Just spotted this bit of news at TweakTown

Our contact over at Chaintech in Taiwan sent us through some pictures of their upcoming K8 Athlon 64 motherboard called Zenith ZNF3-150 based on nVidia's nForce3 150 chipset through the e-waves. The actual surprise is not the fact that we have first look pictures of a K8 retail motherboard, but one of the features of it which raised our eye-brows is RadEX short for Revolutionary Active Direct EXhaust.

Digit-life have snagged a scoop that Gainward have partnered with Zalman to launch a new range of fanless FX5900 with ZM-80C H, and updated FX 5600 and FX 5200 cards! they also have news that MSI will also be launching a fanless GeForce FX 5600 videocard.

I was just over at Xbitlabs.com and I see they have some rumours on two new GPU's from ATI the RV351 and RV381.

ATI Technologies is set to start sampling of its code-named RV351 chip shortly in order to mass-produce it in late Q4 2003 or, more probably, in Q1 2004. The chip will have 4 rendering pipelines, DirectX 9.0, AGP 8x support and other features of the RADEON 9600 (aka RV350) product line. ATI will redesign the VPU a bit in order to reduce manufacturing costs. Most likely, the main trump of the whole RV350/RV360 VPU family ? their high core-speed ? will not be inherited by the RV351 due to price constraints. Obviously, you should expect some 275 ? 325MHz VPU, 400 ? 500MHz memory and a simple PCB with 64- or 128-bit memory bus.

Just got word from VR-Zone that they've thrown up their Gaming rigs round-up with system from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Overdrive PC, Voodoo PC, and Zeus PC are a few to mention.

In this round-up I will go over the difference between each machine; who builds what, the uniqueness behind each machine, the hardware they choose, and we will run benchmarking applications as well as games. For the professional users out there I will also review why these machines are probably the best on the planet when comparing them to production-line PC's.

3Dcenter have thrown up a new article called CineFX NV30 Inside! which provides us with the most detailed look at the inner workings of Nvidia's NV30 and NV35's graphics cards! Nvidia has closely guarded the details of its CineFX architecture! Here's a snip.

Since the release of NV30 with it's new CineFX pixel engine people have been wondering about its internal structure. The developer of the chip, nVidia, has been reluctant to answer questions about internal details in the past, seeking refuge in well-sounding phrases carrying only small bits of information.

Just got word from Crow at Darkcrow.co.kr that he's posted their ATi Fire GL X2 256 Preview! which includes benchmark results for SPECapc MAYA5.0 & CineBench 2003.

DigiTimes:

Taiwan-based IC designer Realtek Semiconductor today announced the launch of the ALC850, claiming it to be the world?s first 8-channel AC?97 Rev 2.3 audio codec. Fully complying with the new AC?97 Rev 2.3 specification, the ALC850 provides a jack-sensing function (surround, center/LFE, front-mic, surround back), a PCBEEP generator, and interrupt capability, the company said. In addition, the ALC850 is embedded with Realtek?s proprietary UAJ (Universal Audio Jack) technology, providing three universal jacks (Line-out, Mic-in, Line-in), giving users plug and play convenience. The ALC850 also supports S/PDIF input and output, allowing digital connections with DVD systems or other audio/video multimedia. It is packaged in a 48-pin LQFP.

The Inquirer's mole drops word that he's snagged the name for ATI's next generation of graphics cards!

ATI had two names for this technology from the beginning. One was Radeon 9900 PRO the only step left for this generation of cards, and the other the Radeon 9800XT.

Here's a great deal? I was told about this yesterday , but with all the posts I forgot about it!

Novatech are having a sale on their Nvidia GeForce3 256bit 64MB DDR Graphics Card for £23.50 inc VAT! How cheap is that? as the GF3 is still a reasonably good card if you want to play at 1024x768 no AA/AF.

Logitech nutzt den Rückzug von Microsoft aus dem Markt für PC-Joysticks und Pads für eine ganze Reihe neuer Produkteinführungen. Unter anderem werden zwei neue Joysticks und ein neues Gamepad für den PC auf den Markt gebracht. Gleichzeitig hat man die Preise für älteres Spiele-Zubehör gesenkt. Einen Überblick über die neue Game-Hardware von Logitech hat Golem zusammengestellt. Golem

Just spotted this byte of news at Xbitlabs.com.

Those of you who constantly read news concerning present and future Intel Itanium processors already know that code-named Montecito design scheduled to come in 2005 will have 2 cores. But was not known until now is that the follower of the Montecito presently known as Tanglewood will have as many as 16 cores, News.com reported quoting a source close to Intel Corp.!

The Inquirer's mole has been a busy bee and has dug up some new rumours!

Some of Nvidia guys that know how things work have told our friends that NV36, Geforce FX 5900 Ultra already has support for pixel shader 3.0 but there is no any driver publicly available that will support it. µ The same source implied that when Nvidia tested pixel shader 3.0 internally, there was a hardware problem.

In this article Xbitlabs takes a look at two integrated sound subsystems. The first is formed by VIA's VT8235 South Bridge and an AC?97 VIA VT1616 codec, and the second one is based on nForce2 MCP-T with the integrated APU SoundStorm and an AC?97 Realtek ALC650 codec. For better comparison they also include the results for Creative's Audigy2 sound card.

Digit-life have thrown up their Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 Mainboard Roundup! Here's a byte.

nForce2 boards for the AMD Athlon XP (Socket A) chipset are not a rarity today, and the new modification of this chipset named nForce2 Ultra 400 doesn't look like a real technological innovation. No secret that the 400 MHz FSB was supported even in the nForce2-S/G. NVIDIA "suddenly found out" that the above mentioned chipset didn't have the 400MHz support only after the launch of the first Athlon XP which worked at that FSB clock.

Just spotted this bit of news over at OCworkbench.com:

Today, we spent some time with a VIA K8 A64 board and noticed something that we would like to share with you.

The popular motherboard maker MSI has made an article on overclocking a Pentium 4 2.4C (800MHz FSB) to an amazing 3.6GHz, in order to show the great overclocking possibilities with their 848P. To do this they used their new 848P Neo motherboard, a Pentium 4 2.4C and the memory they used was GEIL PC4200. In their first experiment they managed to get their 2.4GHz Pentium 4 up to 3.6GHz by cranking the FSB up to 300MHz. Holy mobo circuit...

Games Radar reports that Sony will finally release the new PlayStation 2 model in the UK next month - and it'll be available in silver as well as the traditional black.

The new version of the PS2 - which was first released in Japan back in May - includes a host of new features primarily relating to the machine's DVD playback facilities: Along with standard DVDs, the new PS2 (which is cosmetically unchanged) will also be able to play DVD-R and DVD-RW discs and supports DVD progressive scan playback, which can provide far higher quality images than the current PS2.

It has been a long time coming but we are finally reaching the beginning stages of 64-bit mainstream computing. AMD has been the first to bring a 64-bit processor to the market with any true support in the Opteron. VIA is one of the key chipset companies supporting AMD64 and today TweakTown's Shawn "Toxic" Baker takes a preview look at their new K8T800 chipset with AMD Opteron 242 and 244 processors. 64-bit computing is boarding - don't miss the train!

Myhard sends word that they've snagged some photo's and details on the following products:

ASUS K8V (K8T800/VT8237) Athlon 64 Motherboard ASUS V9950 SE/TD (GeForce FX 5900 SE) ASUS P4V533 (VIA P4M266) Pentium 4 Motherboard

Just spotted this bit of news at [H]ard[OCP.

Trey points out that CyberPowerSystem's page notes an unheard of model of AMD CPU. "AMD? ATHLON? 64 FX 51".

The CPU is matched with a Socket 940 SK8N mainboard from Asus that sports the nForce3 chipset. The memory configuration is noted as "1024 MB (512MBx2) PC3200 400MHz Dual Channel DDR".