The same question keeps cropping up: is it better to buy an entry-level professional graphic card or a high-end general public graphic card for a computer used to play with, and to take the first steps in the 3D animation and modeling world? Behardware.com has tested 7 PCI Express 3D Pro graphic cards to measure the improvements compared to the standard versions.

Just got word from the guy's at HardWareOC that they've snagged ATI's latest GPU Roadmap. Looks like we'll have an AGP version of the R520!

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We take a behind-the-scenes look at AMD's technologies for its 90 nm SOI, duel core and Athlon 64 FX-55 and Opteron production. See what goes into the making of AMD's secret sauces.

Toms Hardware Guide

We just learned that Nvidia taped out its next-generation graphics chip codenamed G70. Our pro-Nvidia sources believe that it will end up faster than ATi's R520.

TheInquirer

The most exciting change for computer enthusiasts was easily the introduction of the PCI-E bus system, which promised to deliver the ever increasingly powerful GPUs in graphics cards from the shackles of AGP? but does it? With its increased bus bandwidth, PCI-E should allow the latest generation of graphics cards - almost little PCs within a PC, nowadays ? to fully unleash their polygon crunching, rendering and painting abilities. It is a new technology, though, and like its siblings (DDR2 and SATA) it?s aimed at providing performance increases in the long run development of components, rather than in the immediate application of current hardware.

We experiment with coolers, clock speeds and power connectors on ATI's mid-high-end graphics card. Does an external power connector provide for better overclocking? What power drain does a souped-up X800 XL have? And what results can you get with an ATI Silencer cooler?

Bit-Tech

ATI are going on a blitz in the marketing dept. at the moment as they begin spreading their latest spiel in the form of a PDF document which highlights all the beneficial factors towards the ownership of one of their X850, X800, or X700 based graphics cards.

After benchmarking the flagship cards earlier this month with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, today we're here to evaluate Splinter Cell performance with today's mainstream offerings in the $150-$300 price range. Included in the roundup are 128MB and 256MB X700 PRO cards, as well as the X800 and X800 XL. Does the extra memory play a role in Chaos Theory performance? Which card delivers the most bang for the buck? Find out inside!

FiringSquad

It isn't very often something truly, 100% exclusive and drool-worthy drops into my mailbox here, but today just happens to be one of those days - I can now present to you what is (To my knowledge) the first benchmark of a desktop dual-core AMD processor!

For our testing we simply did a couple backups of my compact flash cards and also connecting to the PC to navigate and move files. The CD311 did not require any drivers to use with the PC as it was seen by the computer as an external hard drive just as any other similar units we have used in the past. For backing up the compact media, it was as simple as plugging it into the media reader, powering on the CD311 and choosing to backup the entire contents. This unit does also provide the ability to browse any media and pick and choose files to backup also which is a nice little feature. Doing this might be a little time consuming but it offers some real flexibility of use.

Highly reliable sources have confirmed the specifications of Apple's forthcoming revisions to its Power Mac G5, iMac G5 and eMac systems, expected to start shipping within a few days of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's April 29th release.

Think Secret

The Madshrimps report back from Cebit 2005 with news on water cooling solutions, new air cooled heatsinks and a nice collection of flashy casemods!

There aren?t many dedicated consumer soundcards in the market that support eight discreet channels of sound in the market and AUDIOTRAK Prodigy 7.1 is one of them.

Hardware Zone

The Chinese website HKEPC Hardware have snagged the first details , pic's and benchmarks of AMD & Intel multi-core & dual core processors! Here's a quick translation by Google.

The HKEPC editorial department one's own looks for AMD new generation of Dual Core the Opteron processor, hoped takes advantage of this discovers the answer for everybody.

HEXUS.net has details on AMD's dual core processors for the desktop. They will be called "Athlon 64 X2" and the flagship model will be called the X2 4800+, with 4600+ and 4400+ models to be available too. The X2 4800+ will feature two 2.4Ghz cores, so does that mean we'll be seeing performance similar to that of two single core Athlon 64 4000+ processors?

DirectX 9-class graphics cards have been available for some time, but a year ago, hardware MPEG2 TV tuners were only widely available from Hauppauge. This situation changed recently with the release of ATI?s TV Wonder Elite and NVIDIA?s NVTV, both of which offer hardware MPEG2 encoding. Hauppauge has also been busy revising and expanding its PVR lineup with products specifically designed for Media Center Edition 2005. But which hardware MPEG2 TV tuner reigns supreme? We've rounded up ATI?s TV Wonder Elite, NVIDIA?s NVTV, and Hauppauge?s PVR-150MCE-l.p to find out.

We have some more pictures and information from our excursion to Germany. Do you like girls, beer and heatsinks? Then this one is for you!

Bit-Tech

Still sitting on the fence about PCI Express? We review the technology and tell you the advantages and disadvantages over AGP.

Viperlair

Anyone can get a bunch of LCD monitors together and show off some pretty benchmarks. However, if the reviewers don't understand the numbers theyre getting from the benchmarks its pointless. Fortunately, you have a trusted partner at FiringSquad, where our team of gamers, videophiles, and pro-photographers can make sense of pixel refresh times and colorimetry. Weve pulled those Dang brothers out of retirement to let them take a look at 8 different budget LCDs.

After years of providing chipsets for AMD processors only, today NVIDIA officially unveils their first chipset for the Intel Pentium platform: the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition. As its name implies, this new chipset is based on the same fundamental technologies found in today's nForce4 SLI chipset for the Athlon 64, including GigE with firewall, Serial ATA II support, 7.1-channel audio, 10 USB ports, and of course, 20 lanes of PCI Express for SLI! But how does this new chipset perform?