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?

July 17th is still the date when ATI's RV250 is set to be officially introduced to the world. At that time, ATI plans to introduce at least 2 versions of the RV250 based card - Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000 Pro.

Click on Read More for more info.

As the release is drawing nearer also the rumours thicken about ATI's DirectX 9 capable GPU the R300 - which according The Inquirer will be dubbed Radeon 9700. According to the latest reports the R300 will have 107 million transistors on die which is said to result in the need of some sort of external power supply...

OCworkbench.com have what looks like the first benchmarks for 4x AGP vs. 8x AGP. Here's what they're saying:

We ran the Eng. board based on SIS648 chipset using a P4 2.4G at DDR333 CAS 2,2-2-5 mode. Here are our results of 3dMark2001SE Build 330. Drivers used: 3.02a.02.

MSI releases a new mainbord, the MSI KT3 Ultra2 series. These mainbords have now a on-chip USB2.0-controller insted of the NEC USB2.0-controller on the MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU. The MSI KT3 Ultra2 has also na integrated RAID-controller.

According to DRAMeXchange, 256Mbit DDR spot prices reached US$5.80-6.60 on July 4, rising a record 15% in one day, while 128Mbit DDR rose over 9% to US$2.80-3.20. These prices have begun to usher in profit for many of Taiwan?s DRAM manufacturers. DRAM suppliers said that rising demand has pushed DDR prices up. Intel cut processor prices in early June, and DDR-supporting chipsets have been rolled out continuously. In addition, the system products that international OEMs are launching this month are mostly DDR-based. Source: DRAMeXchange & Digitimes

Chinese website PCPop has some images of one of ATI's latest graphics card - the R300 which is probably coming in four flavours according to the latest 7.74 drivers found by us. They seem to have had about 12 hours to play around with the card but are limited in reporting due to ATI NDA. Read More...

I was just surfing around and I stopped by E-buyer and had a quick look in the video card section and guess what? I saw the new Matrox Parhelia 512GPU 128Mb DDR 3xRGB 2xDVI TV-Out OEM and they have 5 in stock @ £257.60 = £302.68 inc VAT!

Click here to Order

Continuing to impress the 7,200 RPM market with its WD Caviar family, Western Digital Corp. introduced the industry?s largest capacity hard drive on June 25th. WD Caviar 60 GB-per-platter 7,200 RPM hard drives will be offered in capacities ranging from 120 to 200 GB and will be available this July. To ensure quiet operation in noise-sensitive desktop/work station environments, Western Digital offers hard drives equipped with optional fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors. Read more...

The most recent Intel roadmaps show that the firm is continuing to scale its Pentium 4 chip, with a 2.80GHz processor now slated for this quarter, quarter three. This processor was shown in previous Intel roadmaps as a Q4 introduction. Intel ascribes the shift to a "healthy" 130 nanometer process and good engineering. That means it's now highly likely that Intel will be able to introduce a 3GHz Pentium 4 for the fourth quarter, as the chip dates shuffle forward.
The 2.80GHz Pentium 4 will kick off at $637, with the 2.66GHz/2.6GHz processor costing $562, and the 2.53GHz/2.5GHz processors dropping to $433, when bought in quantities of 1,000. Source: The Inquirer