NVIDIA is announcing two new chipsets for the Intel platform, aimed mainly at the mainstream and budget markets. You won't find quad SLI systems in here, though maybe you'll find a new system for mom?

PC Perspective

It seems like the AOpen i975Xa-YDG is ready for SLI too where OC.com.tw has done some interesting testing on this board using 2 x 7800 GTX cards in SLI mode.

VR-Zone

Visit any popular discussion board on the internet related to computers and operating system and eventually a comment will arise which implies that Macs are expensive. Kelly McNeill submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which clarifies a long held misunderstanding that Macs are priced out of sync with the rest of the computing industry.

Now that the industry is focused on Blu-Ray and HD DVD, we thought it would be interesting to see what media manufacturers had to say about the dual-layer standard that was all over the news in 2004 and 2005. Back in 2005, we reported that many media and drive manufacturers believed dual-layer to be a fairly stagnant standard, which wasn't going to take off.

Macworld 2006 will always be remembered as the event where Apple launched its first Intel-based Macintosh hardware. The MacBook Pro is the hottest of the products to be launched, and in classic FiringSquad fashion, when no one was paying attention, Alan Dang snuck in one exclusive benchmark comparing the MacBook Pro against an IBM ThinkPad.

FiringSquad

DFI, a world leader in stable and high performance corporate desktop motherboard solutions, today launched the highly anticipated RS482 Infinity motherboard. Designed for the new AMD Socket 939 platform, the RS482 Infinity features ATI Radeon Xpress 200/SB450 chipset, which comes with X300 graphic core built-in, and features support for DDR400 memory in dual channel mode, S-Video TV-out, HDTV, DVI-D, 16-pipe PCI-Express video cards. HardwareXL has more

While Intel is busy bringing its next processor generation, based on the Merom core, up to speed, AMD is adding the final touches to its DDR2-based Socket M2 Athlon 64 platform, TG Daily has learned. AMD is preparing 12 M2 processors for Q2 launch, spanning the Athlon 64, X2, FX and Sempron series of CPUs. Part of the launch will be an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and an Athlon 64 FX-62 chip.

Intel has an interesting launch on their latest Centrino Duo mobile technology over at Hard Rock Cafe earlier this week and we are pleased to hear from Gary Willihnganz, the Director of Marketing from Intel Technology Asia sharing with us the direction of the new platform. "Intel is focused on creating an innovative mobile computing platform that ushers in a new era of working, playing and living," he said. Gary also added that the Intel Centrino Duo Mobile Technology platform creates a new leap in how people work and play, taking advantage of a new generation of uses and experiences. VR-Zone

Our friends over at HKEPC posted some interesting information on the NVIDIA Quad SLI technology through an interview with NVIDIA desktop chipset manager, George Myers. Apparently, the SLI technology on the Gigabyte 3D1 and ASUS Extreme DUAL cards is different from the Quad SLI technology.

VR-Zone

A little earlier today my Fanny cracked opened the can, and spilt the green HEXUS.beans on the forthcoming NVIDIA GeForce 7900, so I thought it would be rude not to prepare you a large portion of red HEXUS.beans. We know you love em!

At this years Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we look at what the PC industry has to offer and provide some videos of the booths and technology showcased as well.

PC Perspective

Here are the second set of photos from the event floor at CES 2006. This time around, we serve you 129 photos of mega-sized LCD and plasma TVs as well as micro-sized MP3 players. Look on!

FiringSquad

Ever since NVIDIA's SLI debuted, we've been hearing about high powered power supplies, which were supposed to have surpass the 700W+ limit in order to support the power hungry SLI setup, but as we found out, all of such news had no merit. Back in 2005, however, we were on the lookout for high powered PSUs and thanks to a Japanese manufacturer, we even saw 900W power supplies enter the Japanese market, which further led the community to believe that high powered PSUs were right around the corner.

Infinity Ward has joined Raven/id in providing a patch that's been designed to deliver performance improvements for users with dual-core, SMP, and Intel's Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading CPUs. In this review we've taken the new patch our for a test spin on the Athlon 64 X2 4200 and 4800+ with four different ATI graphics cards ranging from the X800 XL to the X1800 XT, as well as Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840. See how CoD 2 scales over the various CPUs and graphics cards in today's article!

This year at CES members of the press got to grab a glimpse of the world's tiniest power supply. Well actually it is the world's tiniest 12V snap-in ATX DC-to-DC power supply, but you get the idea. This unit produces 120W of power and is about the size of two AA batteries. It is specifically designed for use with Mini-ITX motherboards, but can be used in many other applications.

As many of us know, Intel launched its Core Duo mobile platform at the Consumer Electronics Show 2006 earlier this year. While Intel's partners were excited about launching their notebook products equipped with the new platform, Intel was busy making plans to revise the platform in the upcoming months to increase its overall performance.

And so it begins. After much speculation, Apple yesterday announced its new line of Intel-powered systems, featuring a brand new 65nm dual-core processor: the Intel Core Duo.

BadComedown

Yep, the title says it all. The next crop of Dell laptops featuring the Yonah CPU will also have an option of using the Mobility X1800XT chipset. This chipset is to compete with the 7800GTX MXM card. The snapshot below tells all. The clocks?

Montreal, Canada, January 10, 2006 -- Matrox Graphics Inc. introduces Parhelia Precision SDT, the world's first single-card solution for digital stereoscopic (stereo-3D) monitors like the Planar SD1710. Such displays have 2 polarized LCD flat panels mounted one over the other and a special glass mounted between them. A realistic 3D view can be seen when looking at the glass though correspondingly polarized glasses.

According to memory makers, DDR2 is steadily growing and the transition from DDR to DDR2 is rather smooth as well, but in order for DDR2 to really take off, at least in the enthusiast market, AMD would have to be a key supporter.