Today TweakTown are going from one end of the spectrum to the other and taking a look at six graphics cards based on ATI's Radeon 9250 graphics core. We've got cards from GeCube, Elsa, Gigabyte, HIS, Sapphire and Powercolor. The Radeon 9250 is a sub $100 US graphics cards and offers value entry level performance - It's really the battle at the bottom but nevertheless requires coverage.

Game2XS have a new hands-on preview of the GameTrak device that was being shown off at the ongoing EGN event in London. The idea for the GameTrak has already been touched upon by Sony with their EyeToy but GameTrak themselves are really throwing development support behind the device, with lots of games coming out soon. You can read what Game2XS thought of the GameTrak, in conjunction with the fighting game Darkwind.

AMDZone reports we've posted our full look at AMD's demo of their dual core 90nm Opteron from my visit their yesterday.

AMD recently announced they were demonstrating dual core 90nm Opterons here in Austin. Well we made sure we caught a glimpse and made the trek through I35 over and underpass construction to do so. AMD was demonstrating two 4P systems loaded with dual core systems. On AMD reference design running Linux, and the other an HP Proliant DL585 running Windows 2003 Server. Both indicated that 8 CPUs where installed, and both only required a bios update to enable dual core.

The Chinese website HKEPC Hardware have snagged the first details and pic's of Intels' onboard CPU aka Shelton! Here's a quick translation by Google.

Recently on-line hearsay Intel will be able to promote code number "Shelton" the processor main attack low price market, it will be used 90nm when the Prescott core the arteries is 1Ghz moreover does not have L2 Cache the processor, main attack South America, Indonesia, east west Asia and so on the low consumver buying power country. This news makes many people all to feel the surprise, by the present Celeron selling price localization, on the basic any space for has not had L2 Cache the Shelton survival.

What if you could fit your whole life ? all your music, all your photos, all your movies, all your email ? in a computer as fun and useful as an iPod? Now you can. Introducing the futuristic iMac G5 in 17- and 20-inch widescreen models. The entire computer, including a G5-based logic board, slot-loading optical drive, hard disk, speakers, and even the power supply ? dwells inside the enchanting display.

Brace yourself! TweakTown have rounded up no less than 12 of the latest Intel 925 and 915 chipset based motherboards to hit the market from Albatron, ABIT, Gigabyte, EPoX, Tyan, MSI, ASUS and Intel. If you are looking at buying a new motherboard to suit your new Pentium 4 LGA775 socket processor, you'd be silly not to stop by and check out their results!

As probably most of you already know, the release of the new "budget oriented" Sempron processors from AMD, designed for socket A motherboards, are meant to compete with the new Celeron D CPUs recently released by Intel. There are two versions of the Semprons, one for socket A and one designed for socket 754. The second one is to be used to make more common the platforms based for Athlon 64 (K8T800, nForce3...). Today at HWspirit we took Sempron 2600+ CPU and compraed it to a Mobile Barton with the same PR. Read the comparison here: Sempron 2600+ vs Mobile Barton 2600+

ShackNews have thrown up their 3 page review of Tapwave's Zodiac which is a Palm based handheld games console.

The key thing to remember about this device is that it?s billed as a gaming portable first, productivity handheld second. This is a gaming site, therefore our focus is on whether or not the Zodiac is a premier player in this growing handheld gaming market. With that said, let?s take a look at the Zodiac hardware piece by piece.

Digit-Life reports recently we spoke about managing number of pipelines in GeForce 6800. The problem was cards with only 12 pipelines found for sale.

Together with the developer of RivaTuner, Alexey Nikolaychuk, as well as with many beta testers of the new version, we found out that a number of vertex pipelines can be disabled even if all pixel pipelines are in place. Like 5 or even 4 instead of default 6. E.g., MSI GeForce 6800 card that we mentioned several times has all 16 pixel pipelines (!), but still only 5 vertex pipelines instead of 6.

Thanks to Guru 3D for the Heads up!

Minutes ago I had a little chat with Alexey (RivaTuner programmer) who did quite an interesting finding. I was a little in doubt wether or not to post this but it seems that Alex is 99.9% certain of his findings. Now we always figured that the difference between the GPU's was based on core & memory clocks frequencies versus pipelines, yet he discovered something else. BTW this info might be a little to geek for some of you, if that's the case just skip this news bulletin ;)

Overclocker Cafe have thrown up their DDR vs. DDR2 Comparison! Here's a snip.

Now that DDR2 is out, motherboard manufacturers have gotten geared up for it's appearance. Is now the time to go for the gusto and upgrade? Hopefully this article will help to shed some light on that question as we pit the new against the old.

We have had very extensive coverage on PCIe solutions from VIA and SiS, and today we complete the circle with some in depth information from NVIDIA's CK8-04; a chipset many have already decided to call nForce4. NVIDIA takes a firm stance in its roadmaps that this next revision of core logic will not use the nForce4 misnomer, so we will continue to call it CK8-04 until NVIDIA calls it something else. We first saw CK8-04 at Computex in June - and even then it supported dual PEG adaptors.

Inno3D and Cooler Master has signed as agreement to allow solitary rights for Inno3D high end graphics cards to include the advance thermal system supplied by Cooler Master. The Inno3D 6800 CoolViva Premium Edition is born and can now reach up to 350-core speed and 800MHZ memory clock.

NVIDIA and ATI, long time rivals to each other in the graphics card market, are in a constant struggle to be at the top. ATI managed to hold the winning crown for more than a year with their GPUs while NVIDIA always lacked one step behind them, however, it seems as if the positions have changed with the introduction of ATI's X800 series and NVIDIA's 6800 series of cards.

So here we are with yet again an AMD Socket A roundup. Last time in December 2003 we saw that the field was dominated by the Thermalright SP-97 heatsink which sports heat pipe technology. Nowadays a lot of manufactures have caught up and we have a wide variety of heatsinks available which are based upon the successful heat pipe tech. Let´s find out if they can beat our Golden Oldie

We've been seeing a slew of benchmarks since the introduction of Valve's Stress Test as part of the CounterStrike: Source beta a few days ago. Well, now it's our turn to look at things here at Elite Bastards, so we've benchmarked both ATI and nVidia's more readily available boards - aka the Radeon X800 Pro and GeForce 6800GT - using this new test, as well as throwing some 6800 Ultra scores into the mix for good measure. We've tested using a host of different settings, as well as taken a look at the performance hit the two cards have with varying levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

The past 10 years of developing dedicated 3D-acceleration hardware for the consumer market brought us milestones like Voodoo Graphics, GeForce3, and Radeon 9700. Still, computer generated realtime graphics looks very "synthetic": Surfaces appear too smooth, the geometry resolution is too rough, liquids still do not look natural enough. But we also saw dramatic progress leading to the ultimate goal: Rendering photo-realistic graphics at HDTV resolutions in realtime.

Sources close to X86-Secret(French website) released some details regarding the upcoming nForce 4(codename CK8-04) chipset from NVIDIA. NVIDIA will release four different nForce 4 chipsets according to X86-Secret, the nForce 4, the nForce 4 Ultra, the nForce 4 SLI and the nForce 4 Pro. All with a lot of nice great features, cant wait for the press release from NVIDIA in September.

Robstar over at [H]ardOCP's Forum has posted the first benchies for Nvidia's Geforce 6800LE which he got from XFX as a replacement for a dead 5900XT.

Gamers Depot benchmarks ATI's latest Mobile GPU, found only in Dell Laptops! They've even thrown in some Doom 3 benchmarks at all quality settings.

ATI has really widened the performance delta between itself and the competition with the last eighteen months or so and more recently has made sure that nobody can catch them by unleashing the Mobility Radeon 9800. Long-time OEM partner, Dell, has the exclusive on this new GPU with its XPS laptop ? which is far and away the fastest unit of its kind we?ve tested.