Our Bro's over DriverHeaven have thrown up some FarCry Benchmarks which were run on a GeForce 6800 Ultra! Here's a snip! LOL

In summary, forcing the R300 path if you have a 6800 Ultra is advisable as it gives you decent performance however better IQ than the standard path.

One other point of note is that the Radeon 9800XT is very close in performance to the 6800Ultra at the same IQ levels. Only 7fps in average framerates separate the cards which is a phenomenal result for the Radeon.

X-bit Labs have posted a detailed block diagram of Xbox 2's Xenon architecture which they got from the Chinese site GZeasy.com!

As everybody knows, there is a lot going on with multi-core, multi-threaded designs at IBM. Apparently, Microsoft also wants to jump on that bandwagon, some sources indicate. The Redmond, Washington-based firm wants to incorporate IBM?s POWER 976 architecture into the CPUs for Xbox 2 console to allow truly high-performance processing.

Stretch Inc announced on Monday of their S5000 chip which is the first processor that can add new instruction while operating. The chip combines an existing RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture with a large reconfigurable area of programmable logic called the Instruction Set Extension Fabric, ISEF. Stretch's own C/C++ compiler automatically spots areas in a program that require intensive computation and creates new instructions for the processor to handle those tasks on-the-fly. During a demo of the new chips performance, the chip was ran at 300Mhz but outperformed 2Ghz competitor chips. Banta said it takes far less time and money to develop products using the S5000 and major changes can be implemented via a software update.

I was a little upset this morning that there wasn't any new R420 information out since the rumors had the NDA being lifted today, so after I ranted a bit at Beyond3D and then went and ranted a bit more at Rage3D, I thought it might be a better idea to try ranting at ATi and seeing if that helped.

So I did, and Patti Mikula got back to me in about 2 minutes with some info.

Just spotted this bit of News over at [H]ardOCP

NVIDIA recently distributed SM3.0 Screenshots and they got a lot of you asking questions. What was NVIDIA trying to show us with the screenshots from the FarCry game engine? We examine these differences and tell the truth about SM3.0.

We come, we saw, we left - amidst tight security. We just returned from visiting nVidia at the Intel Solutions Summit 2004 in Sydney, Australia. There we saw GeForce 6800, PCI Express 16x and Intel Grantsdale and Tumwater in action with some type of mysterious 64-bit processor from Intel.

Nvnews have a new article out entitled Vertext Shader 3.0! Here's a snip.

A bit late to the party, but I have updated our GeForce 6800 Ultra preview with a new page that covers the features of Vertex Shader 3.0. My goal was to use the research material I assembled to present the information in a non-technical manner. But with the complexity surrounding GPUs, it is near impossible!

Elite Bastards reports following on from the image posted a few days ago we now have a second image of R420, showing a close-up of part of the board.

NVIDIA and VIA have dominated the enthusiast market for Athlon 64 chipsets, but they're not the only ones with core logic for AMD's latest processors. SiS has quietly been churning out the SiS755 chipset, which is seeing a lot of action in inexpensive Socket 754 boards from ECS, ASRock, and Foxconn. Can the chipset's features and performance keep up with its Athlon 64 competition? We tested a SiS755 board against VIA's K8T800 and NVIDIA's nForce3 150 and 250Gb chipsets to find out.

GamersDepot have a new article out called DX9 Gaming - Pixel Shader 3.0 and 32bit Precision - What's it all mean and who's right? in which they ask a few cutting-edge developers their opinions on Nvidia's new shader model 3.0! Here's a snip.

With so much bombardment of technology and features from ATI and NVIDIA, it has become a bigger challenge than ever before for consumers to decipher what?s relevant and what isn?t. In the past week or so, we?ve heard NVIDIA pitching Pixel Shader 3.0 as the next quantum leap in graphical prowess and how only 32bit precision is truly to be considered ?full precision?.

We?ve just published our most recent article which raises some questions on the quality produced by Nvidia's Geforce 6800 Ultra.

Before we begin it should be stated that these tests were performed using the Forceware 60.72 drivers, the version provided by Nvidia to all press reviewing their new card. These drivers are still beta however they have an interesting approval. The following text is taken from the Futuremark website:

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!

Read More

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.