Toshiba, a hard drive manufacturer, announced a 100GB hard drive for the notebook market on Thursday. The previous high capacity hard drive for notebooks was settled at 80GB.

VIA announced today that their AS-1210 motherboard will be the world's first lead-free motherboard. A leading proponent of "Green Computing", VIA continues to spearhead the drive for environmentally friendly computing by emphasizing power efficiency and ergonomics, and through the early adoption of manufacturing processes that exclude hazardous substances such as lead. "The transition to 'green' manufacturing for VIA has been very smooth and we have been able to ship lead-free processors and chipsets since the end of last year," said Richard Brown, Vice President of Marketing, VIA Technologies, Inc. "The AS-1210 clearly demonstrates the technology leadership of VIA and Yamashita in being the first to market with a lead-free motherboard that meets the requirements of the international market."

As previously reported, Intel's Itanium 2 is ready to roll. After terribly failing with Itanium chips, Intel set to launch newer versions of Itanium processors with improved architecture to increase the demand among it's enterprise consumers.

Article Snippit:

"What a case. Honestly. She's a big old heavy bugger, but she's beautiful. There is a ton of space in it for devices and HDDs, and the side-facing HDD rack is very innovative (not to mention convenient). The tool-less design makes for easy setup and reconfiguration, and the included PSU and 120mm are fantastic additions.

I'll say it again; it is very hard to pull off a pre-modded case such as this without making it look campy and cheesy. CasEdge has done an excellent job. Now, if they can work on the few minor flaws, they'll have a stellar case on their hands."

PCI Express (not to be confused with PCI-X) is the upcoming replacement for both PCI and AGP. A couple of main points about PCI Express

* While the classic PCI Bus is based upon a parallel architecture, PCI Express is serial based, drastically reducing pin count.
* It is a point to point protocol much like AGP. Devices do not share bandwidth

3DCenter have thrown up a new article entitled ATi R420 & R423 Specifications which has a look at ATi's up coming VPU chips, Like the R423, R480 or the RV380 and RV410 and a graph showing the theoretical filling rates and ranges for Nvidia's and ATi's next gen cards!

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Hexus.net have posted their review of nVidia's newest chipset the nForce3 250! the article looks at overclocking the nForce3 chipset as Nvidia have added a working PCI / AGP lock to the board! Here's a snip.

Since the introduction of the AMD Athlon 64 processor the overclocking community has, as ever, been keen to see just how far these fast processors will go. Progress has been slow and frustrating as both the VIA K8T800 and the nForce3 150 chipsets do not lock the PCI bus. This means that increasing the effective front side bus frequency affects not only the CPU and main memory, but also any peripherals connected to the PCI bus, since it's derived from that CPU driven frequency, itself derived from the HTT clock.

DataFuse.net just finished previewing the Coolermaster Hyper6! Here's the scoop.

Using heatpipes is taking cooling to a next level. Coolermaster has figured this out, but in this case you encounter one huge problem. The cooling-setup is just way too heavy. There's no way I would encourage anybody to slap a 1kg weighing cooler ontop of their socket.

Clubic.com send word they have specification, price and picture of the next double layer liteon dvd writer.

According to 3dchips-fr.com we should see 1 Ghz GDDR3 memory chips with a clock of frequency of 700 MHz from Samsung by the end of the year.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at the TechReport

Hot on the heels of 3Dlabs' Wildcat Realizm announcement, NVIDIA has taken the wraps off its Quadro FX 4000. Though it carries the FX moniker, the Quadro FX 4000's support for high precision dynamic range lighting, shader model 3.0, and rotated-grid antialiasing suggest that the card is derived from the same NV40 GPU as NVIDIA's new GeForce 6800 Ultra.

When Nvidia briefed me on the nForce3 250Gb, the company claimed the chipset would perform better with GeForce FX graphics. The insinuation was not that the GeForce FX was necessarily faster than its graphics competition, but that NVIDIA had specifically optimized nForce3 and GeForce FX ForceWare drivers to work better together than apart. NVIDIA was quick to reassure me that they hadn't done anything to make competing graphics cards run slower on nForce3. They'd simply taken advantage of an opportunity to make their graphics cards run faster.

Uttar at Beyond3D suggests otherwise...

EUROCOM has released their AMD64 based notebook. Many tought this was Vapourware, but now it's available! More information and pics over at Amd64notebooks.com

Anandtech have snagged the latest Roadmap for ATi's line up of motherboard chipsets for 2004!

RS300 turned more than one head; cheap, reliable IGP performance for Intel processors. Small Form Factor PCs benifited the most from the alternative to Intel's 845G and 865G. With RS350 close to induction, today we take a look even further into the future for a glimpse at RS400 and the extremely exciting RS480

Just got word from our bro's over at Computerbase that there having a blow out Competition for their 5th Birthday with Gear from:

ABIT, AMD, Apromatec, Asus, Caseking, Casetek, Corsair, Creative, EPoX, Gigabyte, HAMA, Inno3D, Intel, KeySonic, Leadtek, Logitech, MemorySolution, MSI, NEC, Netgear, Network Associates, OCZ, PNY, QDI, Samsung, Sapphire, Sennheiser, Shuttle, Soyo, Tagan, TerraTec, Teufel, Thermaltake, Twinhan, TwinMOS and VIA,

Yesterday, Sony Corporation and TOPPAN Printing Co. LTD , a large japanese printing company, announced the successful development of 25GB paper disc based on Blu-ray Disc technology.

Further details about the revolutionary innovation will be announced at the Optical Data Storage 2004 conference to be held from April 18th to April 21st at Monterey, California.

Here's some articles that I spotted over at VRZone that are worth checking out!

New ABIT AA8-MAX, AG8, AS8, AV8 Boards LGA775 Prescotts, Grantsdale & Alderwood In June Intel Finalized High Definition Audio Specs NVIDIA Clearing GPU Inventory

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Nvnews.net

I have received a few e-mails asking about the operating temperatures of the GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU. I completed my final test this evening and have tabulated the results in the table below. The table lists the room temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, humidity level, the GPU temperature at idle, and the highest GPU temperature recorded while playing back a demo from Enemy Territory in a 1024x768 window for 5 minutes.

HardwareOC have published three Pixel Shader 3 videos! 2 for Far Cry and 1 with the new Unreal engine.