Never before there was so much video footage around the web like today. Hexus.tv stands out against casual everyday- and joke-content websites like YouTube for their great hardware flicks and interview video coverage. Of course Hexus.tv is at the CeBIT, Nick and James report on-site the fare and show you what's hot and what's not.
A very hilarious thing happened during shooting the 'PreBIT' part. Fast-forward to 05:10 min and watch a 3-stage phase change cascade cooler killing the electricity of the entire ABIT booth.

In their second part, they call it HEXUS CeBIT Sofa - Day 1, Nick and James are sitting on a sofa - sorry, on two sofas - and talk about new hard- and software around the exhibition.

Update: The third sofas-part just emerged. Get some popcorn and a beer, sit back and relax: HEXUS CeBIT Sofa - Day 2.

The same procedure as every year, journalists sneak around and get as many pictures as the battery level of the digicam allows. I find these quite entertaining, after watching the picture show I can easily pretend I have been there too...
The first in the row is the famous VR-Zone which happen to have two parts out already. Click here for the second one!

Update I:
Planet3DNow comes next with their gallery. You will find their coverage of last year's CeBIT over there as well.VR-Zone CeBIT Coverage Part I and Part II; Planet3DNow gallery

Yeah, you could see a Mac Pro with whopping 8 CPU cores at the British Apple Store this morning. After they realized the mistake (or did it happen intentionally?) they took the wrong offering down.



The story behind that is quite simple. When the current Apple Mac Pro was introduced in August last year it was quite a performer around the Macs. Featuring two Dual Core Xeons (Xeon 5100 aka Woodcrest, up to 3GHz, 4 MByte shared L2-Cache), support for up to four PCI-E graphics cards (no SLI or Crossfire though) and a solid storage/network base it was very competitive compared to the PC workstations as well. But soon afterwards (in mid November) Intel revealed the Quad-Core-Xeons ('Clovertown').
Now it's finally time for Apple to unveil something new - obviously a Dual Quad-Core workstation, this time hopefully with full SLI or Crossfire support.
To add another theory, Apple will reveal a Quad-Core desktop Mac at the same time. At the moment the iMacs are based on Core 2 Duos (Merom) and that's it. I think there is plenty of room for a Kentsfield Mac...

Asetek which got quite famous with their phase change (aka 'vapor compression') coolers shows off their latest GPU cooler for water cooled setups at the CeBIT. As usual one of The Inquirers was a tad faster and so we got hold of the picture. Basically this cooler is aimed for the OEM market and there will be a G80 model (which got pictured) and a R600 one. Because of it's being partly air- (PCB and RAM) and partly water-cooled (GPU) it consumes a lot of room, the card together with the cooler will end up covering 2 slots.

VR-Zone has revealed some information about the GeForce 8500GT video cards to be released on April 17. Based on 80nm TSMC process and 128-bit memory interface, the GeForce 8500GT cards will be clocked at 450MHz core with 256MB of DDR2 memory at 400MHz (800MHz DDR). Those cards are expected to outperform any current GeForce 7600GS, scoring around 22xx and 42xx marks at 3DMark06 (1280x1024) and 3DMark05 (1024x768) respectively. The DX10 performance is unknown at this stage. The NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT series will be priced between $79 to $99 USD.

OCWorkbench has found some pictures and specs of NVIDIA's mainstream DirectX 10 cards, the 8600GT and the 8600GTS. The GT (pictured below on the left) is the replacement for the 7600GT and will feature the G84-300 GPU running at 540MHz and either 128MB or 256MB of 128-bit GDDR3 RAM at 1400MHz, priced between $150 and $180. The 8600GTS (below on the right) is a step up from the GT and will replace the 7900GS, using the G84-400 GPU running at 675MHz and either 256MB or 512MB of 128-bit GDDR3 RAM at 2000MHz, with a price of between $200 and $250. As reported before on techPowerUp!, these cards should be released (along with the 8500GT) on April 17th.

A day after news about ATI's Lasso mobile-GPU technology, DailyTech has published an article highlighting more details about ASUS' XG Station.

The XG Station should be available to OEM and channel partners from next month. What is perhaps most interesting is the way that ASUS plans to sell these devices - they will not be purchasable separately, but will come bundled with the company's PCIe graphics cards. Pricing on XG Stations will vary depending on the bundled graphics card. There is no word on which graphics cards will be compatible and which won't - though squeezing in a 8800 GTX might be asking for a little too much.

In addition to the enhanced video capabilities, the XG Station features audio output capabilities. There is a single headphone output jack on the XG Station - unfortunately, there is no 5.1 output support. However, the XG Station supports Dolby Headphone technology for simulated six-channel surround sound audio.

Audio and video capabilities aside, ASUS equips the XG Station with a large LED display to monitor vital system information. The LED display shows the following information:

• System master volume
• GPU clock speed
• Current GPU temperature
• Dolby Headphone feature status
• Current actual Frames Per Second (FPS) information
• GPU fan speed Indicator

A control knob allows users easy overclocking controls too. Overclocking functionality of the control knob is limited to GPU core clock only though.

As you will know from our previous news posts, at an event in San Francisco, AMD demonstrated some R600 cards. ZDNet's David Berlind has managed to snap a good selection of pictures of one of these cards:More images can be found here.

A few weeks ago, sources close to AMD revealed to us that the retail versions of the card are expected to be much smaller than the prototype card AMD has already displayed. Looking at the reverse side of the prototype card, it's apparent that the PCB is much shorter than the humongous cooling solution and thus there is the prospect for retail R600-based graphics cards to be much shorter.

This indicates that the R600 is well under way, with a few working samples in existence. AMD/ATI needs to sort out the cooler, and then the card should hopefully be ready for launch in May.

ChileHardware bring us pictures of a Micro ATX motherboard featuring Intel's G33 chipset (otherwise known as Bearlake), coupled with the ICH9 southbridge.

Specifications are likely to be the following:

• Socket LGA 775, Micro ATX
• Supports Intel Core 2 Duo/Celeron 400 Series Processor
• Intel G33 + ICH9
• FSB 1333 MHz
• Supports Dual Channel DDR2 667/800 MHz
• 4 x DDR2 DIMM Memory Slots, Max. Supports up to 8GB Memory
• 1 x PCI-E x16, 1 x PCI-E x1, 2 x PCI Slots
• On Board Graphic Max. Memory Share 384 MB
• 8+2-Channel HD Audio, 12 x USB 2.0
• 4 x SATAII 3Gb/s Connectors, GbE LAN

It looks like the Rydermark benchmark is just around the corner - the Inquirer brings us some screenshots:A single Geforce 8800 GTX, G80 card under Windows XP and dual Athlon FX 74, Quad FX PC scores 217.11 in the test:And lastly, a new video has popped up (uploaded onto Fileshack by PC Perspective). It can be downloaded here.

VR-Zone claims to have dug up a bit more information on AMD's R600, the company's flagship DirectX 10 card. When it launches there should be both XTX and XT versions of the card. The XTX, with 1GB GDDR4 memory, will have OEM and retail versions - the OEM (pictured above) will measure 12.4" and consume 270W of power, whilst the 9.5" retail version will use 240W. The XT version of the R600 will have 512MB of GDDR3 memory, being 9.5" long and using 240W of power. The XL version of the card is expected to be released at a later date.

Duke Nukem Forever is one of those games that everyone really wants to see, but then doesn't come out. 3D Realms has been working on the game for over a decade, and we haven't seen anything out of it...until now. To remind everyone that Duke Nukem Forever really is in development and going somewhere, 3D Realms president George Broussard randomly and without warning posted a tiny screenshot on Shacknews. According to George, the picture is a (shrunken) real time in-game screenshot.

Sapphire will not be the only one with a dual X1950 Pro card out there. Asus is working on one as well. The design is completely different and sports two PCBs which are connected, instead of packing everything on a single board. The EAX1950 Pro Dual clocks the Radeon X1950 Pro GPUs at 581MHz and 256MB of GDDR3 memory at 1404MHz. No price or release date has been mentioned.

GIGABYTE plans to introduce its latest NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI MCP chipset based motherboard, the GIGABYTE N680SLI-DQ6 by the end of January 2007. Designed specially for enthusiasts and gamers, this motherboard has All-Solid Capacitors, Quad-Triple phase power, Quad BIOS and Quad Gigabit LAN, the first one to have four Gigabit LAN cards. Other features include Silent-Pipe2 and Crazy Cool2 technology by newly design Triple-Heat pipe, 3x PCIe slots (two x16 + one x8) for SLI+ Physics, 4x eSATA2 ports, 8 channel Realtek ALC888DD High Definition Audio.

For now 300 terabyte storage devices may sound like science fiction, but again Seagate discovered plans to release 1TB hard disk drive products within 6 months. The 1TB hard disk drive will be based on perpendicular recording technology. The 1TB Barracuda from Seagate Technology is expected to hit the market sometime in the first half of this calendar year. No additional information available.

Ultra is well known for being the first company to produce modular power supplies, debuting the X-Connect range last year. Now, the company plans to introduce SLI capable 1kW(1000W) PSU, that is modular. It sports a massive number of connectors on the back, including enough to power a couple of GeForce 8800 GTXs. The product will be on the market by the end of the year. Two variations, 800 and 600W will also be available at this time.

Intel Corporation today announced design completion of its first mobile WiMAX baseband chip. Combined with the company's previously announced single-chip, multi-band WiMAX/Wi-Fi radio, the pair creates a complete chipset called the Intel WiMAX Connection 2300. This development marks another major step in Intel's efforts to deliver an "always best connected" mobile Internet experience for future laptops and mobile devices.

AMD today demonstrated the industry's first native quad-core x86 server processor, achieving four x86 processing cores on a single die of silicon. At the annual AMD Industry Analyst Forum, a server powered by four upcoming Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors (codenamed Barcelona), manufactured on 65nm silicon-on-insulator process technology, was shown utilizing all 16 cores. By delivering a consistent thermal envelope while adding two more processing cores, along with micro-architectural enhancements, AMD expects to significantly advance the performance-per-watt capabilities of AMD Opteron processors.