI-E power input. The cooler slightly resembes that of the 8800 GTS 512, but comes with a shroud that resembles that of the GTX 200-series cards by design.

The card is 3-way SLI capable with any other 9800 GTX+ card. It sports 512 MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 2200 MHz, with the core clocked at 740 MHz, with an 1840 MHz shader domain. The card is available at Newegg.com for US $174.99 before a $25 optional rebate.Images courtesy: Newegg

Today, Half-Life turns 10 years old. What started off as a humble beginning for Valve software, using dated technologies licensed from id Software, now stands as one of the greatest PC games ever made. At 10, Half-Life enjoys a lavish Metacritic score of 96%, an aggregate of all known participant reviews.

To celebrate the occasion, Valve is giving away copies of Half-Life via Steam for 98¢ (US $ 0.98), to symbolize the year 1998. This offer ends 12:01 pm PST on November 21. Visit Steam Games for more details.Go Dr. Freeman!

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, today announced that Corsair's Core i7-optimized, triple-channel DDR3 memory was selected for YOYOTech's SPEC CPU2006 world-record breaking PC.

The YOYOTech Fi7EPOWER MLK1610 claimed the performance crown from the previous record holder, an exotic 8-core Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC processor based system, outperforming it by 50%. The Fi7EPOWER MLK1610 uses the latest Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor, which features an integrated, triple-channel DDR3 memory controller delivering incredible memory performance when partnered with triple-channel DDR3 memory.

ASUS seems to have finally made room for an ATI Radeon HD 4870 based graphics card to fit in its elite MATRIX series. Presenting: EAH4870 MATRIX. The card features ASUS' own-designed PCB with high-grade components to facilitate overclocking. The card comes equipped with a dual-fan cooler. The fans blow air directly onto circular aluminum fin arrays, to cool the various components of the card.

The card sports 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. The core is clocked at 770 MHz, with memory at 920 MHz (3680 MHz effective). One of the main selling points for the MATRIX series cards is the level of control it gives the users. Users are able to set and control clock-speed profiles, monitor the card's various thermal zones and voltages, set voltages manually, monitor and control fan speeds, and also end up with enhanced power-saving modes that reference-design cards don't come with. ASUS is yet to announce pricing and availability.

Seagate, the world's leading provider of storage solutions, unveiled today a gift idea that will keep on giving for years to come. Originally introduced in September with a choice of four colors, the new award-winning FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is now available in all the colors of the rainbow, including: think pink, ruby red, solar orange, spring green, forest green, royal blue, sky blue, champagne gold, titanium silver and tuxedo black. The initial color options of ruby red, royal blue, tuxedo black and titanium silver are still offered and widely available.

GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards today is pleased to announce support for the soon-to-be-released AMD 45nm processors including socket AM3 and AM2+ on a full range of current platforms including the AMD 790FX, 790GX, 790X, 770, 780G, 740G as well as the NVIDIA nForce 750a SLI and GeForce 8200.

With a simple BIOS upgrade, GIGABYTE delivers an easy upgrade path for users wanting to take advantage of AMD's latest 45nm process technology enhancements including higher core clocks with greater energy efficiency over past generations, integrated DDR2/DDR3 memory controller (DDR3 memory support for AM3 processors and AM3 designed motherboards only), HyperTransport 3.0 and C1E enhanced power savings.

The launch of Core i7 processors may have kicked off in great fanfare, given that the industry has been preparing rigorously for its launch since the turn of Q2 2008, but sources at motherboard vendors tell DigiTimes that it might be as long as Q3 2009, by the time sales and shipments really pickup. Intel on its part, has already claimed to have shipped over 100,000 Core i7 units. The odd thing about Core i7's launch is its timing. It comes at a time when Intel's desktop processors are successful in the market, and that Intel didn't stall its related technology development to pave the way for it.

NVIDIA has updated its graphics card drivers to version 180.48 today. The list of new features and enhancements is too big to fit on the front page so you'll need to hit the "Read full story" marker for comprehensive information.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Release 180.48 WHQL

The relatively new and unknown Swiss cooling company GELID, today released the WING UV Blue series of case fans designed for gamers and modders. Available in 80mm, 92mm and 120mm models, these fans feature a unique Nanoflux bearing motor that is not only water and dustproof, but also allows the impeller to be removed for maintenance and cleaning. Rated at 100'000 hours MTTF (Mean Time To Failure), the WING UV Blue series blades are also UV reactive. In addition every fan comes with a voltage regulator, that allows adjusting the fan's rotation speed at your preference. GELID is now offering the new fans for $12.50, $13.50 and $16.40 for the 80mm, 92mm and 120mm models respectively. All fans carry a 5 year warranty. For more information, please visit GELID.

BIOSTAR Microtech Int'l Corp., a professional manufacturer of motherboards has unveiled a top of the line model for next generation Intel platform-TPower X58, a superior extreme performance and best power efficiency desktop product.

BIOSTAR TPower X58 based on Intel X58 chipset, which supports Intel latest core i7 series processor family. Intel core i7 series processor supports Quad-Core and Hyper threading technology. Its performance is better performance than prior product family.

AMD has released an ATI Catalyst driver hotfix, Catalyst 8.11 with Intel X58 i7 Driver, that aims to improve performance on Intel X58 platfoms with ATI graphics accelerator installed. The X58-specific optimizations would also be part of next month's Catalyst 8.12 release. The hotfix applies to all discrete graphics cards, ATI Radeon X1000 series and later. The game-specific improvements are universal (helps everyone). A concise list of improvements this hotfix brings about as listed by AMD is as follows:

• Improves performance in various Direct3D and OpenGL applications on the X58 platform. AMD's next official ATI Catalyst release (ATI Catalyst 8.12) will include these optimizations
• Improves performance for the DirectX 9 version of Far Cry 2 on CrossFire compatible systems
• Improves performance for the DirectX 10 version of Far Cry 2 on both single and CrossFire compatible systems
• Improves performance for the DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 version of Stalker Clear Sky on both single and CrossFireX configurations at higher resolutions
• Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway no longer displays corruption on the 'Black Friday' level.

DOWNLOAD: for Windows XP (32/64-bit) | for Windows Vista (32/64-bit). More information can be found here.

Apparently, the great success of Cooler Master's COSMOS series of PC cases has stimulated the manufacturer to introduce a limited series of COSMOS chassis that will make happy only a few. The special edition of Cooler Master's original COSMOS RC-1000 case will be all painted in black, both externally and internally. Unlike the original RC-1000, the new black edition will also ship with upgraded to 140mm top fans. This version is also equipped with a clear side panel, instead of the solid one found in the early models. Cooler Master also says that all limited cases will come with a "new name & logo on each chassis", whatever that means. The official launch date for the "black" COSMOS RC-1000 is set on 11th of December with limited availability of 500 sets worldwide in selected countries only. All bundles will be marked from 1 to 500, to complete the unique feel of the case.

UPDATE: a Cooler Master Black site is now operational.

HP today brought some attention to its brand new TouchSmart tx2 Notebook PC - the industry's first convertible notebook with multi-touch technology designed specifically for consumers. Developed for people on the go, the tx2 boasts a 12.1-inch diagonal BrightView LED display with touch capabilities that allow multi-touch input. Using two-finger gestures your can pinch, rotate and do all kind of such things with various programs. The tx2 has even more advantages when compared to ordinary notebooks, its unique design allows for quick transform into a PC, display or a tablet. With the included digital ink pen, users can turn the tx2 into a tablet PC to write, sketch, draw, take notes or graph right onto the screen - and then automatically convert handwriting into typed text.
Moving on to the rest of the hardware, this thing is powered by AMD's Turion X2 dual-core mobile processors, has the option to work with up to 8GB of DDR2 memory, and store up to 500GB of information on a hard drive. Software is ensured from Microsoft, in the eyes of Windows Vista Home Premium. Other media features include an ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics, a built-in webcam, wireless LAN card, a VGA output, and an ethernet port. The TouchSmart tx2 Notebook PC is available now in the United States, starting at $1,149. For more information, please visit the HP TouchSmart tx2 microsite.

Toshiba Corporation, the pioneer in small form factor hard disk drives (HDDs), today announced a new half-terabit HDD, the flagship model in a series of 5,400 RPM Serial-ATA (SATA) 3.0 Gb/s 2.5-inch HDDs offering enhanced features that will improve the user experience in mobile applications and other digital devices.
Available in capacities from 500GB to 120GB, the new series of quiet and durable drives is targeted for integration into notebook PCs, sub-notebooks, small form factor and energy star PCs, game consoles, external storage devices and consumer electronics products.

Software giant Microsoft might offer a free anti-virus software next year, the company said on Tuesday. Code-named "Morro," this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs.
"Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously," said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft. "This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."
When released, "Morro" will be available as a stand-alone download and offer malware protection for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.
With the arrival of "Morro", Microsoft will also discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service.

Velocity Micro, the premier independent builder of custom, high performance computers, notebooks, and workstations, announces today the immediate availability of ultra performance desktop PCs powered by Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors. Faster and more efficient than their Core 2 predecessors, Intel Core i7 processors provide increased performance in gaming, digital media creation, and multitasking. By combining their trademarked precision craftsmanship and the record breaking performance of this revolutionary processor, the Intel Core i7 processor-based offerings from Velocity Micro set the new standard in power and productivity.

AMD today announced that its Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are powering "Jaguar," the first ever wholly x86-based supercomputer to achieve the petaflop performance milestone. AMD Opteron processors now help drive seven of the Top 10 supercomputer systems in the world.

The AMD Opteron processor-based and IBM PowerXCell processor-based "Roadrunner" system at Los Alamos National Labs again captures the number 1 spot on the bi-annual TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list, while the "Jaguar" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory comes in at number 2 and is the highest performing entirely x86-based system ever on the survey. "Jaguar" is based on Cray XT4 and XT5 systems and runs on over 45,000 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, enabling a balanced system with unrivaled x86 performance.

The newest addition to the Call of Duty (COD) franchise, Call of Duty: World at War, has outsold the first week sales of Call of Duty 4 by greater than 200%. This title is all set to become Christmas number one, and has gone to the top of the All Formats charts in the UK, according to data from GfK Chart-Track.

The figures are rough, and GfK Chart-Track didn't provide a per-platform breakdown, to provide how the game is being received by different platforms. COD: World at War added more console platform support, with Sony PS2 and Nintendo DS over its predecessor.

Samsung was hit on Monday by two separate patent infringement complaints issued from Spansion Inc., the world's No. 3 maker of flash memory chips by revenue. The complaints were filed with both the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the U.S. District Court in Delaware. Sunnyvale-based Spansion claims that more than "one hundred million mp3 players, cell phones, digital cameras and other consumer electronic devices" are made with Samsung flash memory chips that violate Spansion patents. As a result, over $30 billion worth of Samsung products that contain patented Spansion technologies were sold over the past five years.
"Spansion has patents that are fundamental to flash memory. Samsung itself has cited these patents many times in its own patent filings, underscoring industry acceptance of the fundamental nature of Spansion's (intellectual property)," Robert Melendres, Spansion's executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.
Samsung defended itself, saying that it "forbids infringement and unauthorized use" of the intellectual property and "plans to respond actively to this litigation," according to Lee Eun-hee, a company spokeswoman. Spansion is now seeking for damages and for the court to ban sales in the U.S. of products with the affected Samsung chips.

Today, scientific research is carried out on supercomputing clusters, a shared resource that consumes hundreds of kilowatts of power and costs millions of dollars to build and maintain. As a result, researchers must fight for time on these resources, slowing their work and delaying results. NVIDIA and its worldwide partners today announced the availability of the GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which delivers the equivalent computing power of a cluster, at 1/100th of the price and in a form factor of a standard desktop workstation.

"Spider" is the codename for a high-end desktop platform by AMD, which came to light late last year. It consisted of an AMD Phenom series processor, an AMD 790FX-based motherboard, and Radeon HD 3800-series graphics card(s). AMD would be offering a new high-end gaming platform based on its products, called "Dragon". It consists of a Phenom II processor, running on an AMD 790-series motherboard, and Radeon HD 4800-series graphics card(s). Expreview sourced a company-confidential side which illustrates the company's expectations from the platform, in terms of performance increments over its predecessor.

With office and productivity applications, AMD slates a 20~40% performance increment. The trend stays with multimedia applications. The gaming performance is where the money lies, with increments up to 280%. Again, take into account that the Dragon testbed is using a Radeon HD 4800 accelerator. 20~40% seems a significant figure, nonetheless.

Nanya Technology Corporation, one of the worldwide leading DRAM manufacturers, today announced it is shipping 800MHz DDR2 registered dual in-line memory module (RDIMM) designed specifically for the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, to help optimize performance of high-end server systems and workstation applications.
"Nanya worked closely with AMD on the launch of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor (codenamed "Shanghai") to ensure that Nanya DDR2 800 RDIMM would take advantage of the dramatic enhancements in energy efficiency and performance enabled by the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors," said Dr. Pei Lin Pai, Vice President of Global Sales & Marketing and Spokesman of Nanya Technology Corporation.

VIA has announced with its VIPRO PC Panel VP7710. It is a touchscreen display panel with a PC built-in, that finds application in kiosks, ATMs, ticketing machines, and industrial control panels. The 10.4 inch touchscreen display is durable, dust-resistant and water-resistant. The panel PC comes with options of VIA C7 1.00 GHz or VIA Eden 1.60 GHz processor with 1 GB of DDR2 memory. The machine is can run Windows XP comfortably for the hardware that's installed. It provides essential peripheral and network connectivities. The panel uses a sturdy steel and aluminum body.

The PC version of Left 4 Dead, Valve's zombie thriller, has been officially announced. The game is now available via Steam to gamers around the globe, to purchase, download and play. The hard-copy title will be available for the PC and Xbox 360 platforms at retail stores on Tuesday, November 18 in North America and worldwide on Friday, November 21. For more information, please visit Steam Games.

Alienware introduced its fleet of high-performance gaming PCs based on Intel's newest Core i7 processors. The range is branded as Area 51 X-58. Its range starts from US $1,349, with the base model using the Core i7 920 processor, which is configurable to Core i7 940 and the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition. Memory options go up to 12 GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, and base graphics card being the ATI Radeon HD 4870, configurable up to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 SLI or Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX.

There are options for up to 2 TB of storage, or the option to pick performance over storage, with two WD VelociRaptor 300 GB drives in RAID 0. Parallel to this brand is Alienware's other brand, the ALX X-58. The ALX comes with the same base CPU and memory, but ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 or two GeForce 9800 GTX, 2 TB of storage, along with the option of a Blu-Ray burner. The ALX X-58 starts at $3,699. These systems come equipped with 700, 1000 or 1200W power supplies depending on the hardware opted for.

Patriot Memory, a global provider of premium quality memory module and flash memory solutions, celebrated the launch of the Intel Core i7/Intel X58 Express Chipset by debuting its first retail wide release of the Viper Series Extreme Performance PC3-12800 (DDR3-1600) 6GB & 3GB Tri-Channel Enhanced Latency Kits at Micro Center.

Designed specifically for the new Intel Core i7 architecture, the Viper Series Extreme Performance Tri-Channel kit is fully optimized for the latest Intel XMP profile. Coupled with Core i7 processor's new Integrated Memory Controller (IMC), Viper Series Tri-Channel kits provide an out of box over-clocking solution for enthusiasts, gamers and over-clockers to fully utilize its extreme memory bandwidth. "XMP certified memory will not only define the future of enthusiast computing, but also represent Patriot's decades of experience in DRAM technology and it's recognition by our partners," commented by Paul Jones, CEO of Patriot Memory. Patriot's Viper Series Extreme Performance Tri-Channel kits are built based on selected low voltage chips and is 100% hand tested to ensure flawless compatibility. "We tested the Patriot Viper Series 6GB 1600MHz Kit with the Asus P6T; it worked flawlessly - good bang for your buck in performance memory" added by Jerrod Alatalo, Product Manager at Micro Center.

Almost a month into the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4830, HIS is ready with its IceQ-4 model. The graphics card uses the Radeon HD 4830 at reference speeds of 575 MHz, and features 512 MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1800 MHz. The card uses the same exact PCB and cooler design, as that of the Radeon HD 4850 IceQ-4, since the GPU is pin-compatible, but the heatsink over the VRM area is lacking.

As with other ATI graphics cards in its cadre, it provides audio-routed HDMI via a dongle, ATI CrossfireX multi-GPU technology, and DirectX 10.1 support. The card is expected to hit stores soon, carrying a price-tag of €140 in Europe.

Today, Intel made its newest piece of silicon, the Core i7 series processor official with the introduction of three models based on the newer architecture, and socket. One of the significant feature-additions for Core i7 is the 192-bit wide DDR3 memory bus, meaning that memory modules in groups of three or six can be used to make use of the triple-channel memory controller the processors come with.

For memory vendors, it means selling kits consisting of three or six modules of 1 GB or 2 GB per module, resulting in 3 GB, 6 GB or potentially, a 12 GB kit (consisting of six 2 GB modules). Corsair, on its part, has been advertising the benefits of 4 GB system memory in the recent past, in a bit to sell its 2x 2GB kits. One of the important benefits Corsair noted was, that it benefited today's games. Come Core i7, and Corsair thinks 6 GB of memory would significantly benefit gaming PCs based on the Core i7 processors. The company released a whitepaper, in which gaming performance between Core i7-based systems equipped with 3 GB and 6 GB of memory were compared.

Intel Corporation introduced its most advanced desktop processor ever, the Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 processor is the first member of a new family of Nehalem processor designs and is the most sophisticated ever built, with new technologies that boost performance on demand and maximize data throughput. The Core i7 processor speeds video editing, immersive games and other popular Internet and computer activities by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption.
Broadly heralded by the computing industry as a technical marvel, the Intel Core i7 processor holds a new world record of 117 for the SPECint_base_rate2006 benchmark test that measures the performance of a processor. This is the first time ever for any single processor to exceed a score of 100 points.

Cooler Master introduces the Intel Core i7 Socket LGA 1366 retention bracket which is compatible with a wide range of coolers that includes: V8, Hyper Z600 series, Hyper 212 and Geminii S. For some of these models, the retention bracket will eventually be included in the retail pack; making these coolers fully supporting all current sockets on the market: Intel LGA 775, LGA 1366 and AMD Socket 940/AM2/AM2+ compatible.

The backplate is conveniently designed so that it installs on top of Intel's stock LGA1366 backplate, hence reducing the risk of damaging the socket during installation on X58 chipset motherboards. For details, please visit the product page.

Exactly as promised, Danamics today announced the limited availability of what's claimed to be the first cooler to use liquid metal based technology to cool processors. The Danamics LM10 has generated much excitement since its first appearance, but the limited availability and the enormous price are going to kill the interest in such a product, at least that's what I think. European sites are now offering the LM10 here and here for the astonishing 280 Euro. Danamics also sells what they call a PowerBooster, an optional device that enhances the LM10's performance by providing its electromagnetic pump with more power, for around 128 Euro. Let's assume you want to buy the LM10, you'd need roughly 400 Euro or ~$510 for one of those. In return you'll receive a high-quality air cooler filled up with liquid metal and equipped with an electromagnetic pump that has no moving parts. The cooler is compatible with all Intel LGA 775, AMD AM2/AM2+ and AMD 939/754 sockets. I'm looking forward for a review of the Danamics LM10, it has to be one of a kind cooler to cost so much.

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today announced the completion of the USB 3.0 specification, the technical map for device manufacturers to deliver SuperSpeed USB technology to the market.

SuperSpeed USB brings significant power and performance enhancements to the popular USB standard while offering backward compatibility with billions of USB-enabled PCs and peripheral devices currently in use by consumers. Delivering data transfer rates up to ten times faster than Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0) with optimized power efficiency, SuperSpeed USB is the next step in the continued evolution of USB technology.

Mushkin, Inc., a global leader in high-performance memory products, today announced the release of its triple-channel memory kits designed specifically for the new Intel Core i7 platform. The flagship offering of the new memory kits is the XP3-12800 7-8-7, allowing end users to extract higher performance at 1600MT/s than competitors' products while staying within safe operating voltages. Additionally, early adopters of the new platform will find Mushkin's triple-channel products stable and reliable, ensuring a trouble-free migration.

"We've worked diligently to create parts for the Core i7 platform that push specifications to unprecedented levels while maintaining the high quality and reliability standards of our existing products," said Brian Flood, director of product development for Mushkin. "Our triple-pack customers will be rewarded with the utmost reliability from our standard rated products, and greatly increased performance from our high performance line."

EVGA is deligthted to formally present its first motherboard designed around an Intel chipset: the EVGA X58 SLI. This motherboard is based on the highly anticipated Intel X58/ICH10R chipset combo and is optimized for those who want the absolute best from their brand new Core i7 CPUs. The motherboard was once described on our pages here, so I won't rewrite the same features again. Main specs of the board are listed below, also the first 500 members who register their brand new EVGAs here, will receive an EVGA X58 t-shirt.

In addition to the new LGA 775 processors, Intel is preparing price cuts for its solid state drives. Intel's super fast 2.5-inch 80GB multi-level cell (MLC) X25-M SSDs - and its 80GB 1.8-inch X18-M counterpart - will drop from $600 to $525 on November 30th. On the very same day Intel will also introduce its new single-level cell (SLC) high-performance 32GB X25-E SSD for $700. A month later on December 28th, the price of this drive will already be dropped to $575. In the first half of 2009, Intel will be migrating to higher density, releasing 160GB variants of the X25-M/X18-M MLC SSDs priced at $990, and 64GB versions of the high-performance X25-E SLC SSDs priced again at $990.

During the 2008 BAI Retail Delivery Conference & Expo, Microsoft Corp. will showcase several innovative ways banks can better attract, retain and cross-sell customers by connecting their digital lifestyles and work styles together. These include the following:

• Microsoft Virtual Earth. An integrated set of services providing quality geospatial data, rich imagery and cutting-edge technology that helps banks provide immersive online customer experiences, and connect customers with branch locations and services.
• Microsoft Surface. The first commercially available surface computer helps break down traditional barriers to technology. The 360-degree user interface, along with multi-touch and object recognition functionality provides an exciting way for banks to create compelling and interactive retail branch experiences for potential customers.
• Tellme. An on-demand voice services platform that helps banks connect with customers every day, simplifying everyday tasks, on everyday devices.

Believe it or not, although the Core i7 processors have just became available, Intel won't be giving up on its LGA 775 product line-up. According to the trustworthy reporters at DailyTech, on January 18, Intel will launch three new Core 2 Quad processors with a TDP of just 65W. These will be the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200s (2.33GHz, 4MB L2 cache, FSB 1333MHz), Q9400s (2.66GHz, 6MB L2 cache, FSB 1333MHz), and Q9550s (2.83GHz, 12MB L2 cache, FSB 1333MHz) models, priced at $245, $320 and $369 respectively. All three models differ from their brothers from the s-letter in their nomenclature. Intel will also launch a new 2.6GHz Pentium Dual Core E5300 processor in November of this year and one more, the 2.7GHz Pentium Dual Core E5400 on January 18th next year. The second CPU will be priced at $84 when available. Lastly, Intel's power efficient 35W processor lineup will also see some changes at the end of the year. The new T9800 (2.70GHz, 6MB L2 cache, FSB 1066MHz, $530), Q9000 (2.00GHz, 6MB L2 cache, FSB 1066MHz, $348), P9600 (2.66GHz, 6MB L2 cache, FSB 1066MHz, $348), T9550 (2.66GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz, $316), and P9600 (2.53GHz, 3MB L2 cache, FSB 1066MHz, $241) will be released then.

Auzentech, an exclusive Creative partner, informed recently that it has revised the release date for its Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD soundcard to the last week of January 2009. The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD soundcard was originally scheduled for release sometime in September or October of 2008.
"I regret delaying the product release," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "The decision came suddenly due to strategic marketing changes by our partners. These partners have been instrumental in making the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD an industry-supported audio solution. When it is released at the end of January, it will include the necessary software to access the advanced HD capabilities of the soundcard-and much of that software comes from our partners."
The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD is a premium sound card, that will compete well with ASUSTeK's recently launched Xonar Essence STX. When released it will offer PCI-e x1 interface, Creative's 20K2 sound core, 64MB X-RAM, HDMI 1.3a output and some of the latest audio technologies in the market, such as Dolby Digital Live, DTS Connect, ASIO 2.0 and EAX 5.0. The card is also said to be able to output multichannel audio from Blu-ray discs with no downsampling, and play high bit-rate audio such as Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream without altering the original sound. For more information, please visit Auzentech.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) today announced volume production of the first semiconductor foundry 40nm logic manufacturing process with the successful ramp of its 40 nanometer (nm) General Purpose (G) and Low Power (LP) versions. Nanometers measure the width of metal lines in semiconductors. Forty nanometers is less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
The 40nm process is one of the semiconductor industry's most advanced available for production manufacturing process and is expected to play a key role in the development of next generation products in global consumer electronics, mobile, and computer end markets.

AMD has taken steps towards providing its next embedded CPUs with the introduction of a core-logic platform that suits its thermal envelopes, while providing the kind of features essential to embedded platforms today. Its direct implementation could be the embedded low-power Athlon single and dual-core processors that could make it to UMPCs, nettops, and the likes.

The embedded processors will come in the ball-grid array package, and a reduced board footprint (package-size). At the heart of this core-logic is the AMD 780E northbridge. It is a reworked 780G chip with reduced thermal footprints. It will provide the CPU with a HyperTransport 3.0 (up to 5.6 GT/s) connection. This northbridge embeds a ATI Radeon HD 3300-class integrated graphics (IGP) which is AMD Sideport-capable. This adds the provision of adding DDR3 memory chips on the board to serve as video-memory. The northbridge provides an A-Link 2.0 connection (PCI-Express 2.0 x4) to the AMD SB7x0 class southbridge. The northbridge also features a native PCI-E multiplex to allow ATI CrossfireX with two PCI-E 2.0 x8 electrical connections. The SB7x0 southbridge provides up to six SATA II channels, 12 USB 2.0 connections, HD Audio, among others.

Pictures of ASRock's very own X58 motherboard, named simply "X58 Super Computer", appeard today over the web. Now one thing is for sure, it's not really a "super" motherboard and it's not really here to compete with high-end offering, but to appeal to the rest of the audience. After all this is an ASRock, meaning that it will do the work and still offer a good mainstream value with lower price. The motherboard is socket LGA 1366 ready, offering four PCI express x16 slots, three PCI slots and six DDR-3 DIMMs for triple-channel memory kits. The X58 Super Computer comes with completely passive cooling, there are radiators on the north bridge and the board's power elements which are connected by a single heatpipe, while the south bridge is cooled by a modest passive cooler. ASRock's creation also comes with six SATA ports, 12x USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA connector, integrated 7.1 channel audio, dual Gigabit Ethernet and one FireWire connector. This motherboard also implements ASRock's Instant Boot technology, that allows Windows XP or Windows Vista to boot up for 3 to 4 seconds. The AsRock X58 Super Computer has yet to reach stores and receive a price.

Fujitsu Limited today announced the development of two new series in its line of 2.5" enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs), the 10,025-rpm MBD2 RC series and 15,000-rpm MBE2 RC series, both of which provide standard support for the 6Gb/s SAS interface. The MBD2 RC series will be released in the first quarter of 2009 calendar year, and the MBE2 RC series will be available in the second quarter.
Compared to current 2.5" models, the new series improve performance by 60% in terms of internal transfer speeds. They are also more environmentally friendly, with halogen-free design - a first for Fujitsu's enterprise HDDs - and industry-leading power efficiency. Moreover, the series boast perpendicular magnetic recording, which enables increased recording density and allows the MBD2 series to have capacities up to 300 GB, noteworthy for 2.5" HDDs. The new models are well-suited to a range of applications, from servers to high-capacity storage systems.

DFI is ready with its high-end motherboard based on the Intel X58 chipset, providing support for the Intel Core i7 processors. It features three PCI-E x16 slots, that arrange themselves into x16, x8, x8, to support ATI CrossfireX and NVIDIA SLI technologies. The board is studded with high-grade components that include a digital PWM CPU power circuit. The board provides vDroop control. It features an intricate cooling design, with blocks of aliminum fin arrays over the northbridge, and the VRM areas. The VRM cooler projects out of the case, and over the case-fan, if arranged. DFI is expected to announce this product soon.

AMD would be releasing its 45nm silicon-based desktop CPUs, built on the Deneb, Propus, Heka, Rana and Regor cores, to bring out quad-core, triple-core and eventually dual-core processors. AMD has discarded the 5-digit number scheme that was earlier reported, and in its place, adopted a three-digit scheme. The quad-core Deneb chips get a 9xx model number and 8xx number depending on the clock-speeds and cache size, Propus-based chips get the Athlon X4 branding.

Heka-based chips get Phenom II X3 7xx branding, with Rana getting Athlon X3 4xx. Regor dual-core trails with Athlon X2 2xx. It is important to note that AMD seems to have made a critical change to the Deneb core, releasing 2 models based on cache-arrangements. The first kind features a total of 8 MB cache (4x 512K L2 + 6M L3) and one with 6 MB total cache. To learn more about the other cores, please refer to our older article getting into details (here).

Intel's eagerly anticipated Core i7 series of processors have hit retail channels today, with top online and ground stores in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe listing the processors. This, a day in advance, with the company slating the launch for November 17 originally. The Core i7 is the poster-boy for Intel's Nehalem microprocessor architecture. It is a quad-core 8-threaded processor featuring 256 KB L2 caches per core, with shared 8 MB L3 cache. Some of the listings for the processors are as follows:

Overclockers UK (₤276 ~ ₤904) | Scan UK (₤259.87 ~ ₤892.02) | Newegg US (US $319.99 ~ $1069) | Micro Center US ($299.99 ~ $999.99) | HOH Deutschland (€283,90 ~ €989,90) | NCIX Canada (CA $388.99 ~ $1443.99) | TechBuy Australia (AU $676.35 ~ $2364.20)

For the motherboards:

Newegg US ($220.99 ~ $398.99) | Overclockers UK (₤223.24 ~ ₤340.74) | HOH Deutschland (€244,90 ~ €339,90) | NCIX Canada (CA $366.18 ~ $374.99) | TechBuy Australia (AU $503.90 ~ $635.70)

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform provider, today announced at SC'08 that its current line of 23 AMD Opteron processor-based platforms and 1 new AMD Opteron- processor based product will support the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor (codenamed "Shanghai"). Customers can achieve superior performance, low power consumption and low total cost of ownership by upgrading to the new TYAN platforms powered by the enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor built on 45nm process technology. TYAN platforms that support the previous Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are socket compatible and will only require a BIOS update to support this next-generation processor.

Smoothcreations (www.Smoothcreations.com), a leading manufacturer of Custom PC gaming systems, desktop workstations, and Laptops, introduced today, in collaboration with Intel , are proud to announce the Smoothcreations "Prophet i7" series.

Stop showing up to Lan parties with gaming rigs that look like some else's pc. Turn heads, and then shred them with the Prophet i7 series. The first portable performance PC from Smooth Creations.

Configurable options available in price point category platform solutions. The Ultimate LAN party system: The Smooth Creations Prophet i7 series was designed to intimidate, perform and back up every piece of trash talk you fling at your gaming buddies. These custom painted gaming beasts deliver the graphics-shredding processing power you need to conquer your next LAN event.

"The Prophet i7 Portable design makes it easy to go to those LAN parties without having to lug heavy pc equipment around", Mario Gastelum, Product Marketing. The "Prophet i7" models are stacked with Intel Core i7 CPU's and a tasty choice of Diamond Radeon HD4870's or 2x 4870X2 H20 Special Edition graphics cards in Crossfire configurations. Or you can choose some ass kicking BFG Geforce 280 GTX's or 260 GTX's in SLI or TRI SLI configurations. Be rest assured that not only will you have a screaming looking case - but a serious war gaming machine that will get you the highest frame rates playing Crysis or Far Cry 2. Any i7 Platform that is built with a pair of BFG's Geforce 260 or 280 GTX will get a FREE custom painted BFG logo & themed fender guitar and a free copy of Far Cry2.(Ed. note: The green/gray Hellcat system image has been added, so you get an idea about the look of the casing from Smoothcreations)

The entry of Radeon HD 4670 did disturb NVIDIA's position, in a segment touted to be one of the cash-cow segments for both NVIDIA and AMD. It is to counter the HD 4870 in its price-range (by easing production-costs), that NVIDIA released a refreshed GeForce 9600 GSO+. The die on the GPU reads "G94-201-B1", pointing that the GPU uses the 55nm silicon fab process (9600 GSO used G92). With the reduced transistor-count on the G94 core, manufacturing the chip becomes cheaper. The real change however, is that NVIDIA made some significant changes to its shader and memory domains, hence the use of G94 core.

The shader count has been reduced from 96 on the 9600 GSO, to 48. This, by disabling 16 shaders from the G94 core. The core is clocked at 650/1675 MHz (core/shader). The GPU is allowed to use the complete width of its memory bus: 256-bit GDDR3. The card features 512 MB of memory, clocked at 1800 MHz. The memory chips featured on the Inno3D card are made by Qimonda, and have a 1.2 ns latency. The card uses a simplistic circular cooler for the GPU. It is expected to be priced at US $87.

A-Data launched eight new tri-channel DDR3 memory kits for the soon to be released Intel Core i7 processor platform. The company built these eight SKUs by 3GB (3 x 1GB) and 6GB (3 x 2GB) variants each of four models: XPG X Series, XPG + Series, XPG G Series and base-model Standard series.

The X Series is advertised to offer "outstanding performance", targeted to extreme overclocking enthusiasts. The G Series is branded for gaming performance. The + series consisting of Viesta modules is more of a mainstream product, while the base-model is a standard module tested to operate at the lowest voltages at its rated frequencies. Additionally, there are 1600 MHz variants of + Series and G Series, in 3 GB and 6 GB capacities.

Scythe has manufactured yet another front panel, called Kama Panel, that may suit well to your case and needs. The Kama Panel takes one 3.5-inch and offers a card reader that supports all current flash formats, 2-channel fan controller and the possibility to relocate one SATA / USB port and the rear audio connection (Headphones, Microphone) to the front panel. Already shipping, the Kama Panel 3.5" comes in black color and has a recommended price tag of $27 or 21 Euro.

Industry watcher DigiTimes has some good news today. Apparently, disturbed by the rising presence of ATI in the discrete graphics card market, NVIDIA is planning a counter attack with the easiest way possible - cut the prices of its products. If the information is right, NVIDIA is going to slash the prices across its entire high-end GeForce GTX 200 line-up, as well as the mainstream GeForce 9800 GT and GeForce 9600 GT series. Unfortunately, the other piece of information as of when and by how much the prices will go down is unknown.

With AMD making gains in the discrete graphics card market - rising to around 40% in third-quarter 2008 according to a recent report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) - Nvidia is planning to cut its graphics card prices in an attempt to curb further loss of market share, according to sources at graphics card makers.
AMD anticipates taking 50% of the market after reducing prices for its ATI Radeon HD 4000 series products, but to counter Nvidia has also made moves to cut prices for its GeForce GTX 200, 9800 GT and 9600 GT series.

Redmond-based Microsoft has quietly launched an online store today. It's real and comes without a big advertising campaign all over the world. Simply named Microsoft Store and previously available only in the UK, Germany and Korea, now the store invites all U.S. citizens to buy Microsoft products online too. The store has just started, and it offers an extended line-up of software and hardware products under the Microsoft brand. When it comes to software purchase, the store allows to either order the software and have it delivered to your doorstep, or directly download it after the moment of payment. Users who decide to take the digital download way will be permitted to re-download the product until the mainstream support for it end. Typically this is 5 years after the product is released. Also, you always have the option of copying the downloaded products to physical media if you want to have them available for as long as you need. The original product keys for all the digital downloaded software will be stored in your personal Microsoft Store Account alongside your purchase history so you can use it to re-install your software at any time. Finally, here's the link to the Microsoft Store, you can check it at any time.

Valve, creator of the best-selling game franchises Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike, is letting everyone know that its upcoming zombie thriller, Left 4 Dead, has gone gold and is on schedule to become widely available next week. Additionally, the game can now be pre-loaded. Those who pre-order the game via Steam save 10% off the regular price and may now pre-load the game so when it become available at 12:01 am EST on November 18, 2008 they'll only need to download a little piece of the game code and start the game right away. The pre-order discount is also available for both the PC and 360 versions at participating retail outlets.
Left 4 Dead is the new survival action game from Valve for the PC and Xbox 360 that blends the social entertainment experience of multiplayer games such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress with the dramatic, narrative experience made popular in single player action game classics such as the Half-Life series of games. Playable in single player, co-operative, and multiplayer modes, Left 4 Dead is one of the most anticipated releases of 2008 and winner of numerous pre-launch awards, including Best of E3 from multiple outlets. A demo version of the game was also made available today.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and motherboards, today unleashes a new software bundle featuring Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition - a leading 3D tool that evaluates a system's 3D capabilities using Microsoft DirectX 10 demos. The new 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition bundle will ship with ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GT, 9800 GTX+, GTX 2602 and GTX 280 standard, AMP! Edition and AMP2! Edition models, in addition to each card's respective game bundles.

Our friends at Fudzilla had a little news bit a few days ago, about the lay-off of 450 employees at Leadtek. The company has now reacted and I had the following statement with the title Statement to the Untrue Internet Rumor "Leadtek Fires 450 in Taiwan" in my mailbox this morning:

With its strong and healthy operation, Leadtek Research Inc. does not fire 450 employees as rumor said. The partnership of Leadtek and NVIDIA remains solid, as Leadtek is still the exclusive partner of NVIDIA Quadro series in APAC, except in Japan.

To clarify the false internet rumor, "…Leadtek, recently fired 450 people from its operation…Leadtek was not in NVIDIA's top six list and this might be the partial reason….", Leadtek states the facts here :

1. With 378 employees at the moment, Leadtek is in a good and strong condition, no future down-sizing plan ongoing.

2. Leadtek NVIDIA Quadro series is leading in Asia-Pacific, and NVIDIA has stated that Leadtek is still its direct account and the exclusive distributor of NVIDIA Quadro series in APAC region (except in Japan).

The rumor of firing 450 people and the loosing partnership with NVIDIA is apparently false and exaggerating.

Still wasting your time waiting for files to load on your PC? Team Group has heard the prayers of users who wanted better solutions for mobile data storage and launched its next generation solid state drive (SSD). The innovative product incorporates SATAII high speed interface and external mini USB connectivity so as to combine the advantages of SSD (light weight, speed) and external hard disks (mobility, convenience) together. Team Group has successfully transformed SSD from a simple medium of storage into a high speed mobile storage device that is free from location restrictions. With the launch of the product, consumers will no longer have to put up with slow and bulky external hard disks! Team Group's 2.5" Combo SSD is perfect for efficiency oriented business users and gamers with demands for massive data transfer.

Thermaltake's newly released Fanless 330 VGA cooler is here, addressing the need for fanless operating graphics card coolers. The passive design of Fanless 330 offers the absolute quiet operation even for hot cards like GeForce 8800 GT or ATI Radeon HD 3850 series. It comprises of three heatsink modules, 106 cooling fins, four copper heatpipes and a mirror coated base. Half ot the cooling area lies beneath the card while the other half sits above the card, both are connected to each other via the massive heatpipes. The cooler weights in 260g and should already be available worldwide. For more information, be sure to check it out at the official Thermaltake website here. Below is the full list of supported graphics cards.

Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the Maxtor Central Axis Business Edition dual-drive network storage server, a storage solution designed to satisfy the long-term business continuity needs and growing storage requirements of small businesses. The Central Axis Business Edition network storage server takes the guesswork out of network storage management by providing simple, automatic backup with solid data protection and secure remote access to business critical information from any web browser. Available in early November, this small-business network storage solution will help companies keep their competitive edge by delivering access to, and protection for their business critical information while in the office or on the road.

Now that Intel's Atom is on top of the netbook processor market, while VIA and AMD are trying to compete somehow, it appears that a fourth chip maker is going to enter the netbook business and try to give Intel's Atom architecture a run for its money. ARM and Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, are co-operating to make Ubuntu Desktop operating system that will run well with ARM's ARMv7 processor architecture. This will enable new Linux netbooks and hybrid computers to enter the market.
"The release of a full Ubuntu desktop distribution supporting latest ARM technology will enable rapid growth, with internet everywhere, connected ultra portable devices," said Ian Drew, vice president of Marketing, ARM. "The always-on experience available with mobile devices is rapidly expanding to new device categories such as netbooks, laptops and other internet connected products. Working with Canonical will pave the way for the development of new features and innovations to all connected platforms."
This version of the Ubuntu Desktop operating system will handle the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor-based systems. The final Ubuntu ARM distribution will debut in April 2009. Now we only need volunteers to choose ARM and Linux for their netbooks.

Samsung today released five new SyncMaster LCD monitors that use the glossy-black design theme the company has been fascinated with, for some time now. Their screen-sizes range between 15.6 inch and 23 inch. The SyncMaster 633NW is a 15.6 inch display, while the 933SN is an 18.5 inch one, both with a native resolution of 1360 x 768 pixels.

The 2233SW and 2333SW come with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, and are sized at 21.5 and 23 inch respectively. The 2133SW is a 20 inch panel with resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels. All the above monitors sport a response time of 5 ms, and inputs that include DVI-D, and D-Sub. The monitors are HDCP capable. Prices in Japan, range between US $187 and $312.

Industry observer DigiTimes reports today that chip maker Intel is planning on launching new server Nehalem-EP and Nehalem-WS processors within the first quarter of 2009.

Intel is planning to launch Xeon 5500 (Nehalem-EP) and Xeon 3500 series (Nehalem-WS) server CPUs in the first quarter of 2009, according to sources at server makers. Intel will launch ten CPUs for the Xeon 5500 series: quad-core W5580 (3.2GHz), X5570 (2.93GHz), X5560 (2.8GHz), X5550 (2.66GHz), E5540 (2.53GHz), E5530 (2.4GHz), E5520 (2.26GHz), E5506 (2.13GHz), E5504 (2GHz) and dual-core E5502 with prices at US$1,600, US$1,386, US$1,172, US$958, US$744, US$530, US$373, US$266, US$224 and US$188 in thousand-unit tray quantities. For the Xeon 3500 series, Intel will launch three CPUs: quad-core W3570, W3540 and W3520 priced at US$999, US$562 and US$284.
In additional news, Intel is planning to phase out seven notebook CPUs including the Core 2 Extreme X7900 and X7800, and Core 2 Duo T7800 and L7700 in January next year.

December ATI Catalyst Driver Release Automatically Switches on ATI Stream Acceleration in ATI Radeon Graphics Cards Found in Millions of PCs. To Enable Instant Benefit, Users Will Also Be Able to Download Free Avivo Video Converter That Makes High-Definition Video Conversion up to 17x Faster.

AMD today announced that starting next month, the company plans to release for download a free ATI Catalyst driver update that instantly unlocks new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of ATI Radeon graphics cards.

Earlier today, AMD announced the release of its much anticipated enterprise quad-core processor, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron, codenamed "Shanghai". A regular feature with AMD press releases, is that the PR team details about the products' availability. In this particular release, AMD went a step further and revealed the brand name the company's desktop 45nm processors would carry: Phenom II, when getting into details about the AMD Dragon enthusiast platform. Dragon succeeds Spider, and consists of a Phenom II processor, running on AMD 7-series core logic, along with ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics accelerators.

The Phenom II processors will consist of a whole range of quad-core, triple-core and dual-core processors, with the products segregated on the basis of their core count, clock-speed and cache arrangement. Several models are lined-up for launch. The platform itself, as AMD asserts, would release in Q1, 2009. There are signs of the company launching some models of the Phenom II X4 sooner, for which motherboard vendors have already started releasing lists of their existing motherboards that are ready for the processors.

Today sees the release of Blizzard's last World of Warcraft installment, the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. This is the second expansion to date, making the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) game by far the largest in the world. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King features a massive new continent called Northrend, the brand-new death knight Hero class, unique dungeons, an open-world PvP zone with siege vehicles and destructible buildings, and hundreds of brand-new quests. The expansion is available in both a standard and Collector's Edition. The Collector's edition includes the original game DVD, a 208-page book featuring never-before-seen images from the game, an exclusive in-game pet, a behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, a soundtrack CD with 21 songs, and an exclusive mouse pad with a map of the newly opened continent of Northrend. The game should already be available everywhere, have fun playing it.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC segment and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions today announces its brand-new XPC Barebone with Intel G45 Express chipset. The Shuttle XPC Barebone SG45H7 is ideally suited to deliver high-resolution 1080p picture quality. Furthermore, heat dissipation and noise level have been further improved in this model. As a unique feature amongst Mini-PCs, up to 16GB of DDR2 memory can be installed in four memory banks.

"The integrated Intel GMA X4500HD graphics engine with Intel Clear-Video technology ensures effortless and brilliant HD-playback", explained Tom Seiffert, Head of Marketing & PR at Shuttle Computer Handels GmbH. "For even enhanced performance, the PCI-E-2.0 slot can also be equipped with dual slot graphics cards."

AMD today announced the new AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerator and the latest version of its free and open ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), version 1.3. Both are designed to help researchers, technical professionals and IT organizations use mainstream computing platforms to address challenges that once would have required multi-million-dollar investments in proprietary hardware and software.
Today's announcements also advance the company's corporate brand and strategy, called Fusion, by further enabling AMD graphics processors (GPUs) to work in concert with CPUs to deliver balanced platforms capable of increasing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

MSI released its partial list of motherboards that will support 45nm AM3-socket processors by AMD. The list includes all its AM2+ motherboards based on AMD 7-series and NVIDIA nForce 700a series chipsets. As of now, MSI released beta versions of the BIOS that expands its CPU support base, but it is expected that the company comes out with release-grade BIOS soon. The list, unlike ASUS' list, doesn't leave out any of its flagship motherboards.Press Release follows:

Mozilla released an update to its latest web browser, Firefox 3. The browser has been updated to sub-version 3.0.4, with several security patches, bug fixes and localization features added to the mix. To begin with, Mozilla patched several moderate-thru-critical vulnerabilities which include excecution of malicious code remotely, and crashes leading to memory corruption. The list of security fixes can be found here.

Mozilla also squished several bugs as listed in the Bug List. The company expanded localization for Firefox, with stable releases in Icelandic and Thai, and beta releases in Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh languages, which are open for testing till they reach stable-grade in subsequent releases. For more information, please refer to the Release Notes. Firefox can be downloaded from the server closest to you, from the Firefox homepage. Existing users would be updated automatically.

AMD today announced widespread availability of its 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivering up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle. With IT decision-makers looking to do more with less, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SMB customers more than 25 systems, available between launch today and the end of the year, based on the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed "Shanghai."

I'm happy to inform you that ATI has just posted links to its latest Catalyst version 8.11 WHQL drives. This release of ATI Catalyst enables users to verify whether an application is running in ATI CrossFireX mode. The new option found in the ATI Catalyst Control Center system tray, will allow users to verify whether a Direct3D or OpenGL application is running in ATI CrossFireX mode and display "ATI Cross-FireX" logo on screen when the application is actually running. This release also includes some performance enhancements (on all Radeon HD04xxx and Radeon HD3xxx products) that improve Far Cry 2 gameplay from 3 to 10% for single card mode and 8 to 14% in CrossFire configuration. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky game also gains 6 to 18% performance in single card settings and 10 to 30% in CrossfireX mode.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.11 WHQL

Aimed as the culmination of searching for the very essence of sound, the new ASUS Xonar Essence STX range of audio cards delivers the purest, cleanest audio to offer users the ultimate audio experience ever from a sound card. Equipped with carefully-selected components, and ASUS' exclusive Hyper-grounding and EMI Shield design, the Xonar Essence STX is capable of achieving an industry-leading 124dB SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) in signal clarity. Furthermore, full-driving for any available headphone is provided through the built-in headphone amplifier-presenting unprecedented audio quality and under 0.001% of distortion to sate even the most demanding audiophile. Interestingly enough, the design for this audio card is based on a paradigm that is forty centuries old.

Kingston Technology Company announced today that it is starting to ship select DDR2 and DDR3 HyperX memory modules with its new T1 heatspreaders. The taller heatspreaders utilize HyperX Thermal Xchange (HTX) technology to further diffuse heat buildup when overclocking. HTX technology is the latest innovation from Kingston's engineers. It includes bigger heatspreaders made of heavy-duty extruded aluminum and extended fins for maximum thermal conductivity. The new series includes both dual and triple channel kits. All Kingston HyperX products are backed by a lifetime warranty and free 24/7 technical support, the HyperX T1 series makes no exception.

• KHX16000D3T1K3/3GX - 3GB 2000MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) DDR3 kit of 3 optimized for XMP - $ 435.00
• KHX14900D3T1K3/3GX - 3GB 1866MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) DDR3 kit of 3 optimized for XMP - $ 403.00
• KHX14400D3T1K3/3GX - 3GB 1800MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) DDR3 kit of 3 optimized for XMP - $ 397.00
• KHX16000D3T1K2/2GN - 2GB 2000MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 2.0v) DDR3 kit of 2 NVIDIA SLI-ready - $ 295.00
• KHX14400D3T1K2/2G - 2GB 1800MHz (CL8-8-8-24 @ 1.9v) DDR3 kit of 2 - $ 279.00
• KHX8500D2T1K2/4G - 4GB 1066MHz (CL5-5-5-15 @ 2.2-2.3v) DDR2 kit of 2 - $ 177.00
• KHX6400D2T1K2/2G - 2GB 800MHz (CL5-5-5-15 @ 2.0v) DDR2 kit of 2 - $ 55.00

Scythe presented today the new Gentle Typhoon series of case fans developed by the Japanese Nidec Servo Corporation. Coming in 92mm and 120 mm sizes and eight different versions, these ball bearing fans are suitable for everyone and everything, from silent systems to high-airflow cooling setups. Gentle Typhoon Case fans are available now for $11,95 for the 92 mm versions and $16,95 for the 120 mm versions. The full list of all versions, follows below:

• D0925C12B1AP-12, 92 mm, 1700 RPM @ 13 dBA, 44 m³/h
• D0925C12B2AP-13, 92 mm, 2150 RPM @ 20 dBA, 58 m³/h
• D0925C12B3AP-14, 92 mm, 2650 RPM @ 26 dBA, 71 m³/h
• D1225C12B1AP-11, 120 mm, 500 RPM @ 5 dBA, 31 m³/h
• D1225C12B2AP-12, 120 mm, 800 RPM @ 9 dBA, 48 m³/h
• D1225C12B3AP-13, 120 mm, 1150 RPM @ 16 dBA, 63 m³/h
• D1225C12B4AP-14, 120 mm, 1450 RPM @ 21 dBA, 85 m³/h
• D1225C12B5AP-15, 120 mm, 1850 RPM @ 28 dBA, 98 m³/h

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based motherboards and graphics cards, today expands its Display Port-equipped graphics card lineup to include new affordable models - the ZOTAC GeForce 9400 GT DP and 9500 GT DP. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9400 GT DP and 9500 GT DP join the current ZOTAC GeForce 9600 GT DP for a complete lineup of affordable Display Port enabled graphics cards. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9400 GT DP and GeForce 9500 GT DP feature complete Display Port support for Display Port compatibility in Microsoft Windows Vista and XP operating systems. The two new ZOTAC Display Port equipped cards can also display pre-OS boot procedures, including the system BIOS, to Display Port displays for a seamless transition to Display Port technology.

BFG, a leading manufacturer of PC graphics cards and power supplies, introduced today in collaboration with SmoothCreations a nationally known system builder that builds custom painted high performance gaming computers; are proud to announce the Smooth HD SCinema.

"When the Music & Movie industry come asking for the Ultimate Media Center, they don't go to your local pc store or your volume OEM", says Mario Gastelum, they come to a reputable boutique system builder that real design team that can craft & customize a pc. And that's what happened with the Linkin Park media center.

ASUS has published a partial list of motherboards that support the upcoming AM3 socket processors.

Featured in the lists are most motherboards based on the AMD 7-series chipsets, along with those based on GeForce 8 and 7-series chipsets by NVIDIA.Press release follows:

Noctua today presented a new special edition of its flagship NH-U12P CPU cooler for Intel Core i7. The NH-U12P SE1366 includes the highly reliable, easy-to-use SecuFirm2 mounting system for LGA1366 as well as Noctua's pro-grade NT-H1 thermal compound and two NF-P12 120mm fans for superb quiet cooling performance on Core i7 CPUs.

"Intel's new Core i7 CPUs mark an exciting advance in processing power, but they definitely require a high quality heatsink if you want to cool them without the expense of excessive noise", explains Mag. Roland Mossig, Noctua CEO. "We strive to provide an easy entry into the world of premium quality quiet cooling with the new NH-U12P SE1366, offering a premium value package that gives you everything you need to cool Core i7 CPUs quietly!"

Dell continues to celebrate a season of design and discovery with the unveiling of the (PRODUCT) RED artwork for the Dell Studio laptops. This artwork exemplifies the unique visions of artists passionate about fighting AIDS in Africa. Today's announcement expands on the Dell Art House offerings, and allows users to celebrate their personal style, while supporting The Global Fund's fight against AIDS. The Dell Studio 15 starts at $649 and the Dell Studio 17 starts at $799 - these laptops can be personalized with (PRODUCT) RED artwork or Dell's other popular Art House designs by Mike Ming.

Taiwan based high-quality desktop and server chassis manufacturer CHIEFTEC, has today launched its bizzare CHIEFTEC L-type PC case, that might be very interesing for some of our audience. As the name suggests, the case has L-shaped design that allows you to install all your hardware components and then mount a flatscreen LCD monitor to its front. The case design is far from futuristic, but it will do the work if that's the solution you need. The L-type can house ATX or mATX motherboards, has room for seven PCI slots, 3x 3.5-inch HDDs, and a single 5.25-inch optical-drive bay. It measures 255mm x 370mm x 418mm, weighs 6kg, and features a front-facing rail that allows a mounted LCD monitor to be height adjusted. The case design allows for various monitors to be installed, the monitor only needs standard VESA mounting mechanism. Cooling is provided from a 120mm 800rpm exhaust fan, along with air holes to the sides and rear of the case. CHIEFTEC does expect the L-type to reach market in January 2009 at the reasonable price of £50.

Logitech today unveiled the newest addition to its line of award-winning diNovo keyboards - the Logitech diNovo Keyboard, Mac Edition. In addition to offering the exceptionally comfortable typing experience of the Logitech PerfectStroke key system, the cordless diNovo Keyboard, Mac Edition provides the convenience of a 3-year battery life and an integrated number pad.

"With the recently released diNovo Edge, Mac Edition, and now this diNovo Keyboard, Mac Edition, Logitech is giving people more options when it comes to choosing a keyboard that perfectly complements the Mac design," said Denis Pavillard, vice president of product marketing for Logitech's keyboards and desktops. "While the diNovo Edge keyboard is rechargeable and includes a TouchDisc and touch-sensitive volume control, our newest diNovo keyboard has a full-size layout and nineteen shortcut keys that provide quick access to Safari, iTunes, Expose, iChat and much more."

Despite all the rumors that FOXCONN is not doing so well and it is probably going out of the business, Foxconn Electronics and company subsidiary Foxconn Technology posted today record October sales.

Despite a weakening global economy, Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) and company subsidiary Foxconn Technology reported October sales that beat market expectations and hit respective company records. Foxconn Electronics spokesperson Edmund Ding said networking and consumer electronics products delivered an outstanding performance in October, while PC product lines also showed stable growth, pushing the company's October sales up 7.63% from September to NT$169.38 billion (US$5.2 billion), an increase of 29.13% on year. Accumulated sales from January to October were NT$1.216 trillion, up 27.47% compared to the same period last year and slightly lower than the company's 30% annual growth target. The company's sales in November and December are expected to continue to grow, though 30% monthly growth will be a difficult goal for the company to achieve, indicated the market watchers.
Foxconn Electronics' subsidiary Foxconn Technology also announced October consolidated sales of NT$16.72 billion, up 13.12% on month and 25.9% on year. Accumulated sales from January to October were NT$127.87 billion, representing 18.56% growth from the same period of 2007.

I guess now all rumors of FOXCONN leaving the motherboard market are groundless.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today introduced the Travelstar 5K500.B, a mobile hard drive that combines advanced data encryption technology with eco-friendly features, such as halogen-free design and a read/write power specification that is the lowest in the industry.
The drive has earned the new Hitachi EcoTrac classification, used to describe products that minimize environmental impact in the areas of product design, manufacturing, operation and disposal.

Last week Tom's Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard disk drives. Today, they bring some more info directly from Seagate:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions

Seagate also unveiled the part numbers and firmware versions for the affected models, they are as follows: part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. If you're one of the "lucky" owners affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regional support channels. Seagate is also currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.

Fujitsu Limited today announced that it has developed two new 500 GB 2.5" hard disk drive (HDD) models that feature a rotational speed of 5,400 RPM and deliver industry-leading levels of energy efficiency. The MJA2 BH series will be available from the end of December 2008, and the MJA2 CH series will be available in the first quarter of the 2009 calendar year. With industry-leading levels of energy efficiency, the new models consume only 1.4W of power when recording data, one-third less than previous models. Moreover, these are Fujitsu's first halogen-free HDD models, making them an environmentally friendly products across their lifecycle, from deployment to disposal.

NVIDIA today responded on the Rambus accusation made last Friday. It's not a lot of information, but it's enough to tell that NVIDIA is confident of what it is doing and its partners are to be afraid of nothing.

NVIDIA has hosted a meeting with their AIC partners today to keep them updated about the Rambus issue. VR-Zone has learned that NVIDIA continues to deny all allegations brought forward by Rambus as they believe everything is legal so far and will co-operate fully with ITC. NVIDIA stressed that their customers will not be affected by this allegation. Also they mentioned that this case will likely to drag for the next 12-18 months.

Enjoy the whole new experience with the new stylish NEC POWERMATE P All-In-One Desktop PC. NEC Computers Asia Pacific launches two new models of its NEC POWERMATE P All-In-One Desktop personal computers, POWERMATE P4000 & P6000. Leading its successful launch of the NEC POWERMATE P3000 and P5000 series, these two models further extend the range of NEC POWERMATE P All-In-One PC to convey another powerful entertainment system highlighting integrated thoughtful utility features.

The Intel Atom processor saw the company create a new niche, that of netbooks (sub-notebooks) and nettops. It has become the de-facto choice of OEM builders who are themselves teething in this new market. Intel Atom finds direct competition in VIA Nano, which offers the same x86 embedded options, at nearly the same thermal footprints, although AMD has some catching up to do in this segment.

Industry observer, DigiTimes, notes that Acer could be eying non-Atom options for its upcoming nettop SKUs. These products could feature VIA Nano, or AMD Athlon low-power processors. The company is basing it on the issue, that it plans to sell around 12~13 million nettop units, and given the situation, sourcing all the processors from Intel doesn't seem feasible. The silicon giant is already dealing with massive back-orders, backlog and stock shortages for the amount of demand the Atom has created. Acer also has three OEM sources in mind to make the nettop: Quanta Computer, Wistron and Micro-Star International (MSI). The company is expected to reach a decision in December.

TechPowerUp! announces the IKONIK Giveaway Contest. Up for grabs, are an IKONIK Zaria A20 PC Case, and an IKONIK Vulcan 850W modular power supply. Members of TechPowerUp! Forums for over one month, are eligible. Members need to post in the contest thread, and in a single post, answer three simple questions, to stand a chance to win the Zaria A20 or the Vulcan 850W. For a full set of eligibility details, contest rules, and other information, please refer to the contest thread. Good Luck!

Seagate today announced sweeping advances in its global push to help secure notebook computer information from theft or loss. To combat growing threats to mobile information, Seagate, the world leader in storage solutions, is now shipping its groundbreaking, self-encrypting notebook PC hard drives, now with up to 320GB of capacity, to the worldwide distribution channel, with 500GB models coming soon. Additionally, Dell is now shipping a notebook with a 160GB self-encrypting hard drive. McAfee is set to provide software for the enterprise-wide management of notebooks with Seagate Secure hard drives.

Powerful, easy-to-use notebook data security is increasingly important as the global adoption of mobile PCs continues to soar and more notebooks are used to store sensitive personal and business information. Lost or stolen notebooks can cost companies millions of dollars in compromised proprietary information and threaten consumers with the high cost of identity theft, yet many computers remain unprotected. According to the United States FBI, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds and 97% are never recovered*.

Intel will be releasing its newest processor: the Core i7, in the days to come. The first releases of the i7 are based on the Bloomfield core, which happens to be the poster-boy for the Intel Nehalem CPU architecture. The processor uses Intel's new LGA-1366 socket, it is a quad-core processor with HyperThreading enabled.

Expreview pictured the Core i7 (non Extreme) package, which reveals a largely standard pack that's seen on Intel's processors these days. Also pictured is Intel's stock cooler for the non-Extreme i7 processors, which largely resembles the stock-coolers of most Intel processors. It consists of a central block made of copper, which makes contact with the CPU. The thermal interface material is pre-applied to it. Aluminum fins project radially from the block, which fork into thinner fins, to increase surface-area. Also included in the package is the related documentation, warranty declaration and bezel sticker. The CPU pictured by Expreview is the i7 920, clocked at 2.66 GHz, with 8 MB L3 cache. The processor has a QuickPath Interconnect speed of 4800 MT/s.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and motherboards, today unleashes an overclocking storm with the new ZOTAC FireStorm software-overclocking application. The new free ZOTAC FireStorm application enables owners of ZOTAC GeForce 8, 9 and GTX series graphics cards to easily overclock their products. "Graphics card overclocking is becoming mainstream. With the new ZOTAC FireStorm application, users can easily overclock their ZOTAC graphics cards without downloading third-party applications or worry about compatibility with third party applications," said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.

Professionals searching for oil, diagnosing illness or styling the next high-performance luxury vehicle all have one thing in common, the need for advanced visual computing solutions. NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual computing technologies, today unveiled the most powerful professional graphics card in graphics history - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800.
"The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze and use to make impactful decisions," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive
datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions."

MSI today announces the latest VR220 YA Edition in three brilliant colors. Ignoring the cold and less interesting black, the MSI VR220 YA Edition is embracing the Magic of Colors turning the mundane into fun and exciting lives! The VR220 YA Edition has selected the very best fluorescent paint on the exterior to present the most surprising charisma of colors! The new edition includes 3 different colors of Denim Blue, Coral Pink, and WASABI Green. The colors are lively and brilliant; the design is light and attractive. Escaping the dark and less interesting technological feel of notebook computers. The VR220 YA Edition can satisfy your every need, and it is also a fashion accessory.

Other than the colorful and fashionable appearance, the inner functions are also a primary selection. Embedded with Intel Pentium Dual-core/Celeron Processor, incredibly large memory space, build-in 3 in 1 Card Reader, the very best 802.11 b / g/n wireless internet connection, and a multimedia burner drive. The VR220 YA Edition is your perfect partner in work and fun, embracing the magic of colors turning the mundane into fun and exciting lives.

In an exhibition of pure technological flexibility by AMD, the RV770 graphics processor is going to be used along with GDDR4 memory, in PowerColor's newest Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ GDDR4 graphics card. The inclusion of GDDR4 memory is to boost the memory clock speeds and to provide room for a little more memory overclocking.

The PCS+ GDDR4 features a GPU cooler designed by ZEROtherm, which is advertised to keep the GPU up to 10 °C cooler than what the reference cooler would. It features heatsinks for the memory and the VRM area. It features 512 MB of GDDR4 memory clocked at 2.20 GHz, with the core clocked at 675 MHz. The card supports CrossFireX, and sports dual-DVI connectors. There is no word on its availability pricing as of now.

I doubt someone expected this to happen so quickly, but Samsung's recently covered 23-inch 2342BWX high-resolution LCD display won't be the only one on the market for long, because Dell is also getting ready to ship the brand new SP2309 soon. Just like the Samsung, Dell's upcoming LCD will boast the remarkable 2048x1152 QWXGA resolution on a 23-inch 16:9 viewable display size. The remaining specs include dynamic contrast ratio of 1000:1, 300 cd/m² brightness, 98% color gamut, 2ms response time, 2-megapixel camera with microphone and VGA/DVI and HDMI inputs. The Dell SP2309 should start selling later this month. It's price is estimated at around $419.99.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards and motherboards, today kicks off the holiday season with a new premium software bundle featuring Ubisoft's Far Cry 2. The new premium software bundle will be available with the award-winning ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 280 AMP! Edition, GeForce GTX 2602 and GeForce GTX 260 AMP2! Edition for a limited time. "ZOTAC is pleased to provide gamers with Ubisoft's highly anticipated Far Cry 2 game. With Far Cry 2, users can take advantage of the 3D power available with their new ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 280 AMP! Edition, GeForce GTX 2602 or GeForce GTX 260 AMP2! Edition and experience stunning visuals right out of the box," said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.

Thermalright, better known for aluminum fin blocks based coolers, is ready with a Core i7 supportive variant of the Ultra-120 eXtreme cooler. The cooler comes with the same Ultra-120 eXtreme heatsink, consisting of 52 aluminum fins across six heat-pipes, with the required bolt-through retention module for LGA-1366 socket, along with the fluid-dynamic bearing fan which operates at ~1600 rpm with a noise level of 29 dBA.

Thermalright will be announcing this cooler shortly.

In order to cater to users who require excellent graphical performance boosts and exceptional cooling from their graphic cards, ASUS, world-leading producer of top quality graphics solutions, has today introduced two ranges of self-designed graphics cards, namely the EAH4870X2 and the latest EAH4830 Series. These ASUS designed graphics cards are equipped with specially designed fansinks that deliver extreme cooling of up to 24°C for the GPU and low noise-levels of only 29 dB-greatly enhancing the gaming enjoyment of users. The inclusion of the Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI) shield, Covered Chokes, low RDS (on) mosfets and the Stabilizer Solid Polymer Aluminum Capacitors infuses extreme performance with durability for total peace of mind.

Corsair has announced its newest PSU, the HX450W. This 450W PSU would be the company's entry-level offering with flat modular cabling. The unit measures 150mm x 86mm x 150mm, and features a quiet temperature-controlled 120mm fan. In many aspects this PSU could be seen as a modular version of the VX450W.

The PSU flaunts 80-plus efficiency badge with a company-rated efficiency level of above 85%. It features active PFC. The PSU guarantees continuous output of 450W under 50 °C, and an MTBF of 100,000 hours. The PSU is backed by Corsair's seven-year warranty. Corsair recommends this PSU for single graphics card setups.

Foxconn marks its enthusiast and gamer grade motherboards under the Quantum-Force banner. These motherboards are targeted towards overclockers and gamers. Having made a motherboard based on the Nehalem-supportive Blood Rage, the company hasn't made a stop. They've come up with a new motherboard based on the Intel P45 chipset, known as 'Avenger'.

Foxconn claims to have made several changes to the basic design of a motherboard, by pushing the northbridge closer to the DDR2 memory slots (reportedly to cut latencies), and the inclusion of a supplementary PCI-Express switch, to provide dual PCI-Express x16 connections for ATI Crossfire: something not possible with P45 motherboards. The switch chip is made by PLX, and is similar to the one used by AMD on its flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card.

Glacialtech, one of Intel's stock-cooler suppliers, has taken a step into the branded high-end cooling segment with its UFO CPU cooler. Expreview took a few snaps of the cooler, which shows a large fin array suspended on four heatpipes, on which two 38 CFM, 92 mm fans blow air downward. The two fans sandwich the aluminum fins, and are covered by sporty black and yellow shrouds. The combined noise of the fans is rated at 28 dBA (at max. speed of 2000 rpm). The cooler supports all current CPU sockets, and is expected to release soon.

Creative staff has announced that it is ready with its first release of drivers for Sound Blaster X-Fi sound cards, that supports 32-bit Linux. The driver comes in the form of a source tar-ball. The drivers allow seemless operation over ALSA. Updates to the x86_64 drivers are provided as well. This driver applies to all X-Fi series sound cards based on the CA-20K series audio processor. Its known issues include lack of functionality for external I/O modules, and that there are no Linux versions of the applications Creative bundles in its Driver CDs, which work under Windows, as of now.

To download the drivers, select your compatible Sound Blaster X-Fi model from this page and choose Linux under the manual selection drop-down to list Linux drivers.

The Japanese cooling specialist Scythe Co. Ltd. unveils the new CPU Cooler Stabilizer 775. With this product, mounting of LGA 775 Coolers is possible without using the Push Pins. With the supplied Push Pin Removal-Tool, displacing the original Push Pins is no problem anymore. Secure mounting of the cooler is possible using Back-Plate and screws. The whole product consists of metal and is really solid.

When using the Stabilizer on Socket 478 CPU Coolers, the included mounting bars are used. By using those, the CPU Cooler Stabilizer 775 provides a better contact pressure between CPU and Cooler than using conventional mounting solutions.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, today announced that it has been voted "Best Power Supply Manufacturer" by the readers of Custom PC Magazine for the second year running.

Corsair was chosen above all other brands by Custom PC's audience of true technology enthusiasts and overclockers in the magazine's annual awards survey. Over 4000 votes were cast and Corsair emerged as the clear winner in the Power Supply category with high scores in all areas, including ratings of 9.5 out of 10 for Performance, Reliability and Build Quality.

The RV770 graphics processor changed AMD's fortunes in the graphics processor industry and put it back in the race for supremacy over the larger rival NVIDIA. The introduction of RV770-based products had a huge impact on the mid-range and high-end graphics card markets, which took NVIDIA by surprise. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA has been quoted saying that they had underestimated their competitor's latest GPU, referring to RV770. While the Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator provided direct competition to the 192 shader-laden GeForce GTX 260, the subsequent introduction of a 216 shader variant saw it lose ground, leaving doubling of memory size to carve out the newer SKU, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB. Performance benchmarks of this card from all over the media have been mixed, but show that AMD isn't giving up this chance for gaining technological supremacy.

In Q4 2008, NVIDIA is expected to release three new graphics cards: GeForce GTX 270 and GeForce GTX 290. The cards are based on NVIDIA's G200 refresh, the G200b, which incorporates a new manufacturing technology to facilitate higher clock-speeds, stepping up performance. This looks to threaten the market position of AMD's RV770, since it's already established that G200 when overclocked to its stable limits, achieves more performance than RV770 pushed to its limits. This leaves AMD with some worries, since it cannot afford to lose the wonderful market-position its cash-cow, the RV770 is currently in, to an NVIDIA product that outperforms it by a significant margin, in its price-domain. The company's next generation graphics processor would be the RV870, which still has some time left before it could be rushed in, since its introduction is tied to the constraints of foundry companies such as TSMC, and the availability of the required manufacturing process (40nm silicon lithography) by them. While TSMC takes its time working on that, there's a fair bit of time left, for RV770 to face NVIDIA, which given the circumstances, looks a lost battle. Is AMD going to do something about its flagship GPU? Will AMD make an effort to maintain its competitiveness before the next round of the battle for technological supremacy begins? The answer is tilting in favour of yes.

NVIDIA Corporation today reported financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 ended October 26, 2008.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2009, revenue was $897.7 million compared to $1.12 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2008, a decrease of 20 percent. For the nine months ended October 26, 2008, revenue increased to $2.94 billion compared to $2.90 billion for the nine months ended October 28, 2007, an increase of 2 percent.

Yesterday, OCZ silently released new solid state drives, part of the company's Solid series line-up. There's still no sign of a press release, but the drives are already starting to appear at some etailers. These are not the Core V3 SSDs we covered here two days ago, but new budget solid state drives. The new value-minded SSDs come in a 2.5-inch form factor, have a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, one mini USB port and a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.5 million hours. The SSDs do claim 155MB/s read and 90MB/s write speeds and are shock resistant. OCZ's new Solid SSDs are available in 30GB (OCZSSD2-1SLD30G), 60GB (OCZSSD2-1SLD60G) and 120GB (OCZSSD2-1SLD120G) models, priced at $89, $159 and $299 respectively. All drives have a two year warranty.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, announces a brand new graphics card for overclockers - PowerColor Liquid Cooling Solution, LCS HD4870. With EK Water Blocks cooling solution, PowerColor LCS HD4870 provides an extraordinary thermal performance in a single slot design, enhances overclocking ability to its optimum stability and delivers an extreme gaming performance.

Microsoft has released its latest update to the DirectX end-user runtime. The update patches DirectX installations on all current Microsoft PC, workstation and server operating systems. Microsoft releases updates to the DirectX end-user runtime on a bi-monthly basis, with security, performance enhancements and features usually forming the update. The latest update or the entire redistributable (for offline installations) can be downloaded from Microsoft here.

Rambus Inc., one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed memory architectures, today announced it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) requesting the commencement of an investigation pertaining to NVIDIA products. The complaint seeks an exclusion order barring the importation, sale for importation, or sale after importation of products that infringe nine Rambus patents from the Ware and Barth families of patents. The accused products include NVIDIA products that incorporate DDR, DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR, GDDR, GDDR2, and GDDR3 memory controllers, including graphics processors, and media and communications processors.

With today's traditional workstation model pricing, many organizations can only afford to deploy professional graphics solutions to select designers and engineers, leaving a significant portion of the workforce with sub-optimal products. This is about to change as NVIDIA Corp. announced today NVIDIA Quadro FX 470, the first integrated professional motherboard GPU, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (Quadro FX 370 LP), an entry-level Quadro graphics boards for small form factor systems.

When Toshiba set out to reset the bar for high performance gaming laptops and revamp its flagship gaming line, the company turned to NVIDIA for its expertise in visual computing. The combined efforts of both companies resulted in Toshiba's most powerful gaming laptop to date featuring the new highly integrated GeForce 9400M graphics processing unit (GPU) along with a pair of NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS enthusiast-class GPUs. The Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 and X305-Q706, the first pair of laptops to incorporate three powerful NVIDIA GPUs, give users a choice between maximum performance and quiet operation.

Samsung is today adding a new 23-inch 2342BWX widescreen LCD display, that boasts an ultra thin black bezel and a 2048x1152 QWXGA resolution. That's in fact the world's first 23-inch display with such unusual resolution. The 16:9 screen is dedicated for office work and is large enough to fit two A4 pages side by side as well as the vertical Vista Sidebar. Samsung claims that the 2342BWX eliminates the need of a second display in the office, with such a wide resolution it can fit almost everything. Other specs that enrich the monitor even more, include a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, a 5ms gray-to-gray pixel response time and a very small pixel size (0.249mm). Samsung will launch the display first in Korea for the equivalent of $295 (₩399,000), then it will spread the model across the world. I almost forgot, don't count on receiving the display with the girl from the picture. ;)

SiS today announced the SiSM671/968/307DV chipset supporting the latest Intel Atom 230 and series CPU has been adopted by Dell to develop the Thin-Client PC OptiPlex FX160 project. With low power consumption and without fan characteristic of SiS chipsets, the new launched Dell OptiPlex FX160 is designed for business users to experience the noiseless environment and to make a contribute to energy saving and carbon reduction.

As the photo shown below, the DELL OptiPlex FX160 has the quite exquisite outlook. The space-saving design is only one eighth of the regular ATX chassis with SiSM671-based chipset of Mini-iTX motherboard inside. On account of superiority of meshed aluminum material case, the DELL OptiPlex FX160 not only integrates all the modern PC functions thoroughly but also features small-sized, light-weighted, high radiation; easy-fixing and power-saving. We can foresee the cost-efficient and full functional DELL OptiPlex FX160 paired with Intel Atom series processors and DDR2 memory definitely becomes the tendency in the IT world.

The company slogan change, from "Smarter Choice" to "The future is fusion" marked a major shift in core-Strategy for AMD. The company now focuses on delivering solutions, more so than mere products, with a solution comprising of several products working together to let the PC serve a purpose. One such solution is the AMD Maui entertainment platform. Maui platform makes AMD hardware work with AMD's own Live! Media Center software to deliver a complete home-theater PC solution.

On the hardware front, Maui includes a qualifying AMD Athlon X2 or Phenom series processor, a motherboard based on the AMD 7-series chipset with integrated graphics. Video is handled by the 7-series IGP, while audio is handled by a special audio component-riser card that has pre-amp circuitry onboard, which enables users to connect speakers in the 5.1 channel configuration directly to the motherboard. Future models would bring in 7.1 channel support. The first motherboard to use this design, is the MSI Media Live DIVA 5.1 780M.

Stealing money has always been the easy way to earn some quick pocket change, but what about $1 Billion stolen not from anybody but from Intel itself. At the age of 33, Biswamohan Pani, now a former Intel employee, was charged today for stealing trade secrets from Intel that worth more than $1 billion. Pani was allegedly stealing trade secrets from Intel Corp.'s facility in Hudson, Mass., and downloading confidential documents from the company's offices in California. According to the indictment, Pani gave notice to leave Intel and told his superiors he was using up about a week of vacation while looking for a job at a hedge fund. In reality, he had taken a job at Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices, and while using up vacation time at Intel, was downloading valuable trade secrets. When Pani's house was searched by the FBI, they've found eight documents described by Intel as "confidential," "secret" or "top secret." Now Biswamohan Pani is facing a major sentence in prison, so he can reconsider his theft estimated for $1 billion in research and development costs. On the other side, AMD said it was not aware for any of Pani's stolen information.

First unveiled two months ago and then delayed a little bit for some last minute changes, Enermax is finally announcing the availability of it's new "REVOLUTION 85+" flagship PSU series. Produced as a worthy successor of Enermax's previous high-end 1kW-class GALAXY and GALAXY DXX PSUs, the new REVOLUTION series is a top-notch product that puts a new more aggressive outside look and some new innovations never seen in Enermax PSUs before. These power supply units will be ideal for server, workstation or gaming systems. The REVOLUTION 85+ series comes in four different wattages: 850W (ERV850EWT), 950W (ERV950EWT), 1050W (ERV1050EWT), and 1250W (ERV1250EGT - available only in Europe). All PSUs from the series have a total of six 12V rails rated at 30A to 35A each, no-load operation mode, power saving modes for upcoming CPUs, high efficiency of 85+ % and modular cable desgin. Besides that, these PSUs are nearly silent because of the double ball bearing low-RPM 135mm fan installed. The other normal features for the model include Enermax's PowerGuard status monitor, SafeGuard now with 8 protections instead of formerly six (SIP (Surge & Inrush Protection) and UVP now as separate AC UVP & DC UVP), AirGuard to reduce air turbulences and the new HeatGuard that keeps the PSU fan rotating in case the inside of the PSU is hotter than usual after shut-down. A good review of the PSU was also posted today, over at AnandTech.

The year 2008 so far, has been very eventful for the graphics card market. A reinvigorated GPU lineup by ATI, brought in some fierce competition to NVIDIA, which resulted in a tug-of-war with pricing graphics cards in the market, with either company refusing to lose on grounds of pricing. This event, coupled with the announcement of several game titles by game publishers, resulted in bumper-sales of graphics cards, giving the present state of the global economy little or no relevance.

The months to come hold the same amount of importance for both AMD and NVIDIA, where the next round of competition begins with successors to current high-end products being slated. NVIDIA is expected to continue with its monolithic high transistor-count GPU design methodology, while AMD could bring in a little change to the way it uses two efficient GPUs to build powerful products.

Intel recently issued a list of the processors it will be phasing out in favour of the new and faster Core i7 CPUs. The list includes several 65nm, 45nm and some laptop processors:

• Q9450 (2.66 GHz 1333 MT/s, quad-core, 95 watt, LGA775, Yorkfield 45nm)
• E8200 (2.66 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Wolfdale 45nm)
• E8190 (2.66 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Wolfdale 45nm)
• E6850 (3.00 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Conroe 65nm)
• E6750 (2.66 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Conroe 65nm)
• E6550 (2.33 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Conroe 65nm)
• E6540 (2.33 GHz 1333 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Conroe 65nm)
• E4600 (2.40 GHz 800 MT/s, dual-core, 65 watt, LGA775, Allendale 65nm)
• T7400 (2.16 GHz 667 MT/s, mobile dual-core, 34 watt, Socket-M, Merom 65nm)
• Celeron-M 530 (1.73 GHz mobile, 533 MT/s, single-core, 30 watt, Socket-M, Merom-1024 65nm)

You will still be able to get these items until 2010, but Intel is already taking measures to slowly phase them out from the market.

Hard drive king Seagate officially confirmed today that it is investing as much as $100 million in a very own line-up of Solid State Drives. Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins said:

We'd love to have an SSD range, that's why we're investing (as much as $100m), as there are a lot of things that we like about them. But there are also some problems.

The new line-up Seagate is building will try to overcome some of the problems current SSDs have. At present we're aware of SLC (single layer chip) and MLC (multiple layer chip) SSDs, and we know that the latter is cheaper but has reliability issues. Seagate will try to create a new technology that combines both single-layer cell (SLC) and multi-layer cell (MLC) tech, making better, faster and cheaper SSDs, the drives we all want.
Seagate's senior vice president of global marketing Pat King also revealed that the company is working on a network attached storage solution for the home. Unfortunately, that's all the information we have. Hopefully this new line-up will be a big step in the SSD industry.

ZOTAC International, a leading manufacturer of NVIDIA-based graphics cards, today is shipping three new NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO based graphics cards - the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, GeForce 9600 GSO 1GB and GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB AMP! Edition. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9600 GSO models usher in a new era of affordable high-performance graphics solutions that are ready to take on the latest Microsoft DirectX 10, OpenGL 2.1 enabled games and NVIDIA CUDA enabled applications. Drawing power from 48 screaming-fast stream processors, the new trio of ZOTAC GeForce 9600 GSO graphics cards will deliver phenomenal visuals and fast frame-rates in the latest 3D games. Powered by NVIDIA's flexible unified architecture, the 48 stream processors are programmable to take on any tasks - whether its gaming or accelerating NVIDIA CUDA-enabled applications.

VIA and NVIDIA have had a decent association going their way for some time now, with the latter offering to design platform core logic (chipset) embedding the GeForce Integrated graphics, which gives VIA's Nano processor, an edge over Intel's Atom platform using obsolete core logic technologies.

Sources at VIA tell DigiTimes, that the deal between the two companies, to work on an inexpensive netbook platform, may have been shelved. The two companies had earlier planned to pair VIA's Nano processor with NVIDIA's MCP79 IGP (which now seems to have a fair bit of success in its Intel Core 2 microprocessor-supportive avatar). Although cooperation on the platform is suspended, VIA said the two are still continuing to cooperate and will showcase co-developed desktop PC (read: nettop) products at CES 2009.

Early access to the Left 4 Dead demo begins Today, November 6 on both the PC and Xbox 360. The early demo access is scheduled to begin around 2 am PST on the Xbox 360 and 7 am PST on the PC. This promotion is being offered in addition to the 10% savings for those who pre-order and applies to all Steam PC pre-orders and all PC and Xbox 360 pre-orders from GameStop and EB Games in North America.

On November 11 the demo will be made available to all PC and Xbox 360 gamers worldwide, with no obligation to purchase. The demo concludes on November 18, when Left 4 Dead will be made available at retail outlets across North America and worldwide via Steam.
For more information, please visit Steam Games.

Topower Computer, a worldwide leader in innovative, high performance, and high reliability power supply, today unveiled the Award-Winning Special Edition PowerBird 1100W power supply with aluminum carry case for high-powered gaming systems and workstations.

Designed to offer the consumer market an industrial-grade computer power supply with state-of-the-art designs, the PowerBird is the ultimate power solution for those users that require an ultra-efficient, highly reliable, high-wattage, multiple graphics cards solution for their leading-edge gaming machine.

Gainward, a subsidiary of Palit, has announced the Radeon HD 4870 X2 Golden Sample. The graphics card is identical to the Revolution R700 Deluxe by the parent company Palit, while going with Gainward branding to cater to the company's target markets. Gainward focuses on the Asian markets, where it has most of its influence on. The other subsidiary of Palit, XpertVision, is reportedly being dissolved into the parent brand, as brand Palit has started to have market presence in XpertVision's target market.

The card spans across three expansion slots for its massive cooler. It features two RV770 graphics processors by ATI aided with 2 GB of total memory based on the GDDR5 memory standard. It features a dual-link DVI, a D-SUB, a DisplayPort and a HDMI port. The availability and pricing of this card, is intended to be synchronized with those of the Palit card, they might reach markets at the same time, just that they release in different parts of the world. More pictures could be viewed here.

SanDisk Corporation today unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) that yields dramatic improvement in performance and reliability for computing applications. Called ExtremeFFS, this next-generation patented flash management system - which has the potential to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems - will ship in SanDisk products during 2009. Speaking in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk's Solid-State Drive (SSD) Business Unit, presented ExtremeFFS along with two metrics - vRPM and LDE - that can help end-users evaluate SSDs. vRPM enables comparisons in performance between an SSD and a hard disk drive (HDD) or another SSD, and LDE calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive.

Xigmatek, best known with its RED SCORPION S1283, today announced the Cobra D984 - yet another direct heat-pipe CPU cooler with a name borrowed from an animal. Cobra D984 is a high end cooler build upon the company's "Fin connected to HDT base" and "H.D.T. Technology" where four 8mm heat-pipes are in direct contact with the CPU. The cooler measures 131 x 92 x 102mm (W x D x H), weights in 452 grams and features a 92mm PWM controlled fan with an aiflow of 39-54.6CFM and a noise level of 20-28dBA. The Xigmatek Cobra D984 offers support for Intel LGA775 and AMD AM2/754/939/940 sockets, but it is not compatible with the latest Core i7 LGA 1366. It can already be found for just under 30 Euro.

The easy installation and space saving design of Thermaltake Liquid Cooling Systems are always very much appreciated by liquid cooling users. In order to keep your cooling device upgraded for the most advanced gamer platforms today, Thermaltake has introduced the new 3U drive bay liquid cooling system today - Bigwater 780, satisfying all players who look for only the extreme perfections.

Bigwater 780 is an all-in-one device that has every little detailed parts carefully designed. You will be able to monitor the coolant circulations from the front panel of your chassis. Bigwater 780 has a 530c.c. big water tank that keeps you carefree of coolant fulfilling troubles for a very long time. The coolant controlling works will also be very simple with the transparent design and easy fulfilling structure.

Qimonda AG, a leading global memory supplier, today announced the commencement of commercial production of DRAM chips using its new Buried Wordline technology. Qimonda's revenues in October included the first sales of 1Gbit DDR2 chips using 65nm Buried Wordline technology. In addition, Qimonda has achieved first yields on the next generation 46nm Buried Wordline technology and has taped out what it believes is the worldwide smallest 2G DDR3 chip based on this technology. Qimonda's innovative Buried Wordline DRAM technology combines high performance, low power consumption and small chip sizes to further advance the company's product portfolio, which is now focused on DRAM for infrastructure and graphics applications.

NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in visual computing technologies, announced it is accepting applications for the NVIDIA Fellowship Program for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Dr. David Kirk, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, stated: "The NVIDIA Fellowship Program is designed to stimulate and support excellence in visual and parallel computing research in universities worldwide, and to promote communication between NVIDIA's R&D team and outstanding students and professors. Since its inception in 2002, the Program has awarded over $1.6 million in funding to assist 65 Ph.D. students with their research."

Freescale Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics, a world leader in display technology, have announced their collaboration to address the burgeoning market for energy-saving and environmentally friendly light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
"Freescale's LED backlight driver technology is the industry's most compact and integrated solution," said Arman Naghavi, vice president and general manager of Freescale's Analog, Mixed-Signal and Power Division. "Our collaboration with Samsung on LED backlighting - clearly a disruptive technology - will help spur further innovation and growth in the LCD market."

During the DIY PC Expo 2008 in Japan, OCZ Technology unveiled that it will be updating its Core series of solid state drives. The third generation MLC (multi-level cell) NAND-based Core V3 models will bring higher read and write speeds that exceed 230MB/s read and 160MB/s write speeds, a lot more than the 170MB/s (read) and 98MB/s (write) offered by today's Core V2 SSDs. The new Core V3 SSDs will come in a 2.5-inch form factor, and will boast a SATA 3.0G Gbit/s interface. Most likely OCZ will release models that range from 32GB to 256GB in capacity. The rest of the details are still unknown.

After Corsair dropped off some of its latest Dominator 2 DDR3 memory kits for testing with the new Nehalem platform, various sites immediatelly acknowledged that there're some changes in the DHX coolers that cool the new memories. The new approach will be called DHX+ and it consists of a modified thick-sink design where an additional fins are bolted on the top of the cooler. Now HEXUS.net has unveiled that the DHX+ technology will also offer enthusiasts to futher cool the memory by attaching a water cooled TEC block on top. The block appears to be still in development, so we'll have to wait a little bit more until more information is available. The Pelt/waterblock combination should allow extra voltage to be pushed through appropriately selected RAM modules without killing them, potentially yielding higher clock rates and lower latencies.

Although it was aquired by Mad Catz, Saitek has managed to reborn an icon among the keyboards and release the Saitek III keyboard. The third Saitek series is a sleek backlit multimedia keyboard with touch-sensitive lighting and volume controls, and adjustable, multi color backlighting shortcut keys. The backlight of the keyboard can vary in colors depending on the user's preferences. Once you made some changes to the keyboard's color or its settings they'll remain unchanged after system reboot. This USB 2.0-connected peripheral also comes with a 2-stage height adjustment and removable wrist rest increase comfort, laser-etched keys, a head phone and microphone audio ports. There is no word on pricing or availability yet.

Solid State Disks (SSDs) are all the rage these days. The robust flash based hard drives offer many advantages to typical magnetic storage solutions. Silent operation, minimal electricity requirements, almost no heat build-up and fast read/write rates. Because of their high resistance to shock and impact damage, SSDs are especially suited for mobile computers. Disadvantages include their high price and relatively low capacity--at this time capacities greater than 128GB are hard to find.

Sharkoon is now introducing an alternative that allows users to build a Notebook SSD themselves. The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive S2S is an SSD adaptor with the size and connections of a 2.5 inch SATA hard drive. The necessary flash memory is provided by the up to six SDHC cards that can be installed in the enclosure. Users can select the manufacturer, number, chip type (SLC or MLC) and capacity of the memory cards according to their needs.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC sector and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions extends its portfolio with a new compact entertainment artist specifically designed to play back high-resolution Blu-ray media. The Shuttle XPC H7 7800H complete Mini-PC system is easy to use, stands for high processing power and space for expansion.

The Windows Vista based complete system includes a Blu-ray Combo drive, a card reader, hybrid TV tuner card, WLAN and a remote control. Based on the Shuttle XPC Barebone SN78SH7, this attractive Mini-PC solution barely measures 32.5 x 20.8 x 18.9 cm (DWH).

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra high performance and high reliability memory and components, has been named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Program for Silicon Valley Software and Information Technology (IT) companies. This year's Silicon Valley Technology Fast 50 program is co-presented by Deloitte, Silicon Valley Bank, Korn/Ferry International, Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, Cornish & Carey Client Solutions, and ABD Insurance and Financial Services - A Wells Fargo Company. Rankings are based on the percentage revenue growth over five years from fiscal year 2003-2007.

MSI EX623 features Cinema Pro Technology, which offers consumers the finest movie viewing experience. With a simple touch of the exclusive Cinema Pro button; you may immediately switch to Movie Mode. The quality on screen will be more detailed, the richness in sound and the subwoofer as well as Dolby sound will be activated, providing the finest sensory of the theaters. Furthermore, the embedded high performance subwoofer design can create shocking effects.

Combing Color Film Print Technology with ocean wave patterns in design, the EX623 has been injected with a brand new texture to personal notebook computers. The most advanced NVIDIA Geforce 9500M GS graphic card with 512MB VRAM, for a more fluid, more detailed, more realistic 3D high-definition viewing experience. In the other hand, EX623 selects the brand new ECO Engine Technology, the outstanding and unique power saving function by MSI Notebook, as the power management function to extend the battery running time while performing different tasks.

Industry informer DigiTimes shared today some information on the upcoming Deneb processor family from AMD. According to their information, AMD is planning to launch six high-end 45nm quad-core CPUs (Deneb) and four entry-level (Propus) including 20x00, 18x00, 16x00 and 1xx00e models, in the first quarter of next year. Two of these processors will be available earlier in November of this year - the 3GHz Phenom X4 20550 and 2.8GHz 20350 for socket AM2+ systems.
AMD will also launch six 45nm triple-core CPUs (Heka and Regor) including 14x00, 12x00 and 1xx00e series. These triple-core CPUs will enter design validation test (DVT) and start shipping in the first quarter next year.
In the second and third quarter of next year AMD will also start shipping its 45nm AM3-based dual-core CPUs, part of the Regor family.
Although the chipmaker will largely enter the 45nm generation, in order to prevent potential yield rate problems from the new process, it will launch seven 65nm CPUs including three quad-core Phenom X4 CPUs (Agena) - 9950 (120W), 9850 (95W) and 9450e (65W), and two Athlon X2 CPUs (Kuma) - 7750 and 7550 in the first quarter of 2009, while two low-power Athlon X2 CPUs (Brisbane) - 5050e and 3250e, will launch in the near future.
Launching of the new Phenom processors will also lead to new price reductions and last order notices for some of the older processors. Unfortunately, there is no additional information.

WiQuest Communications Inc. today went bankrupt, and thus unofficially announced that the work on the Wireless USB standard will stop permanently. The Allen, Texas, company employed about 120 people focused on the wireless USB protocol. WiQuest was shipping a two-chip wireless USB solution adopted as an optional add-on to notebooks from Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba as well as consumer devices such as hubs from Belkin, D-Link and others. According to the source of this story, WiQuest couldn't resolve the technical difficulties in bringing the wireless technology to the market. The whole wireless USB solution requires two chips instead of a single one to work, also the first generation wireless USB devices offered very limited transfer speeds. Another problem that was present during all the time were the power requirements set by the OEM adopters. After the little success of the first generation wireless USB standard, WiQuest was sampling a single chip device announced back in August, but this one won't make it to production now.

We've been looking for a variety of alternatives for awhile now including new investors and acquisitions, but none looked like positive alternatives to our investors so we decided to shut the doors today,

said Todd A. Brown, vice president of worldwide sales at the company.

Sapphire has really stepped up on its engineering lately, designing the industry's first graphics card based on two RV770 Pro (Radeon HD 4850) cores. While the card that has been making news for a while now, has 2GB of GDDR3 memory, with each GPU having access to 1GB of it, Sapphire has decided to carve yet another SKU, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, where each GPU has access to 512 MB of it.

The card is expected to fit comfortably between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the Sapphire HD 4850 2GB in the markets, while offering performance levels that justify its price. The two RV770 GPUs are clocked at 625 MHz, with memory clocked at 1,986 MHz. There is no word on its availability or pricing yet.

Palit is ready with what appears to be, a monstrous graphics card based on the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 (R700) design with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, called the Palit Revolution R700 Deluxe. What makes it monstrous apparently is its width that spans across three expansion slots. Under the shroud of the cooler is an elaborate cooling system designed by Palit itself.

The cooler comprises of a large heat radiator, through which several heat-pipes conduct heat from contact blocks for the GPUs, memory, and the PCI-Express bridge chip, with seperate cooling blocks for the VRM area. Two fans of identical sizes blow air on the two thermal zones for the card: GPU and power circuitry. The card boasts overclocking features and company marketed overclocking potential highest for any R700 design so far, while shipping with reference clock speeds of 750/3800 MHz (core/memory). The card is fueled by the usual 6+2 pin and 6 pin power connectors, which are right-angled for accessibility.

Valve, creators of best-selling entertainment products and advanced technologies, today announced the roll out of Steam Cloud, a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC. Steam Cloud is a free extension to Steam, a leading a platform for PC games with over 15 million accounts worldwide.

Steam Cloud support will ship with Valve's Left 4 Dead demo later this week and the full game on November 18. In this first release, the information stored and accessible through the Steam Cloud includes keyboard, mouse, and gamepad configurations, as well as multiplayer settings such as spraypaint images.

High-end laptop maker Alienware is now offering a new M17 laptop model that is not to be mistaken with the mighty M17x from the same company. Like most of its siblings, the new M17 is highly customizable. Starting at $1399, this 17-incher is the very first CrossFire X-enabled notebook, that can be outfitted with a Core 2 Quad / Extreme CPU, up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 GPUs, a WXGA+ (1440x900) or WUXGA panel with Clearview (1920x1200), an optional ATSC HDTV tuner, up to 1TB of HDD space in a RAID 0 array, a dual-layer DVD writer / optional Blu-ray reader, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, gigabit Ethernet and a AlienSense facial recognition sensor or a biometric fingerprint reader. Of course, with all the goodies your're looking at around $4000 price tag. The Alienware M17 is available now, for the full list of features or the purchase page please click here.

Plextor is reinforcing its product line-up of Qflix recording devices by introducing the two new PX-806SA and PX-Q840U internal and external optical drives. Both drives feature Qflix recording technology from Sonic Solutions, enabling consumers to download and burn movie and TV titles on a DVD media for immediate viewing. The PX-806SA internal SATA super multi drive supports blazing fast 20x burns on single layer DVD±R media (4.7 GB), 8x burn speed on double/dual layer DVD media (8.5 GB) and 12x on DVD-RAM media. As for the old CDs, it is capable of 48x CD-ROM and 32x CD-RW burn speeds. The drive's bundle features Roxio Venue, which connects directly to CinemaNow for media download, Roxio Creator 10 CE burning software and two recordable Qflix DVDs by Ridata. At last, both drives have 2MB of buffer memory, the standard for today's burners. The PX-Q840U model is essentially the same drive, but designed for external usage. Like most Plextors, the PX-Q840U external retails for $149.99 and the PX-806SA internal retails for $89.99, a lot above you'd expect to pay for a DVD burner. Both drives are available for purchase now through distributors and retailers in North and South America.

GlacialPower made an addition to its AL Series high-efficiency power supplies (PSUs), with the GP-AL650. The PSU provides 650W of continuous power output, and is ATX12V v2.2 certified. The power output distribution diagram shows this PSU to feature two +12V rails of 26A and 21A.

The unit is cooled by a 120mm fan, some units may feature an 80mm fan instead. Outputs include two 6+2pin PCI-Express connectors, six SATA power, six Molex and one floppy power connector. It offers built-in PFC and a rated MTBF of 100,000 hours. It flaunts an 80 Plus efficiency rating badge. The PSU is backed by a two year warranty. Technical details of the PSU could be read in this company-published PDF document.

Transcend Information Inc. (Transcend), the world's leading manufacturer of memory products, is proud to release its all-new 128GB high speed 2.5-inch Solid State Disk (SSD). SSDs are made of reliable NAND flash memory that contains no moving parts, and therefore are not susceptible to mechanical failure resulting from vibration, shock or heat. Featuring a powerful new controller, Transcend's MLC-equipped 128GB SSD far outpaces standard 2.5" hard drives, delivering exceptional sustained read/write speeds of up to 145MB / 92MB per second to guarantee fast throughput regardless of file size. With these high-speed transfer rates and virtually non-existent (0.2ms) latency, software applications and games open faster and run more smoothly, improving overall system responsiveness. Moreover, this SSD's industry-standard SATA-II interface and 2.5" form factor allow easy and straightforward user installation in most notebook computers and mainstream PCs just like regular hard drives.

Transcend Information, Inc. (Transcend), a leading manufacturer of flash memory products, today introduced a new ultra-tiny USB flash drive, the JetFlash T5. Measuring just 29.9mm x 15.3mm x 6.1mm (L x W x D), the T5 is incredibly compact, and only weighs a mere 2g. Unlike other miniature USB flash drives, the T5 is constructed with non-breakable plastic and is rugged enough to resist bending, stress, vibration, shock, and even full water submersion. Its retractable connector design and eye-catching two-tone color schemes not only make the drive easier to handle and use, but also give it a unique fashion accessory look. With its convenient attachment loop, the ultra-light T5 can be used as a mobile phone dongle or a keychain fob, making it easy to carry and store in places where ordinary flash drives just do not fit.

Barebone and nettop specialist Shuttle, has introduced a new version of the X27 nettop barebone, featuring dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor, running at 1.60 GHz. The X27D measures 250 (L) x 185 (W) x 70 (H) mm, and houses an Intel 945GC-based ITX motherboard featuring Intel GMA 950 graphics.

The motherboard feautures one DDR2 memory slot that has to be populated with a DDR2-533/667 MHz memory module, with up to 2 GB in capacity. It offers an IDE connector and two SATA II ports for connecting hard drives. Peripheral options include DVI and D-Sub connectors for video output, six-channel audio, and gigabit ethernet. The company marks this product as Windows Vista ready. It has started selling in Europe for €215.

Gingle, a relatively new entry to the DRAM market, has announced its first set of tri-channel DDR3 memory kits for the upcoming Intel X58 platform. There are two kits available with sizes of 3x 1GB and 3x 2GB. The memory can operate at 1600 MHz, with DRAM timings of 8-8-8-24, at 1.65V or 1800 MHz with the same timings at 1.8V. The modules by Gingle carry simplistic heat-spreaders. The company offers life-time warranty.Press-release follows:

Seagate today introduced the world's fastest and greenest drive - the Savvio 15K.2 HDD, the new 15K-rpm addition to the Savvio family of 2.5-inch SAS 2.0 enterprise solutions. Savvio 15K.2 HDD delivers the industry's highest hard drive performance and reliability as well as adding a self-encrypting drive option, all while maintaining Seagate's industry leading, record low power consumption. The Savvio 15K.2 hard drive and the previously-announced Savvio 10K.3 hard drive are both part of Seagate's new Unified Storage architecture which converges disk drive interfaces, form factors, and security features into a common best-of-breed platform for powerful, yet simple storage solutions. Together, Seagate's Unified Storage architecture and the Savvio hard drive family improve manageability, integration, security and performance benefits for IT departments while ensuring business continuity with no compromise.

Previews, reviews and all kind of write-ups about the new Intel Core i7/X58 platform flooded the network this morning. I'll use this post to add all the links I can find, you can also post your comments here until the official press release statement.

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Without any official release from Western Digital, a new product of theirs has emerged on Best Buy called the WD TV HD Media Player. It is a very small device not much bigger than the remote it comes with, but what is unique about this gadget is that it allows you to plug in a USB flash drive or USB hard disk drive (HDD), and play full 1080p high definition videos, pictures and music, on to your TV. It supports two USB2.0 devices simultaneously, measuring only 1.6x4.9x3.9 inches and weighing a mere 10.7 oz, it could be the answer for many people instead of having HTPC's or trailing cables from their main PC's. The RRP of the device appears to be $129.99, however it is currently on sale at Best Buy for $99.99.

"Shanghai" is the codename for the soon to be released quad-core enterprise processors by AMD, under the Quad-Core Opteron brand. It was expected of the company, to come up with these processors around this time of the year, and they have. AMD hasn't officially announced these processors yet, but the processors have made for early listings in some popular online stores. PC Connection and Buy.com have made listings of some of the upcoming SKUs. The Opteron 837x, 838x series are anything but cheap. These are processors that support multi-socket setups up to eight sockets. The Opteron 238x series processors are the dual-socket supportive variant of the same processors.

Dell refreshed today its monitor line-up by introducing the two brand new S2209W and S2309W LCD displays. First leaked some time ago, the two monitors are finally going into the market so you can enjoy them. The sleek, glossy frame S2209W is a 22-inch LCD widescreen that boasts full HD 1920x1080 resolution, fast 5 ms response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, and 160° / 170° viewing angles typical for most TN panels. In terms of connectivity the S2209W features both analog and DVI-D (HDCP) inputs, but it lacks of HDMI. The S2309W has exactly the same specs as the 22-inch S2209W with the one difference that it boasts a bigger 23-inch matrix. Dell is now selling both displays for $239 and $299 respectively.

Intel has set concrete plans for the rest of 2008 and 2009, with its lineup of mobile processors, as in notebook, netbook, portable PC, and MID processors. Roadmaps available with TechARP also reveal Intel's plans for supportive chipsets. The roadmap, for now, shows that the laptop won't be running a Nehalem processor until Q3, 2009. The company still has several SKUs to pull off its hat till there's a need to bring in Nehalem architecture based processors.

As the new flagship system for the ASUS line of business notebooks, the B80A with a 14.1-inch widescreen is packed with the powerful features, robust security and stylish build that corporate users look for in their notebooks of choice.

The ASUS VENTO TA-F Series chassis incorporates space-saving design, user-friendliness and maximized airflow system catered for daily computing. By designing a foldable chassis, ASUS has made the TA-F Series easy to carry and transport, providing both experienced users and beginners of the DIY scene with a tools-free design for quick and easy installation. Furthermore, the TA-F Series chassis offers two options for users to choose from, with the TA-F11 in sophisticated black and the TA-F21 in stylish silver.

Resisting the cold winter of industry, domestic leading memory-maker Team Group today announced two new DDR module series, Team Elite DDR3 1333/1066 for desktops and laptops in 1GB and 2GB capacities, with rich experience in R&D of DDR3 overclocking modules. Team also introduced the dual-channel kit for the Elite DDR3 LO-DIMM as a total solution for users upgrading their memory modules to avoid incompatibility among chips and with the motherboard. Team emphasized that every module has been tested to comply with all the relevant tests to ensure maximum compatibility and premium quality. Therefore, Team Elite DDR3 1333/1066 are the best choices for upgrading your PC efficiency!