Digitimes reports that NV18 and NV28 graphics chips will finally be launched worldwide on September 25, formally leading the company into the AGP 8x market. According to sources, the NV18 and NV28 will be named the GeForce4 MX440 8x and GeForce4 Ti 4200 8x, respectively, following Nvidia?s two better-selling products, and will be priced only slightly higher than the current chips. On a sidenote Digitimes says that ATI Radeon 9500 based on the R300 core and offering the AGP 8x specification, (Radeon 9500 and Radeon 9500 PRO) is designed with four pipelines and DirectX 8.1 support. Read more for a preliminary packshot of Asus MX460 AGP 8x VGA card.

Just spotted this @ NvNews.net where one of their news posters has received an email pointing him to a spanish website that had a presentation that had the proposed specifications for the Audigy 2 sound cards:

DVD Audio, Dolby Digital EX 6.1 o THX de Lucasfilm and backwards standards compatible.
Playback in 24 bits y 192 kHz.
106dB Signal to noise level (6 dB more than old generation).
Recording in 24 bit/96 KHz.
Frequency response from 10 Hz to 46 kHz.

Hit Read More for the Creative Labs Audigy 2 presentation.

Hardware creators at Microsoft are introducing various designs of computer devices to meet the wide variety of personal preferences consumers have today. "People are using their mouse and keyboard more and more each day, and in turn are viewing these devices as an extension of their personality," says Matt Barlow, group product manager for Microsoft Hardware. "They are asking for these products -- like cell phones and PDAs -- to reflect who they are. We are happy to be a foremost provider of diverse computer peripherals for a variety of technology consumers." "Our newest lineup of seven unique mouse and keyboard products are specifically designed to mirror a diverse range of consumer personalities and attitudes toward technology," says Barlow. Productshots under read more...

Kentron Technologies, Inc., a privately held company, announced that VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, and S3 Graphics, Inc., have licensed the QBM technology. The QBM controller interface license provides VIA and S3 Graphics with the necessary IP coverage to incorporate QBM into their line of PC, Workstation and Server core logic chipset solutions. The QBM technology doubles the speed of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory devices, maintains the existing 64-bit bus structure common in today?s general purpose computing systems and meets the marketplace?s requirement for low cost memory modules. Using existing DDRI devices, the technology provides DDRII speeds, cost savings and a dramatic performance improvement over DDR333, DDR400, future DDRII modules, and other more expensive, non-DDR compatible memory technologies. Read more...

News.com reports that Pioneer Electronics said Tuesday that its DVD-rewritable drives overheat when recording on certain high-speed disks.

Representatives from Pioneer Electronics USA, based in Long Beach, Calif., said that writing to blank 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW discs can cause its DVD-rewritable PC drives and DVD recorders to freeze.

Ok Peeps, been told by a reliable mole that Creative will announce the new Audigy 2 on October 9th 2002 and soon after, you should be able to buy one in your local PC store. That is if your brave enough to buy one, after the last. We should get Degger to speaker to HERCULES and do us a deal on their:

Watch.Impress have some screenshots posted of CoolerMasters upcoming Opteron fan DRACO K8.

Just got word that Nvchips-fr.com have details up regarding Nvidia's NV18 and NV28! Here's a quick translation as the site's in French.

GPU NV18 and NV28 will not bear a new name which would have been misleading and will continue to be called GeForce4. We learned that MSI will launch in mid-October the GeForce4 MX 440 supporting AGP 8X! According to tests' carried out, showed that the AGP8X offers a profit of performances of 4.68% compared to the same chart in AGP4X, under 3DMARK 2001.

Savagenews.com reports that thanks to my brother I have found a site that just published pictures of some SavageXP based videocard along with benchmarks!

DOCUMENTS SEEN @ THE INQUIRER show that the SIS 655/963 Pentium 4 dual DDR 333 chipset is likely to be in volume production in November.

The chipset, which includes a 533MHz system bus and has an AGP 8X/4X interface, will support up to four DIMMs of unbuffered DDR memory at either 333 or 266 speeds, with a maximum density of 1GB per module.

Abit has issued their latest FAQ dealing with crackling noises on Soundblaster Live! cards and corrupted data transfer using their VIA based motherboard range. They recommend altering BIOS settings as well as 3rd party PCI Latency patch by programmer George E. Breese. Quote: You may meet the following situations: Copying files from Iomega PEERLESS MEDIA drive to on-board IDE hard disk may lead the computer hangs, or the files may be corrupted. Creative Sound Blaster Live! (5.1) Series sound cards have a crackling noise while playing music with AT7 / KT7 / KT7-RAID / KT7A / KT7A-RAID / KR7A / KR7A-RAID / KR7A-133 / KR7A-133R / KX7-333 / KX7-333R motherboards. It is very slow to copy files from on-board IDE hard disk to another disk, the data may be corrupted, even leads the computer to be halted. Read more...

What do you do, when you have a old Radeon 7200 (like me), 7500, 8500 or any other ATI card and want to upgrade it to another ATI card (most likely 9700 if you are like me)?
You might ask friends or some bloke at a hardware shop to trade with you and the person always responds with a much smaller amount than you expect (which makes you think it will be better if you donate it to your cousin). Or you go to ATI.com, get the new card and test it on your system and then get a good price on your old card from ATI. Wait... there is a catch though (I heard you say "Isn't there a catch?").

Both Seagate and WesternDigital have announced there will be 1-year warranty on their harddisk drives. This limited warranty will take effect from October 1st 2002. Update thanx "FC" for this one Maxtor has joined... and actually started the party. If you read/previous the above news and said fine where is the Maxtor's dealer number?; then read this "Effective October 1, 2002, all Maxtor desktop drives will carry a one-year standard warranty". Ouch... Hit read more for links.

From Intels Pressroom:-
"Retaining backward compatibility with the older AGP 4x technology, AGP 8x doubles the graphics bandwidth of the AGP interface to 2.1 gigabytes per second (GB/s) which is designed to benefit applications on today's most popular workstation platforms. It is expected to impact the desktop market segment in 2003 as desktop applications become more bandwidth-intensive. "

We've been hearing all kinds of good things so far concerning the new ATi Radeon 9700 series graphics cards, but can it possibly live up to all the hype? Come join TweakTown as they take a look at this beast and tells us once and for all if it has what it takes to become the next champ, or the next chump!

According to a report at the japanese magazine Nikkei.Net Interactive (login required) ,which was published today, Fujitsu is going to recall about ten million internal harddisk drives which were manufactured during September 2000 and September 2001. If the recall process is limited to Japan is not known. The report states that the RMA process will be free of charge for customers. The whole conversion is said to cost about 85 million Euro, which was confirmed by Fujitsu spokesperson Bob Pomeroy. He also said that customers like IBM, Hitachi and NEC were concerned. Rancho*: I also own 2 Fujitsu drives and had intermittent problems with complete drive failures... Update: It seems there have been translation errors. The correct amount of HDD's is 300.000. Also there are numerous reports about failing Fujitsu drives outside Japan. Read more...

Following on from the Radeon 9700 PRO review Beyond3D has posted a review of its 'low end' baby brother the Radeon 9000 PRO, being largely based from Radeon 8500's architecture. Here's a snip.

Max Payne has previously shown to receive a reasonably healthy boost in the lower resolutions from a card with strong onboard geometry processing. Here we can see that the 9000 PRO performing very closely to the 8500, indicating that it's T&L performance is still quite strong in comparison to 8500. This could indicate that 9000 PRO's Vertex Shader units are more powerful than 8500 or that 8500 was not able to run both its processors in parallel in all cases.

INQ reports the Palomino MP cores under 2000+ will be phased out by the end of September, and the cores replaced by Thoroughbred cores, it appears.

Slower Palominos will still be available for the next six months but won't be shipped into the channel after the end of this month.

Big Thanks to TweakTown.com and Rage3D.com for this information. All quotes by Cameron Wilmot of TT.

One of our readers sent me a link to the Rage3D forums where they say that ATI are fully aware of the Radeon 9700?s AGP 8x problem and has a solution for those of you experiencing problems with their new graphics cards after what we reported on the problem yesterday a couple of posts below.

According to ATI, they are now receiving and testing these 8X AGP boards. They are ALSO finding the 9700 does not work at all or works intermittently at best on these boards. Engineering indicated most of the boards already shipped have this problem.

The nice peeps over @ Hardtecs4u.com have sent word that they have got their grubby hands on the latest AMD Processor roadmap. The roadmap shows that the ClawHammer is delayed to Q1 2003...