Amazon Tech have got a new workstation card and it's called the PURE PCI Render Card and what's so Amazing about this card u say well it cames with 512 megs of on-board SD RAM! WOW :D

Amazon Tech PURE PCI Render Card

Another day of beta releases for you Asus owners: Bios TUSL2-M ( i815e ) 1011 - 07 Beta Bios TUSL2-C / TUEP2-M ( i815ep ) 1011 - 07 Beta Bios TUEG-VM ( i815eg ) 1011 - 07 Beta Use caution when flashing your BIOS.

MSI has a new BIOS for their KT266A board. Changelog is: Fixed Win98SE/ME/2000 will have ! mark after installing NEC USB 2.0 driver Don't disable on-board AC97 when install PCI sound card Support AMD XP 2000+ CPU Grab BIOS 3.3 here if you own this board.

A new day, a new BIOS. TUV4X 1004 - 04 Beta

A very decent review has been posted on the renowned Sharky Extreme website. Editor Vince Freeman took the ATI boards for a ride and he has some good conclusions in his review concerning the future and to-be-expected support from ATI. Also Vince took a slightly different approach to evaluating Radeon 8500 performance adding a one-week real-life test run to the review. As this is the most interesting part here's a snip for you: The first thing we found is that the RADEON 8500 is an exceptional 2D card. For basic Windows duties it makes a great choice, with excellent performance and image clarity all around. Whether it was used for manipulating huge image files or scrolling through graphic-laden documents, the RADEON 8500 performed like a real champ. [...] While we didn't run the gamut of available 3D games, our initial results were very promising. CounterStrike, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 and many other popular first-person shooters ran like a knife through butter on the RADEON 8500 and it was difficult to find any issue with overall performance or stability. Now if you're still undecided if the Radeon 8500 is worth your attention the give the SharkyExtreme review a good read.

Void Your Warranty has taken Lian Li's aluminium tower case to their labs for testing. Personally I prefer midi towers cause most stuff fits in well and it doesn't take half of the room. Here's a tidbit of their review to make your mouth water: There are many things about the PC70 that deserve attention. First of all, the bezel is toolless, and pops off by simply pulling it from below. This is made possible by plastic pieces that hold the bezel onto the frame. This works exceptionally well and was possibly the nicest method I have seen for holding a bezel in place. In the unlikely event that you damaged one of the clips, you could simply replace that clip rather than the entire bezel. VYW Lian Li PC70 review

The IBM Feature Tool allows you to control some of the features in the newer IBM high performance ATA hard disk drives. The IBM Feature Tool allows you to: Enable or disable the read-ahead or write cache. Change the drive Automatic Acoustic Management settings to the: - Lowest acoustic emanation setting (Quiet Seek Mode), or
- Maximum performance level (Normal Seek Mode). Change the predefined capacity of the drive. This option can be used in situations where there is a BIOS limitation and the drive is not recognized. See the Users Guide for specific details. Switch the Ultra DMA mode (replaces the IBMATASW utility) Change Advanced Power Mode - allows you to change between the lowest power consumption and the highest power consumption (maximum performance level). Show Drive Temperature - shows the current drive temperature in Celsius and Farenheit. Download IBM Feature Tool 1.40 Windows Download IBM Feature Tool 1.40 Linux

Tom's Hardware have done a review of Maya 7.1 Gold soundcard

Here's a bite from their review

On-board sound systems are standard today. However, the quality of codecs meets only basic requirements such as system and application sound output. If you want high fidelity sound, you might want to upgrade your sound system. We introduce two interesting products from Audiotrak: Maya 7.1 Gold, a high-quality sound card at $129, and a PC amplifier called CARDamp.

Maya 7.1 Gold Review

Did you ever think about that you're spending most of your time in a 2D envorionment when using your PC? Apparently nearly noone does when sucked into the swirl of todays 3D hype. HardwareCentral has taken a note on superior 2D quality and performance of ATI's 400Mhz RAMDAC sportied on the Radeon 8500: I should note that in no way is the GeForce2 Ultra (or GeForce3) a poor 2D performer, but the Radeon 8500 proved superior at higher resolutions. Performing tasks such as manipulating or scrolling through large images or even a worksheet full of Excel graphs was noticeably smoother with the ATI card, and 2D image and text clarity is a bit better -- especially at 1,600 by 1,200 or higher. Check out Vince Freeman's findings @ HardwareCentral.

[H]ardOCP has upped their review of Abit's VIA KT266a offering branding it a top notch board to get. With the recent onslaught of KT266A motherboards, there has been one board in particular that has been conspicuously missing from the recently released KT266A board lineup...the ABIT KR7A motherboard. Whether this was by design or simply ABIT cooking their board "extra" in an attempt to squeeze everything it can out of this chipset, we'll know today. ABIT has long been a leader in the performance arena, some even think that they put their priority on performance above all else... while that may or may not be true, when all is said an done, we will know exactly what ABIT had cooking for so long. Check out the full review

Uhhh, yeah some new beta BIOSes from Asus Germany for Intel based boards were released today. The list includes 8 new BIOSes so if you feel like testing one of those read more.

Intel has just released an updated P05 BIOS for its D850MD Pentium 4 motherboard.

Abit has released the first BIOS update for the highly anticipated and praised KR7A mainboard based on VIA's KT266A. This update includes: Enhance the PCI card compatibility. HPT 37x BIOS version 2.0.1024. The RAID function is for KR7A-RAID only. This BIOS version is also for non RAID boards and HPT BIOS will be automatically disabled while RAID controller chip not detected. BIOS compile date: 11/23/2001 Download BIOS 6G | 205KB

They just can't stop: Bios A7V133 1008 - 001-B Beta Use caution when flashing your BIOS.

New ATI products? Well at least ATI has upped the product pages. If you feel like ckecking these out you can do it via these links:

ATI FireGL 8700

ATI Mobility FireGL 7800

Another in-depth review of the Radeon. Personally I like Hexus's review style so it's worth a read. Snip: Hopefully the drivers continue to get better as time goes on, it's just unfortunate they weren't better than this out of the box. For those willing to persevere however, not that you should have to, it's a fine card, very good performer and recommended if you like your image quality sharp and your DVD playback smooth. Just short of an Editors Choice Award on account of the driver issues and problems installing and testing the card. Finally, while I would have liked to have gone over SMOOTHVISION in more detail we just didn't have time. Check the full review here.

3dfx Owners Can Now Trade in their Voodoo Graphics Card for a Verto? Graphics Cards Featuring NVIDIA?s High-Performance GPUs

Parsippany, NJ & Santa Clara, CA - NOVEMBER 26, 2001 ? NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), in conjunction with PNY Technologies, announced today the ?Got Voodoo ? Get Verto? online redemption promotion for 3dfx? Voodoo? graphics card owners. For a limited time, end-users can trade in their Voodoo graphics cards with the purchase of select models of PNY Verto graphics cards for a cash-back rebate. In addition, an NVIDIA ForceWare? Game CD, which features a selection of games and applications optimized for advanced graphics technology will be included.

ATI's latest drivers finally enabled SMOOTHVISION Anti-Aliasing support for the Radeon 8500, but there's actually a lot more to this feature that Radeon 8500 owners should know about. 9 pages of in-depth supersampling AA anisotropic comparison await the curious readers! Check out the complete article

WooT!!! Bios P4B-LX 1004 Final (=1004 - 05 Beta)
Bios CUV4X 1010 - 02 Beta
Bios CUV4X-M 1008 - 02 Beta
Bios CUV4X-ME 1003 - 03 Beta
Bios P3B-1394 2004 - 01 Beta
Use caution when flashing your BIOS.

Prolink have released new bioses updates for their GeForce3 Ti500/200/Ti video cards...