Sony Electronics is wrapping four devices into one portable package for the holidays. The consumer-electronics giants new MPD-AP20U player can play and record CDs as well as play DVDs and digital audio files, such as MP3s. Sony announced the device Monday, saying it will be available in November for less than $300.

Just been informed by Vr-Zone.com that their ATi Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro Review is up! Here's a snip.

The Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro is roughly the same size as the Radeon 8500 reference board, and includes the ATI reference Red PCB, a great looking heat sink fan, but lacks ramsinks on the memory chips. The coolest part about the Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro is the Heat Sink Fan, which differs greatly from the reference design and has some of the "uniqueness" Sapphire needs to hold its own in the consumer graphics card market.

Over at Dvdwriters.co.uk we have the world's first review of the new Pioneer DVR-A05 4 speed DVD writer. Part of the conclusion: "Pioneer has finally delivered on what we and most others wanted most in a DVD writer and that was an increase in DVD recording speeds. There is no disputing that the speed at which new DVD writers record to DVD-Rs at is light years ahead of the 1st generation drives - the A05 only needs 15mins to writes a whole 4.7GB of data.

just got word that The Adrenaline Vault have posted their P4 3.06 GHz Processor Q&A interview with Intel's Gabe Achanzar! Here's a snip.

Percentage-wise, how much faster will the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz processor be than the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor?

You'll see the usual solid performance increases when we add 200 megahertz. However, in some instances, you can see up to 25 percent performance improvements from Hyper-Threading Technology alone.

Will the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz processor require a new power supply?

No. A standard ATX12V supply works fine. However, a motherboard should be rated by the manufacturer to support 3.06 GHz operation.

With so many choices out there for enclosures, it is beginning to get difficult to choose. Come join TweakTown as they take a look at the Ahaniz dboX Case. It has features and looks combined, but how can it handle the demanding stresses that we put on it? Come see for yourself!

Ever have to crawl behind your PC, get blasted with high speed fans and fumble in the dark just to connect one thing? I know I have on many occasions. The FrontX unit seeks to eliminate that. Let's see how well it does...

Just got word from Aron @ASElabs that he's posted his Plextor 48x CDRW drive review!

New users will most likely want to read the manual, it gives a load of information. Users beyond the skill of a beginner will either use the quick start guide, or nothing. The quick start guide was well written with pictures showing the jumpers and cabling. On the other side it shows the software aspects of burning. The CD had the normal suite of utilities including Easy CD Creator and Direct CD among other things."

Many of us know ECS as a Taiwanese company specializing in OEM based computer products. Recently though they've partly branched away from this sector and started to recognize the Overclocker as a valuable segment of the market. One of the new products that is helping the company in this endeavor is their new innovative ECS I-Buddie 4 Desknote desktop replacement PC. Simply put, it's a cost effective notebook based on PC desktop technology. Follow TweakTown as they take us on an in-depth discovery of this little gem from ECS!

With LED'S taking off in the PC-Mod industry, it was only a matter of time until manufacturers started putting LED's in their other peripherals such as mice. Since LED's are so small, have very low voltage requirements, and put out a considerable amount of light, it is no wonder that we see new products everyday that use LED technology. Today, we'll be looking at a great looking mouse. The pictures of it will not really do it justice, but you'll get the general idea...

Asus has long made motherboards with the enthusiast in mind. No matter the chipset or processor being supported, they have been there. Join TweakTown as they delve into one of their latest offerings; the Asus P4S8X Motherboard. Using the new SiS 648 chipset, we will look at a number of areas to see if this newcomer can stand up to the Asus reputation.

Check out this AMD Roadmap:

TomsHardware has previewed AOpen's AK86 Tube Motherboard. This mobo is based on VIA's K8T400 chipset which supports AMD Hammer CPU's. Although this motherboard's will not be launched before this year christmas you will get a good idea what the next gen Hammer chipset has to offer.

Planet 3D Now has posted six pictures of Aopens upcoming AMD Hammer board. The board comes with three tubes for warmer richer sound. Check the pics via the above link.

IBM announced a newly-developed, high-performance PowerPC microprocessor for use in a variety of applications, including desktops, workstations, servers and communications products. The new chip called the IBM PowerPC 970 is derived from IBM's award-winning POWER4 server processor to provide high performance and additional function for users. As the first in a new family of high-end PowerPC processors, the chip is designed for initial speeds of up to 1.8 gigahertz, manipulating data in larger, 64-bit chunks and accelerating compute-intensive workloads like multimedia and graphics through specialized circuitry known as a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) unit. Read more...

Rage3d.com reports that an ATI representative was on TechTV last night and he brought along a nice new toy out of ATI's labs, a Radeon 9700 with DDR II RAM. I didn't catch it but McTurok from the forums wrote a good summary.

Advanced Micro Devices' chief technical officer tipped the performance of the 64-bit Hammer chip at the Microprocessor Forum on Tuesday. "The Opteron architecture offers industry-leading performance for enterprise-class servers but at the same time it's a sweet little processor for the desktop," said Fred Weber, AMD's vice-president of engineering for the Computational Products Group. Read more...

Renowned german IT magazine Chip has compiled the latest info and assumptions regarding the eagerly awaited launch of NV30 at Comdex Fall, Las Vegas in November. They also have a first benchmark of ATI's Radeon 9500 series which is on par with Nvidia's GeForce 4 Ti 4600. Read more...

Xbitlabs have posted details of upcoming VIA Pentium 4 Chipsets! Here's a byte.

Later this year VIA Technologies will unveil its VIA P4X600 core-logic. The newcomer was already showcased at VTF, so, it should appear just as scheduled without any delays. The P4X600 is intended for the Pentium 4 processors with 400 or 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and will feature dual-channel memory controller. I wonder if VIA announces this baby a couple of days before Intel announces its Granite Bay, in order to be able to call it ?the first dual-channel DDR SDRAM supporting Pentium 4 chipset?. Keeping in mind VIA?s negative experience with DDR400, the company only declares PC2100 and PC2700 support for their new device. Frankly speaking, dual-channel PC2700 DDR SDRAM delivers about 5.4GB/s of peak system bandwidth what should be enough not only for the current Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, but also for the up and coming Pentium 4 ?Prescott? CPUs with 667MHz FSB.

High-speed CD-RW drive, CHECK. DVD drive, CHECK. Two speedy hard drives for unheard of storage space, CHECK. Brand new DVD-RW drive... whoops. More and more people are falling victim to the problem of no more IDE ports for peripherals. Too many new products are hitting the shelves that need these valuable resources, but most motherboards are limited to four devices. Come join TweakTown as they take a look at the New Motion Combo Converter Device. It tackles this very problem by utilizing your system's USB or Firewire ports. Let's see if it can tackle the demanding needs of a Power User!