At the transition to a 90nm manufacturing process, something that would be a long down period for Intel started and the cause - heat. For several years it struggled with refining its manufacturing process to be able to increase the frequencies of the Prescott core. The goal was to release a processor at 4GHz, but this turned out to be too much. Intel has for the last year been working on setting their factories to use 65nm technology and it has according to information we've received already reached a productivity equal to the already refined 90nm process.

Today we are going to compare the performance of dual-processor workstations built on single-core and dual-core processors from AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor families.

X-Bit Labs

The Madshrimps are proud to present you with their last heatsink roundup of 2005. Featuring the latest offerings from Arctic, Scythe, Silverstone, Sharkoon and newcomer Noctua. They compare them to the best out there in 3 different test configurations.

Earlier this month, NVIDIA bought chipset manufacturer ULi Electronics for $52 million USD. In today's interview we speak with NVIDIA's Drew Henry on the acquisition. See what NVIDIA has in store for ULi in our latest article!

FiringSquad

ATI secretly released its Silver Bullets material to AIBs this week and the picture of R580 is slowly coming together. R580, or Radeon X1900 as it is called internally, is expected to "launch" in January according to ATI documentation.

AnandTech

Western Digital will soon introduce two new Raptor HDDs. Both SATA2 drives will feature 150GB storage capacity, one will be aimed at servers and the other one at gamers.

DV Hardware

Speculation over the arrival of ATI?s next high end chip, to replace the tardy R520, has been rife over the past few months, with the popular theorists pinning towards a late January 2006 timeframe.

Beyond3D

Ah, back to the seemingly age old topic. If it wasn?t for ATI, I doubt we would be talking about this stagnant, yet important, topic anymore. The fact of the matter is people, including the editors and readers, are tired of repeating ourselves and demanding (our requests clearly did nothing) products right when they are launched.

Despite the shortcomings of the initial article, we did manage to get a good look at the performance we could expect from Yonah. Mainly, that it was a fairly strong successor to the single core Pentium M and even more impressive was that it offered performance equal to that of AMD?s Athlon 64 X2 without an on-die memory controller.

We are pleased to invited to attend the HKEPC Techday 2005 over at Hong Kong over the weekend and we have witnessed an impressive line-up of interesting technologies displayed (Presler, 975X, Yonah, 3DMark06 etc.) by the sponsors and of course HKEPC themselves.

VR-Zone

we wanted to let you know that our latest review article is up. In this article, we put the GeForce 7800GTX and 7800GT with all modes of transparency anti aliasing in our usual games benchmarks. The conclusion: 4x transparent SSAA is definitely not really attaininable even on the 7800GTX.

In October of this year, Intel invited AnandTech to its Jones Farm Campus in Portland Oregon. The purpose of the visit was to get a detailed overview of their roadmap for the next year, and to take a close look at the Bensley platform. Bensley is the code name for Intel's new Xeon platform, which will support both Dempsey and Woodcrest processors and a new chipset, code-named Blackford.

To kick things off in the brand spanking new forums we're giving away a Kingston Datatraveler II+Migo 512MB flash drive to one lucky forum user! The closing date is the 25th Dec, so get moving!

There is a lot more to dual card graphics than the extra frame rates ATI and NVIDIA's respective Crossfire and SLI platforms offer. Besides their overclocking potential, we look at the storage interface performance of ATI Crossfire and the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platforms. We've also included VIA's new K8T900 dual graphics chipset in our lineup.

Tom's Hardware Guide

Enter Asus with its brand new Extreme GeForce 7800 GT Dual. This monster of a graphics chip sports two 7800 GT chips running in parallel. We'd like to note a few things that are special about this card.

How many products did PC Magazine review in the past year? As of press time, the number was over 1,300 and growing. Here's a list of the best products in 13 categories, including Gaming Software, Notebooks, Home Security, and Entertainment.

iRobot's Scooba Floor Washing Robot, the follow-up to the hugely successful Roomba home vacuum, the Scooba sweeps, scrubs, mops, and even dries the floor. It does all this with very little interaction from you: The Scooba's robot brain lets it map out your room, navigate obstacles, and know when it has cleaned the entire room.

PC Mag

In this round-up I'll be looking at six USB flash drives, some no frills but with a price worthy of consideration and others with all the bells and whistles some out there may find essential. On test are the following drives: Corsair Flash Voyager; Crucial Gizmo; Geil David; Kingston DataTraveler II + Migo; Kingston DataTraveler Elite, and the OCZ Rally.

Scottevest, now known as SeV, continues to refine its much-hyped clothing line. Their first line was famed for its multiple pockets and high durability, and now they're up to version 4.0. Christiaan takes some of the gear for a spin and gives us a verdict. Maybe getting clothes for Christmas won't be so bad anymore?

FiringSquad

This is a friendly reminder of Xtreme Resources Computer System Benefit Raffle. The site has put a great system together through parts donated by many of our wonderful members. The proceeds from the raffle are going to one of our friends and staff member to assist in defraying medical costs incurred from a complicated back surgery that his wife endured without the assistance of any medical insurance. Our very generous community through their donations have already helped take care of a major portion of their bills, with one very generous member matching all donations made.