Just saw this @ TheInquirer!

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE between a Pentium 4 Northwood that sits happily in a 533MHz chipset motherboard and a Pentium 4 Northwood that sits happily in a 400MHz chipset motherboard?

That's the question we asked Intel yesterday and the answer is "not a lot", but enough to entangle you in a nightmare if you buy the wrong sort of processor by accident.

For all of you thinking about picking up a KT333 Dragon don't plan on overclocking it TOO far. I haven't seen it really pointed out yet BUT the onboard goodies of the dragon limit your FSB overclock. The worst of which is the USB 2.0 controller which craps out on you when you're around 160Mhz FSB or running that controller on a 40Mhz PCI bus.

Cyber Drive has released an updated Firmware version 120D for their 32x CDRW drives.

The update is dated 7th of May 2002.

"Description: new firmware version 120D for the CD-RW drive CW058D is available now! Improvements among others: Enlarge supported CD-R and CD-RW discs! Better support of Roxio products."

Just got word from Aron that he's got details of Soyo's new P4S-645DX Dragon Ultra mainboard for the Pentium 4.

Soyo's SY-P4S645DX motherboard with SiS 645DX/961 chipset maximizes system and memory performance with 533MHz FSB support, DDR333 memory, USB 2.0; on board RAID and 10/100 Ethernet, and many advanced and easily customized overclocking features. The board delivers the memory bandwidth and optimal performance for Intel's latest 400/533MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors.

VR-Zone has done up a preview on the upcoming Triplex Silver Xabre Pro card based on the Xabre400 GPU. This Xabre Pro card from Triplex is another successful Millennium Silver line of graphics accelerator to be released in the next few weeks and should be priced competitively against GeForce4 MX440.

Today Intel will introduce their new top notch Pentium 4 CPU's running at 2.53Ghz, 2.4Ghz and 2.2Ghz. These new CPU's will take advantage of Intel's revised 850 chipset which offers 533Mhz bus speed and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM. The increased FSB mounts up to a memory bandwidth of 4.26GB/s.

The chipmaker will announce three new Pentium 4 chips for desktop PCs, along with a new version of its 850 chipset. The new chipset offers a faster 533MHz bus and supports a speedier version of Rambus memory, 1066MHz RDRAM, sources said.

Intel's new flagship Pentium 4 will be a 2.53GHz chip. The other new Pentium 4's will run at 2.26GHz and 2.4GHz. All work with the faster bus. The added clock speed, faster bus and new RDRAM could translate into an overall performance boost of roughly 10 percent to 15 percent over current high-end desktop PCs!

3Dlabs, Inc. Ltd. today announced a ground-breaking Visual Processing Architecture that combines the architectural strengths and programmability of general-purpose CPUs with extreme levels of hardware parallelism. This architecture, which has been in development for the past two years and has significant patents pending, enables advanced software rendering techniques to be accelerated in real time to produce interactive imagery with stunning levels of realism. 3Dlabs expects to ship board-level products based on the first Visual Processing Unit (VPU), a chip codenamed the P10, during the third quarter of 2002.

VR-Zone has posted some updated info on the new SiS Xabre graphics cards. Apparently, SiS has assigned some product names to their Xabre series of GPUs. Xabre 80 will be known as Xabre Lite, Xabre 200 will be known as Xabre Real, Xabre 400 becomes PRO and lastly Xabre 600 is known as Xabre Ultra.

Just got word from Beyond3D that they have previewed Nvidia's reference GeForce4 Ti 4200 board! Here's what their saying.

In the preview we check out gaming, Pixel Shader, FSAA and filtering performance. Alongside the higher end P4 we also check out the numbers on a lower end PIII as this budget board may appeal to many on lower end systems still.

A report is running at Independent News uncovering some general information on Sony speeding up development of Playstation 3 specifically targeted for online gaming. Sony has courted alliances with some of the technology industry's biggest hitters in an effort to "soundly beat whatever our rivals produce next''. IBM and Toshiba are jointly designing the central chip that will control the PlayStation 3 at a top-secret technology lab in Austin, Texas. The project, which aims to create the ultimate graphics and sound processor, is believed to cost around $1bn (£650m). Check out the full article via the above link.

NvNews.com have the latest scoop on the Nvidia NV30. Here's what their saying.

According too Jen-Hsun Huang CEO of Nvidia stated today that the company will launch a fundamentally new architecture in August.

The Inquirer have posted a good article featuring Nvidia's Quadro4 XGL 750 vs. ATI's FireGL8800 professional graphic cards. Here's byte from their writings if you're in pro cards:

Nvidia is quite experienced in this business since along with its sinking partner Elsa, where they already made a mark with the well known Quadro brand.

ATI, on the other hand, chose a different approach to this market. It simply bought well know company FireGL with its very strong brand and continued this line with the well known FireGL2 and FireGL4.

X-bit Labs mole has been busy @ AMD cause they seem to have got some details on new AMD CPUs. Here's what their mole is saying:

AMD has recently shown the working prototype systems built on the new generation of AMD processors alongside with some other new achievements at a private meeting of the AMD investors.

They were showcasing two servers built with Sledgehammer processors (Opteron) and two workstations connected to them built on ClawHammer processors. They used 64bit Windows Server OS version for both and were running IIS and Terminal Server software. On the client systems they were running 64bit Internet Explorer. Also AMD demonstrated how well these systems coped with 32bit applications.

ReactorCritical.com are reporting that Club3D introduced the SiS Xabre 400 based videocard in Taiwan. Their solution works at 250/250 MHz for core and memory and utilizes 3.3 ns Hynix chips. The board is equipped with VGA, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors. As the SiS301 chip is also present, the board supports multi-monitor functions.

Just got word from Crow that he attended the official launch of the SiS Xabre GPU @ the Far East International Hotel in Taipei City which also included AOpen and CHAINTECH, C.P.Technology, ECS, GIGA-BYTE, Joytech, SOYO, Transcend , Triplex...

For more info and screenshots hit Read More.

According to a story running at DigiTimes VIA is considering the launch of their Zoetrope codenamed graphics chip in May 2002. Whether the company will launch a Zoetrope-based graphics chip depends on the final performance testing results of the products, VIA said. The Zoetrope is currently at the tape-out stage and is expected to be manufactured using 0.15-micron processing. The product is likely to target the clone market, similar to the new Xabre graphics chip from Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS).

Corsair Memory, Inc., an industry leader in ultra-performance DDR DRAM modules for gaming and overclocking applications, has announced that it is now offering two new 512 megabyte modules tailored specifically for overclocking applications. The first part, Corsair part number CMX512-3200, is guaranteed to operate at 400 MHz. The second part, part number CMX512-3000C2, is guaranteed to operate at 370 MHz, but with a column access strobe latency ("CAS latency") of only two clock cycles. Source: Corsair Micro

AMD announced today AMD Opteron as brand for their next-generation server and workstation processors. Shipments of the AMD Opteron processor are planned to begin in the first half of 2003. AMD Opteron processors will mark AMD's entry into 64-bit computing enterprise market.

The new Triplex Xabre range consists of four chips, the Xabre 80, Xabre 200, Xabre 400 and Xabre 800 which correspond to the SiS 328, SiS 332, SiS 334 and SiS 336 respectively. All four render across four pipelines and 8 texels, double the performance of comparable nVIDIA GeForce products. Three of the four models in the Xabre series are also the world's first to support AGP 8X. And unlike nVIDIA's GeForce 4 MX and ATI's Radeon GPUs, the Xabre series boasts a hardware pixel shader and environment bump mapping. With hardware support for these features and Direct X 8.1, the Xabre series is able to deliver much higher image picture quality and speed. For a quick comparison of the features of the Xabre series compared to nVIDIA's GeForce 4 MX GPUs, please refer to the following table.