I started a series on industry roadmap updates back in February, covering product launches from a bunch of companies in the four quarters they like to split the year into. While the Q1 and Q2 articles went down really well, I struggled to beg borrow and steal roadmaps for Q3 so that article slipped into the ether. Q4 is a similar story and with the year fast approaching its end. However, a juicy morsel of information from the mighty Intel quietly slipped into my topsecretro@dmaps.com mailbox a couple of weeks ago and I've got an excuse for a quick article today on Intel's future plans.

The Sound Blaster Audigy 4 pro is available at the US Creative website. There seems to be enough space next to it on the site for a possible (cheaper) Audigy 4 platinum and normal Audigy 4.

Today NVIDIA have released their 6800Go product, this is the first part to be launched using their new 6 Series GPU.

While it's nice to just look at the finished product itself, sometimes it's useful to go back and look at how it's made. Especially today in the silicon industry, where both major players in the x86 desktop market are having issues with their top end products.

The Crazy Madshrimps are giving away a 1gb kit of those new Samsung powered memory modules from PDP Patriot. All you need to do is answer one question and send of an email. The winner will be picked near the end of the month!

If you've been paying attention over the last few months, you've no doubt noticed that AMD's latest Athlon 64s trounce Intel's newest Pentium 4s almost across the board. That's a real shame considering that Intel's 900-series chipsets bring so much to the table, including PCI Express, advanced Serial ATA and RAID features, and high-definition audio. There could be hope for Intel fanboys, though. Since the Pentium 4 500 line stretches from 2.8 to 3.6GHz, lower speed grades may have considerable overclocking headroom just waiting to be exploited.

VolariGamers has posted benchmark results of Lian Guan's new V3T128 graphics board based on the Volari V3 128-bit card. The core is clocked at 250 Mhz and the memory is 500 Mhz (250 Mhz DDR).

3DXtreme is giving away an Albatron K8X800 Pro II Version 2.0 Motherboard. Based on the VIA K8T800 chipset this board is packed with extras. It supports the AMD socket 754 CPUs extras include Gigabit Lan, 1394 Firewire and onboard 8 channel sound. This board is valued at $130 - this is the newest revision. Get in the game now to win! The Giveaway ends tomorrow.

Creative Japan has officially announced the Audigy 4 pro. There is is now news about a cheaper internal PCI version.

The Register is reporting ATI has completed its design for the upcoming R5xx series of graphics chips. The chips will be the company's first to support Shader Model 3.0, and may be the company's first 90nm parts.

Madshrimps tests a new batch of PC3200 and PC4400 rated memory from known and lesser known manufacteres on their Intel P4 test setup. With the introduction of Samsung´s TCCD revision F memory chips we might get performance only seen in the days of Winbond BH-5!

The biggest gaming event of the year is only two weeks away and many people are fretting. Half-Life 2 promises to be as good as the original, at least if the many early reviews are to be trusted, and just about everyone wants to play it. But what if you're stuck with old hardware and not a lot of money?

Corsair and CoolTechZone proudly partners together to bring you one of the largest appreciation contests in the industry. We, Corsair and CoolTechZone, would like to take a moment and thank our consumership and readership that has supported us throughout the. "It is truly an honor to start a contest for individuals for supporting our work," implied Gundeep Hora, Editor-in-Chief and CEO, CoolTechZone.

We took the 8 fastest and most capable burners and put them head to head in our Fall 2004 DVD recordable roundup.

Beyond3D has a report on some details on ATI's next generation R5xx architecture following an analyst meeting held by ATI last week.

This Italian site hwupgrade.it has info on the upcoming Audigy 4 pro and the rest of Creative products to be released this november:
New features are better performance, better dacs (113db), but no PCI-EX.

New Abit Fatal1ty pictures available on the HardwareOC site's.

AnandTech have thrown up their Performance Preview for Nvidia's nForce4 SLI MCPs using a pair of GeForce 6800GTs and 6600GTs! Here's a snip.

NVIDIA is less than a month away from sending final shipping nForce4 SLI boards out to reviewers, but we managed to get some quality benchmarking time with a pre-release nForce4 SLI board from MSI. The important thing to note here is that it was pre-release and we had a very limited amount of time with it - not to mention that I'm about halfway around the world from my testing equipment and benchmarks, so forgive me if the number of tests or benchmarks is not as complete as you're used to seeing on AnandTech.

This isn?t what I intended to write or publish tonight. Originally, tonight was supposed to be a review of Mushkin?s DDR500 on both AMD and Intel platforms. Instead, a simple RAM review turned into an in-depth exploration into why MSI?s K8N Neo2 Platinum performs the way it does.

Sudhian Media

In this roundup Madshrimps compares 13 different P4 heatsinks made by Thermalright, Coolermaster, Scythe, Speeze, Swiftech, Evercool, Aerocool and TTIC. Using different fans at low and high speed we try to find the best bang for the buck, best performer and most silent heatsink out there.