The key players in the processor industry being Intel and AMD, both offer cut down versions of their flagship products. For example the cut down version of the Intel Pentium4 processor is known as the Celeron. Currently the AMD equivalent is known as the Sempron and this processor is available in two different forms. The Sempron has been released for both the Socket A and 754-pin platforms. Often readers ask if they should purchase a 754-pin Athlon64 or Sempron and is the $50 US price premium worth it for the Athlon64 processor.

Intel's 915 and 925X Chipsets made their debut last June, bringing with them a whole raft of new technologies all at once. Since then, Intel has had the P4 chipset market nearly all to itself. VIA is aiming to change that with the introduction of three new chipsets for the Pentium 4 sporting a wealth of new features, including PCI Express, that should finally give VIA chipsets feature parity with Intel.

The fact that PCI Express standard is the future of computing industry and is moving forcefully towards its designated position in both high-end server/workstation and consumer end systems is not a secret. Therefore, it makes sense to move upcoming high-end components, such as GPUs and boards, in that direction.

According to AMD and Intel dual core CPUs will usher in a new era of computing. But will they really? We beg to differ, as quite a few things need to be in place first.

Hardware Analysis

For your chance to win an iRiver H10 digital audio player with a 5GB hard drive and a colour screen with the ability to play MP3 & WMA files, head over to TrustedReviews.

Digit-Life have thrown up their Hardware Digest 2004 for Desktop Hard Disk Drives , Sound Cards , Processors and their monthly 3D Digest.

Like in the year 2003, sound cards manufactured in 2004 could be divided into two categories: entertainment and professional.

Today TweakTown compare three of the latest nVidia based AGP and PCI Express graphics cards from Gigabyte. We look at the GeForce 6200 for the low-end market, the impressive value for money GeForce 6600GT with SLI support along with the high-end 6800GT AGP which offers great performance but not at the price of the very high-end models. Read on and work out which graphics card is best for your needs as we run them through our usual array of gaming benchmarks

NVIDIA is taking the wraps off some interesting new additions to its nForce Professional line of core logic products. NVIDIA trumpets these new nForce Professional chips as the industry's first PCI Express platform for Opteron processors, but there's much more to this scalable family of core logic products than just PCI-E.

TechReport

The multifunction market is changing. Prices are falling, printing rates rising and ink costs have gone down. In this test we put the Canon MP390, Epson RX425 / CX4600, HP PSC 1350 and Lexmark P6250 up against each other.Full story : click here.

We don?t need to discuss the state of DDR any further, as we have already published an informative CES 2005 Special Report that details the standard and its future directly from the manufacturers.

T-Break have a preview of A new VIA K8T890 PCI-E AMD64 based Soltek mobo. I think no one else has reviewed such a thing yet.

VIA had their K8T890 chipset announced for the Athlon64 platform quite some time back. If we remember right, it was announced before nVidia?s nForce4 as the first PCI Express solution for the AMD platform. However, boards based on this chipset are yet to make an appearance on store shelves. Today, we have recieved the first motherboard based on the K8T890 chipset and its an Engineering sample from Soltek modelled the K8T890.

I wrote an article on my blog about building the ultimate PC at www.kmaximo.blogspot.com

This being an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe system.

I have some of the first shots of a finished DFI NF4 SLI-DR motherboard that was sent to me yesterday. As I'll be out of town during the weekend and most of next week, I won't get a chance to review it until I get back, but I thought I'd share some pictures of the board with you before I head out and just scroll down the page for the Abit WN-2S dual Opteron NF4 SLI Maniboard.

PC Perspective

According to NVIDIA?s marketing, NVIDIA?s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) "can deliver as much as 2x the performance of a single GPU configuration for unparalleled gaming experiences." What NVIDIA fails to make clear, however, is that SLI currently requires NVIDIA to write driver profiles for each game to support SLI. Are all the games you want to play supported?

[H]ardOCP

Today ATi have launched their Mobility Radeon X700. Claiming twice the performance of the Mobility Radeon 9700, it looks set to be a popular choice for laptops where graphics performance is an important factor. ATi have issued a press release and HEXUS.net have an analysis.

In conjunction with the launch of the Intel Sonoma mobile platform, Team ARP is proud to present to you a look at, not one, but TWO Sonoma-based notebooks! Today, we take a close look at the new Sonoma mobile platform as well as the spanking new Techdos and Fujitsu Sonoma notebooks! Be the first to read about Sonoma and why it will change mobile computing as we know it

Socket 939 has established itself as THE gaming platform. To extract the utmost in performance from a 939 platform, some very good memory is needed. Today the Madshrimps are looking at 8 sets of memory modules which are based on Samsung´s TCCD chips. As many know, the TCCD chips are fast becoming legendary for their ability to clock to crazy levels with modest or even low voltages. Let's take a peak at how our provided samples behave in our test bed shall we!

Dual-Layered (DL) DVD writers are still a bit expensive, but the question of concern is the media prices. The price per DL media averages out to $10.00, which is shockingly high. We talked to manufacturers at this year?s CES about prices and what they thought about DL media in general. The replies we received were far from positive and disappointing. According to a few blank media providers, DL standard may not have a bright future ahead of it. The reason is the upcoming Blu-Ray and HD DVD standards that are supported by world?s top most corporations.

With the introduction of the Pentium 4 570J Intel introduces what could be the last member of the NetBurst architecture. Will it be enough to once again secure the performance crown? Or is it just one last speed bump for Intel's Pentium 4?

Recently, Hp has finally released their LightScribe technology to the market. Why is this important? This new technology removes the need to write on the CD or DVD. You can now actually burn an image on the label side of the CD/DVD, including image and text.