Ozren Zagmester - editor at PCEkspert.com - and his team have discovered a pretty unusual behaviour of GeForce FX Ultra cards. There appears to be a serious flaw in the Flow FX cooling control routine - a bug that could damage your brand new hardware. According to his report, this affects at least the Nvidia reference models, Gainward and MSI FX products.

On April 14th Intel launched the new high-end Pentium 4 core chipset i875, formerly code-named 'Canterwood'. While Intel provides a reference mainboard - D875PBZ - a couple of manufacturers already have their modified versions announced and soon to be shipping. We have collected pictures and specifications for the most interesting boards from Abit, Asus, MSI, EPoX, Gigabyte, Tyan, Iwill and Chaintech.

PC.Watch published a nice interview with William M. Siu, the Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Platforms. They asked some details about the upcoming Intel Prescott. The guys at Newsware.ws have read the interview and gathered some details about the Prescott. CPU speeds up to 5Ghz are said to be possible with the new processor.

ExtremeTech.com pops the question if the Intel CPU Bug does matter. As you know Intel has had problems with the latest 3GHz 800Mhz CPU. Here's a snip:

On Monday, April 14th, Intel announced the 875P chipset, nee' Canterwood. ExtremeTech covered it as news, as well as an in-depth performance preview. However, as Monday morning dawned, Intel also revealed that it had run into potential problems with the 800MHz (effective) frontside bus Pentium 4, which runs at 3.0GHz. Spokesman George Alfs noted that the issue, which isn't yet fully understood, seems to be specific to that Pentium 4 variant; there's no problem with Canterwood running with 533MHz FSB parts.

According to Intel, i875P chipset announced yesterday will become the top solution for desktop systems for about a year. The manufacturer claims that the dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM, supported by i875P, will remain the most up-to-date memory type for this time interval. It?s true, DDR I seems to be hardly able to get any faster in terms of working frequency, so that the future is definitely with DDR II. This statement is exactly the basis for Intel?s ongoing strategy in the chipset market.

The Inquirer.net have posted information about ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro clock speeds! Here's a byte.

Using a high-end processor the card will give you about 11500 marks in 3dmark 2001SE and about 3500 in 3dmark03. The latter benchmark is faster than Nvidia's FX 5800 Ultra results with non tweaked drivers and at 1024x768 no Aniso or FSAA used. In Quake 3 it will result with 250+ FPS.

Uttar over at Nvnews.net's forum has posted the full - what he believes is the - NV35 official feature list. I advise you to take it with a barrel of salt and a dead fish as the writer himself stated: "It's PR talk."

Here's a couple of news items from Xbitlabs.com.

First Socket A Mainboard With 400MHz FSB From MSI for Sale: MSI started to sell its K7N2Delta-L (MS-6570) mainboard based on NVIDIA nForce2 core-logic with support of 400MHz EV-6 FSB. If I a not mistaken, this is the first mainboard with official support for the upcoming AMD Athlon XP ?Barton? processors with 400MHz bys that has reached retail-channel. As always, the first country to see the novelty is Japan.

Plextor, one of the leading companies for the development and production of CD-ROM drives, CD-Recorders, CD-ReWriters and media is expanding its range with the PlexWriter Premium, which writes CD's at 52-speed, rewrites at 32-speed and reads at 52-speed. The PlexWriter Premium is the ideal instrument for both professional and private users who want to copy CD's, archive large files, or create multimedia productions. There are two products under the name - an internal E-IDE and external USB2.0 52x CD-RW drive (PlexWriter Premium and PlexWriter Premium-U).

Intel Corporation today announced a significant improvement in overall PC performance by introducing a new Pentium® 4 processor with a faster system bus and a new chipset platform. The new platform provides more balanced system performance, resulting in smoother operation and less time waiting for data. The new chipset contains two technical innovations that accelerate the speed at which data flows between the computer's processor and system memory and also doubles the computer's networking bandwidth. A chipset consists of one or more chips that act as a computer's nervous system, transmitting signals from the computer's brain, the microprocessor, to the rest of the system. These new products support Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology and are targeted for high performance and feature-rich workstations and desktop computers.

Just spotted this at The Inquirer.net:

We always knew that the AMD processor could do much better than the appalling 3dmark 2001SE of 7913 and we were right. The Athlon 64 at 1.8 GHz this time, 200 MHz faster than the one we tested before, combined with a Radeon 9700 should give a Pentium 4 a run for its money.

Just got word that 3DCenter's Aths and Leonidas have posted their 6 page look at the new 8x, 12x and 16x Anti-Aliasing modes on Nvidia's GeForceFX hardware.

Even while announcing the original CineFX archicture, Nvidia stated their intention to introduce new and higher / better AA modes. Specifically 6xAA under Direct3D and 8xAA for both Direct3D and OpenGL were planned, and even a 16x anti-aliasing for the professional-grade QuadroFX. Meanwhile, a few new anti-aliasing modes found their (purely unofficial) way into newer Detonator drivers: 6xS and 8xS in November, and the 4xSS, 6x and 8x modes in January. Given the appropriate drivers and tweaking tools, as their own aTuner, these are available for even Geforce 3/4 based graphics cards.

Asus is now officially marketing the new 'AI' or artificial intelligence features for their upcoming mainboards. The i875 Canterwood based P4C800 is such a board with Dual Channel DDR400 and AGP 8x support. The specific 'AI' features extend to the whole system instead of just the BIOS as many have thought beforehand. These motherboards include automatic and intelligent features for Gbit LAN, 6-channel audio, BIOS recovery technology and more.

Sony announced a new blue laser optical data storage disc drive and cartridge-type disc media (both rewriteable and write-once versions), which will be demonstrated for the first time at the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM) conference in New York from April 7th through April 9th. The new media will offer 23.3 GB of capacity per disc, while the new drive sustains a maximum transfer rate of 9 MB/sec, making it ideal for professional data-intensive applications such as document and medical imaging, e-mail archiving, enterprise content management, multimedia projects, graphics design and audio/video editing. Both are expected to ship to OEMs this summer.

Hush Technologies is a bespoke manufacturer of precision engineered PCs and cooling systems that work with people not against them. Ergonomics, stability and silence are their three watchwords and focus lies on case design, cooling systems and consultancy. Read more...

Xbitlabs Anton Shilov has been a busy boy and tracked down the Barton processors Core-Clocks for the Athlon XP 3200+ & Athlon XP 3000+ with help of HardTecs4U!

Read More.

Plextor today announced the launch of its new internal 54x CD-ROM and 16x DVD-ROM drives. Designed for the retail and assembling market, the new models add to the company's already expansive product portfolio, making Plextor's optical range one of the broadest on the market. The CD-ROM drive - PX-54TA, has an E-IDE (ATAPI) interface and a 54x reading speed. The DVD-ROM drive - PX-116A, has an E-IDE (ATAPI) interface with a reading speed of 16x (DVD-ROM) and 48x (CD-ROM).

AMD3D, a United Kingdom based enthusiast website, has received a pre-production (?) motherboard from Asus equipped with latest i875 Canterwood chipset. The board officially supports the new Pentium 4 800Mhz FSB processors. Preliminary tests were run with a 2.4Ghz PIV and it includes some SANDRA 2003 results. The board itself carries the title AI for some special 'Artificial Intelligence overclocking feature', as well as Dual Channel DDR400 and AGP 8x. Check it out here

Just got word that VR-Zone.com have posted a piece of info on ATI R350 & R400 graphics cards from roadmaps they saw at Watch.impress.co.jp.

Read More

Xbitlabs Anton Shilov has posted details about upcoming Intel i865 and i875P chipsets.

We continue to bring you the latest information about forthcoming products from leading manufacturers. It seems that now it is the right time to share the details about Intel?s mainboards that will be available later this Spring.