Xbitlabs have reviewed two of the latest Socket A chipsets from the two major players on the market: NVIDIA and VIA. Who will win the race? A whole bunch of tests with different memory types and FSB frequencies will help to find this out.

Check out this little bad boy called Cubit.

Xbitlabs reviewed today's fastest gaming graphics solution from ATI: RADEON 9700 Pro. Besides the indepth performance investigation, they also like to offer you a highly detailed coverage of FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering techniques and their implementation in the newcomer and its closest rivals. DirectX9 is coming: get ready now with Xbitlabs.com.

From Matrox Press release October 24th, 2002 :-
"Matrox Graphics Inc., the leading manufacturer of professional graphics solutions, today announced the new Parhelia 256MB graphics board designed for the most demanding 3D workstation users in the AEC, DCC, MCAD and GIS markets. At an ESP of US $599, an unprecedented price for this memory configuration on a graphics accelerator, the Parhelia 256MB provides the ultimate in productivity and reliability, award-winning image quality and cutting-edge workstation features. "

The VPR Matrix 200A5 is the third notebook Best Buy has created, and it's the best. It's also the first Windows notebook with a wide-aspect, 15.2-inch LCD with a 1,280x854 native resolution and a remarkable, high-fidelity digital audio system. The $2,399 system also includes a 2GHz Pentium 4-M, 512MB of DDR SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, a combo CD-RW/DVD drive, and integrated 802.11b wireless networking. It all comes in an eye-catching, silver-magnesium case that weighs 6.4 pounds and measures 13.9 inches wide, 10 inches deep, and 1.2 inches thick.

We reviewed two new generation IDE hard disk drives from Seagate and Maxtor. Higher data density, new huge platters and excellent noise levels. Which one will win now?

Just got word from Crow @Darkcrow.co.kr that he's posted the Sparkle Platinum Geforce4 Ti4600 Review and don't forget the site in Korean.

Designed for the most demanding 3D workstation users at an ESP of US $599, an unprecedented price for this memory configuration on a graphics accelerator, Matrox Parhelia 256MB provides the ultimate in productivity and image quality for the AEC, DCC, MCAD and GIS markets. In addition to offering award-winning image quality, no compromise reliability and cutting-edge workstation features, Matrox Parhelia 256MB enables sustained productivity by providing ample local memory for the most demanding design environments including 3D across triple-displays and complex rendering with abundant high-resolution texture usage.

I had originally planned to write up a little article on the Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 launch event I attended today, however, after just returning from it there wasn't much exciting happening at the event that deserves special mention. Furthermore, much of the information we obtained at the launch is going to be discussed in detail in our full review of the sound card that will be written as soon as we get our hands on a 6.1 speaker system to do thorough testing with. Read More

It's always hard to make a decision on what motherboard you will spend your hard earned dollars on once a new chipset or processor is released to the highly competitive motherboard market. Assisting you as best as possible, today TweakTown presents us with a mini roundup of four VIA KT400 based motherboards for the Athlon series of processors from Abit, MSI and Soyo!

ATI lifted the NDA on the Radeon 9700 (non-Pro), Radeon 9500 Pro, and Radeon 9500 this morning. Previews and Reviews of the newest Radeons started appearing almost immediatly. First, you can check out our Preview here, then go over to Beyond3D for a similar deal. Once you get through those you have a choice between Anandtech's hands-on Review or HardOCP and what they have to say about their first hand experience with the newest Radeons.

VR-Zone has visited Shuttle HQ at Taiwan and managed to caught up with the man behind the popular Shuttle's XPC series, Mr Ken. Ken has revealed how the first Shuttle's barebone system was created and how it evolve into today's XPC design concepts. Also there are some nice XPC prototypes lurking around in his office and we have managed to capture a photo of the new copper heatpipe cooler meant for the upcoming SN41G2 XPC based on nForce2.

Modfactor.com has just finished two reviews: The Palm Zire and the CrazyPC Lian-Li Fire Dragon Window Panel.

Both, the FIC AN17 and the Epox 8K3A+ motherboards have been built around the KT333 Northbridge chipset, while certainly not the latest DDR-400 supporting chipset from VIA, KT333 motherboards will most certainly start to see more mainstream action for that same reason, hence a lower price is expected for these products.

We take a look to these, pretty solid, RAID capable products which are currently selling in the $70-99 price range.

Today 3Dlabs launch two new Workstation PC graphics boards, the Wildcat4 and Wildcat VP560. The Wildcat4 follows on from the WildcatIII architecture, whilst the Wildcat VP560 is a new chip, P9, adopting the principals behind their recent P10 chip.

Although P9 utilizes much of the P10 design principals, it does contain one rather surprising element?

VR-Zone has posted a review on the new EPoX 8K9A2+ board based on the VIA KT400 chipset. This new board supports 333Mhz FSB Athlon XP, DDR400, AGP8X as well as Serial ATA. EPoX has been pretty innovative recently to include Magic Light into their chipset cooler which certainly looks real cool and also nice blue rounded IDE cables. More interestingly, you no longer need to unlock your T'Bred on this board since it has an unlocking feature. I have managed to increase the FSB all the way up to 226Mhz at most aggressive timings of 2-2-5-2-1 and the memory performance is simply amazing at this insane FSB.

Just a quick note to let all the Peeps from the UK know that you can now buy the Sound Blaster® Audigy? 2 on Creative's Online store.

CD Freaks.com reports that Kiss Technology will release world's first DivX compatible DVD player.

For those who have been asking for inexpensive heatsinks for your systems, take a peek here as TweakTown takes a look at one of the cheapest coolers to recently hit the market. Of course, inexpensive doesn't take away the necessity for reasonable performance. We've put this Nexus cooler through the standard gauntlet to see if it will suit the needs of those looking for a more reasonably priced cooling solution. Let's see how it fared against some other low-cost sinks!

The unit looks good and is watertight. The clamp has a good design and should certainly be looked at by other waterblock manufacturers. With the noisereduction in mind water-cooling isn't half bad if you can stand the stress. "Is my pump still on ? Did I fasten the hoses correctly ?" Making sure you have all the parts is about 75% of your entire project.