Those wanting an affordable, all round great card with good shader performance will likely be pleased with the Radeon X700 Pro series. Even with the lack of AGP support and the absence of its premium part (the elusive Radeon X700 XT), Radeon X700 Pro continues to be one of the preferred choice for many gamers. Today, we test boards from three different manufacturers. In alphabetical order they are the ASUS Extreme AX700 Pro 256 MB, Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB and the MSI RX700 Pro TD128E.

Alienware presents us Intel-based Area-51 3500 systems and AMD-based Aurora 3500 systems with new sleek mid-tower cases. The company equipped the cases with acoustic dampening features to eliminate annoying noises and also incorporated convenient front-accessible microphone, headphones, FireWire and USB ports. Another feature is the large front grill that allows extra airflow. More details and images Click Here

Thanks to VR-Zone for the Heads Up!

Our friends at HKEPC has landed themselves with a Radeon X800GT reference card. It is based on R430 core, 8 pipes, 395Mhz core, 700MHz GDDR1/3 memory. It will be announced next Monday on 25th July and will be priced at US$149. HIS will be producing this card exclusively at the initially stage and will take their own cooling design. Sapphire and PowerColor will be producing at a later stage.

We've been able to secure some early performance numbers and picture on NVIDIA's pending 7800GT card which is said to debut at this year's QuakeCon.

Core Center, MSI's Temperature Monitoring program is interfering with SoundBlaster Live! series of sound cards and on board integrated SB Live! audio solutions like MSI K8N SLI Platinum boards.

Sony Electronics is a name known for consumer electronics products. Not surprisingly, the company has introduced a latest line of sleek MP3 players based on flash memory for portability and ruggedness. As you can already tell, the exterior of the player is like no other with a small, glossy finish for an attractive look. According to Sony, it?s about the size of a gum, which makes it pretty small.

The latest releases from many major manufacturers has created a pressing demand for a comparison in which CDRinfo has gathered the eight best recently reviewed drives. Over the following pages, we will be comparing some of their primary characteristics such as transfer rate, error correction, ripping speed, as well as writing quality and writing times.

Just like MP3 players are the latest buzz in the consumer electronics industry, cordless keyboard and mice are the latest talk in the peripherals market. Logitech, a company known for its innovation and a solid product line, at least most of the time, has come through with yet another mouse that may interest you. Logitech?s MediaPlay Cordless mouse may appear like a regular mouse, but it?s definitely not anything you?ve ever seen before.

There?s no doubt that Apple?s iPod product line has been garnering a lot of attention ever since the first iPod was launched back in 2002. Since then, Apple has managed to push its iPod line to a point where it?s more like a cultural accessory in addition to the traditional consumer electronics device. In fact, Apple?s iPod is the world?s most popular portable audio player with as much as 80 percent of the market share.

Like expected Intel today launched two new Intel Itanium 2 processors with a faster FSB. For the first time, Itanium 2 processors have a 667MHz FSB, which connects and transfers data between the microprocessor, chipset and system's main memory. Servers designed to utilize the new bus are expected to deliver more than 65 percent greater system bandwidth over servers designed with current Itanium 2 processors with a 400 MHz FSB. This new capability will help set the stage for the forthcoming dual core Itanium processor, codenamed "Montecito," which will feature the same bus architecture. More at DV Hardware

SLI Multi-GPU technology gained the world's attention, breaking every performance record one by one. Seeing this success, ATI secretly began working on a new Multi-GPU architecture, which is known as Crossfire. Now, the time has come for the two Multi-GPU standards to show their teeth.

CDRInfo

HEXUS.net has a review of a NAS solution capable of storing in excess of 1TB of data, depending on the hard drives you decide to use, and with RAID 5 protection!

The "Faster G70", which is how the G71 is being called internally now, targets almost insane clock speeds. We have learned that several boards achieved a clock speed of 800MHz, which just goes to prove that tweaks being done in 110nm G71 core will make R520 tremble, and force ATI to respond with its 32-pipe R580 as soon as possible. However, we have to warn you that we haven't been able to find out in what environment this clockspeed was achieved. But it was achieved using new and improved two-slot cooling, not water or phase-change cooling.

TheInquirer

This is quite an interesting mod shared by our friends at HKEPC where they are able to unlock the SLI capability on the nForce4-4x chipset. As we know, nForce4-4x chipset, the value version of nForce4 Ultra/SLI is often used by board makers for their inexpensive AMD motherboards that usually sports single PCI-E x16 slot.

There are quite a bit of confusion over the codenames of NVIDIA G7x series especially when NVIDIA decided to drop the NV4x codenames. If you remember for GeForce 6800, there are already 3 codenames tagged to it; NV40, NV41 and NV42. NV40 is the one where all the GeForce 6800 series started from but it is AGP-based interface.

VR-Zone

The reference design implies that you will need dual slot cooling. Chip will be clocked incredible high and our sources implies that will end up much higher than 600MHz plus than we suggested before.

TheInquirer

Sharp has developed a new LCD that can simultaneously display different information and image content in right and left views in a single display.

MaxConsole

Fujitsu today announced their joint development of the world's first film substrate-based bendable color electronic paper with an image memory function. The new electronic paper features vivid color images that are unaffected even when the screen is bent, and features an image memory function that enables continuous display of the same image without the need for electricity.

When we first evaluated EVGA?s 6800 PCIe graphics adapter, one of the things we noted was their lack of engineering efforts to make the graphics adapters something above NVIDIA?s specified design. There just wasn?t anything exclusive about EVGA?s product line, but that?s about to change, thanks to EVGA?s already implemented heatsink and fan combo on its 7800GTX. Moreover, EVGA is taking it a step further by working on its ACS cooling design that could define new standards in graphics card cooling, assuming it performs well.

Thats the greatest idea for a keyboard I have ever seen!