ATI have released a bunch of new demo movies for the Radeon 9700 card to demonstrate support for new ATI hardware features. These technology demos all require DirectX 9 so there will probably be no download until DX9 is publicly available.

Tomorrow! At least that is what we all expect. The Ontario-based canadian company will unveil the details of the Radeon 9700, a desktop graphics chip based on a new architecture that will provide greater realism when it comes to 3D. The fastest versions of the new chips will offer considerably higher performance than Nvidia's current GeForce4 roster, giving ATI the edge with gamers as well as PC makers, analysts said. And even after Nvidia - which began to chip away at ATI's leading spot in graphics in 1999 - comes out with its GeForce 5 in a few months, the competition between the two will remain close.

Graphics firm Nvidia stood up at the Platform Conference in San Jose yesterday and showed off its Crush 8 mobo for the K8 Hammer, according to a report on PC Watch.

GeekExtreme.com is proud to announce that while everyone else is spouting product specs about nForce2, they're spouting product specs and releasing our EXCLUSIVE video interview with Brian Huynh, Product Manager for nForce2.

Good Evening Everyone,

Today I sent an email to both Antec Technical Support, with a copy to ASUS Technical Support, outlining a very serious overheat situation when using an ASUS A7V333 motherboard in an Antec Performance Plus case. The following is the main portion of that text:

With hard drives today, size never seems to be a problem . . . with the agerage computer savvy user using at least a 60GB drive. So what does this leave for IBM and Seagate, two of the top hard drive companies of today? All the details!

IBM has decided to focus their efforts on speed and loudness. The high speed hard drives today reach a max of 10000 RPMs, while IBM is working on methods of boosting this to 15000 RPMs, and at the same time, keeping the annoying whirr to a minimum. Their plans to minimize the audio coming from the hard drive include liquid rotational parts, rather than ball berrings. This will make for a smoother rotation of the physical disk.

DigiTimes is reporting that ATI are launching their Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000 Pro codenames RV250 and R300 graphics chipsets on July 17.

Althought I don't think this is likely, as I have seen reports of P4s running at 3.8GHz, but I do beleive the article claim about Windows XP. As this OS unlike 2000 on same hardware refuses to install unless I remove virtually every card from my system. Anyway heres the post Sources That Reckon To Know, claim Intel's 2.80GHz Pentium 4 part may not see the light of day because Windows doesn't like it. Reports claimed that the speed of the chip causes Windows 2000 "to crash and burn." While Windows XP doesn't like the speed of the processor, not one little bit. And it's not just Intel chips too, the claim continues. Athlon processors at high speeds are experiencing problems as well. Press read more for continued coverage

An old lady tested this card on Athlon and P4 platform and you will clearly see how the Athlon's performance lagged big time compared to the Pentium 4. Intel is, of course, a very good friend of ATI on the face of it. She tested it on 1024x768 and 1280x1024 and got:

The nForce 2 chipset to be announced in the middle of next week has a claimed advantage over VIA's DDR 400 chipsets of around 20 per cent, according to information from a Taiwanese mobo manufacturer who wishes to remain nameless.

The Nforce2 will support dual DDR memory, 64-bit and 128-bit buses, and 266, 333 and 400 flavours of the memory type. There will apparently be support for asynchronous FSB clocks and memory clocks, an AGP 8X interface, and Hypertransport support at 800MB/s.

Just got word from Crow @ Darkcrow.co.kr that he has snagged a shot of Unitech's new ATI Optimus 9000 Pro card.

OCworkbench.com have snagged 7 screenshots of Nvidia's upcoming nForce2.

AGP8X, 2x the bandwidth of AGP4X, provides cutting-edge graphics performance while Dolby digital 6-channel support brings incredible sound quality. In addition, Twin Bank DDR400 and Serial ATA technology significantly enhance overall system performance, while a dual LAN design and Windows? native Internet connection streamline your networking platform.

The german website 3DCenter.de has tested & compared the Anti-Aliasing quality between a Geforce 4 Ti and the brand new Matrox Parhelia. They have tested it with the following settings: GForce 4 TI = 4x Anti Aliasing Matrox Parhelia = 16x Anti-Aliasing It looks like that the Matrox card has some bad problems with the Anti-Aliasing. The main article is in german but you will see the difference in the pictures. Move your mouse over the pictures and you will see it. The first picture shows the GF4 Ti and the 2nd after mouse over the Matrox card. Read the article over here.
Download the testtool over here.

VIA Technologies today announced the VIA P4PB 400 Mainboard, the world's first mainboard to feature the VIA Apollo P4X400 chipset. The VIA P4PB 400's performance features are impressive and include AGP 8X, providing 2100MB/sec of graphics bandwidth, double the speed of today's standard platforms. DDR400/333 RAM enables the new Intel Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz FSB to perform to its full capacity by supplying a 3200MB/sec of fast double data rate memory transfer rates. Read more...

Intel Corp. is pushing up the release of a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 to this summer in hopes of boosting sagging sales of its flagship PC processor, sources close to the company say. In addition to raising the bar for its fastest chip from 2.53GHz to 2.8GHz, the Santa Clara, Calif., company also is considering additional price cuts this quarter in a bid to reduce its rising supply of unsold Pentium processors, sources say. Sounds like The Inquirer, eh? Wrong - ExtremeTech

Some of you have written in asking about the rumored Athlon XP SFF (Small Form Factor) CPUs that have made an appearance here and there in the news. Hot Hardware had a glimpse at these new low voltage XPs up close and personal at a recent show, behind closed doors.

IBM hopes to regain some lost market share with the introduction of their new professional harddrive series. No consumer models are planned as of yet but maybe we will see some technology adoptions in the future. Available today, the new Ultrastar 146Z10 is the first 10,000 RPM hard drive of its generation to ship in volume and has a top capacity of 146 gigabytes (GB). To enhance performance, the drive comes with a large eight megabyte (MB) cache. It also debuts with new anti-vibration technology called Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) to improve performance in large disk arrays.

Theinquirer.net mole seems to have dug up some new info about ATI's new Radeon 9700:

Fastest card for this summer could boast up to 15,000 3DMarks! ATI, as well as its partners, are very optimistic about this card and now it seems we can say their optimism in not unfounded. With eight pipelines, the card will deliver very nice performance figures and we learned that it should be clocked at 315MHz, which is obviously the fastest speed that ATI can guarantee to its partners. We are sure that the company will also introduce cards clocked at lower speeds, under a slightly different name, though we expect the LE label to be dropped.

Just saw this @ 3Dchipset.com. Looks like they had a private chat with someone...

I've received some information regarding the NV30, NV31 and some insight of the NV40 Nvidia is working on. First off though, the NV30 is AGP 8X and it's still a go with 900MHz DDR memory. Also what is now known is that the NV30 is multi chip capable. The number of chips is an odd number. That's all I can say without giving out the exact number. I'll say this though. It's under 8. With regards to FSAA performance the NV30 has a zero (0) performance cost using 4X FSAA. Specifications have been discussed and the NV30 is able to churn out 16 textures/pixel per pass. The NV30 also uses a 4-1 colour compression technique. Nvidia has explained to us/me that the performance we all will see with the NV30 is about double the performance of the Xbox/GF Ti4600. Another feature that is not known to the public is the use of IEE 1394 or known as Firewire will be on NV30 video cards.

Did I mention that 3Dchipset also have some details about ATi's new Radeon 8500 MAX?