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.

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!