Thanks to Mertsch for pointing me in the direction of this article posted over at AnandTech!

As it is no secret, Athlon XP officially dies Q2, 2005. This time next year there will be no more Bartons or Thoroughbreds to whet your Socket A palette. However; Socket A looks to be here to stay for quite some time. In the US, Europe and parts of Asia we are constantly spoiled with the newest of the new CPUs, memory and motherboards. But the most prolific processors in the ROW market (Rest of World) remains the discontinued Duron! South American markets are just beginning to adopt Athlon XP.

OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high-reliability memory, today announced the release of the DDR Booster, a power-filtering and voltage boost diagnostic device.

The DDR Booster uses OCZ Technology Group?s patent pending Powerclean? technology to supply cleaner power to the memory module, thereby increasing memory stability and optimizing performance. A digital VDIMM readout and voltage adjustment control dial enables the user to adjust the VDIMM (VDD and VDDQ) voltage to a maximum of 3.9 volts .

The website boycottsapphire.com alleges graphics card maker Sapphire is selling ?Radeon 9800pro? video cards that are crippled. These cards have a 128-bit memory interface and lower core and memory speeds than other ?normal? 9800pro video cards. Many people have fallen victim to this marketing trick, believing they are receiving a real Radeon 9800pro video card. In reality, they receive a card that performs like the much cheaper Radeon 9800SE.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Nvnews.net

Our sponsors, Galaxy have furnished us with some pictures of their soon to be available GeForce PCX 5750 card and GeForce PCX 5300. They are nice and compact sporting Galaxy's own HSF deisgn. Below the HSF you will see the HSI bridge chip with passive heat sink.

Welcome to a new kind of Realizm ... where precision, speed and your creativity combine in ways you've only dreamed of. 3Dlabs puts the power of the industry's most advanced visual processing right at your fingertips with Wildcat Realizm 800 - the flagship in a fully programmable lineup of graphics accelerators developed exclusively for professional designers. 3Dlabs' 16x PCI Express-based graphics feature dual Visual Processing Units (VPU's). Twice the processing power. Twice the performance.

AnandTech have the early hints on specs from a die shot released today for AMD's first dual core Opterons! Here's a snip.

Continuing to ride the train of success that AMD has had in 2004, AMD is announcing today the completion of design work on their first dual-core Opteron processor and the beginning of the tape-out process for that core. While the first dual core CPUs won't be available until the middle of next year at the earliest, AMD sees the beginning of the first dual core tapeout as a pretty monumental step in their microprocessor evolution.

In Shane's latest article, he compares the performance of a GeCube based ATI Radeon X800 Pro against the reference nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra. While taking a quick look at both cards, we benchmark with our usual array of benchmarks as well as with AA and AF enabled and with the addition of Far Cry.

NVnews have thrown up the first look at Nvidia's GeForce 6800 Graphics Card! The reference GeForce 6800 comes with 128MB of memory and has 12 pixel pipelines and operates at a core frequency of 325MHz and an effective memory frequency of 700MHz.

Just spotted this bit of Info posted over at AMDZone! :D

Earlier this week we received a Prescott Survival Kit from AMD. We decided to investigate the kit, and see whether or not it would allow us to survive our Prescott.

Hardware Zone have posted a eight-way Shootout of Nvidia's FX 5900XT from manufacturers like Albatron, AOpen, Chaintech, Gainward, Gigabyte, Leadtek, MSI and PixelView! Here's a snip.

In our previous graphics card shootout, Albatron used to be one of the very few or the only one sporting a turquoise blue PCB, but in this GeForce FX 5900XT shootout, half the graphics cards were found having the same color! Looks like this a much favored color but that didn't stop Albatron's FX5900XT stand out from the competition with its superb overclocking edge. However, the price you have to pay for this X-factor is the cooler's high operating noise.

ALPHA is back with an improved AMD XP heatsink, the S-PAL8055F, does bigger mean better?
Does it stand a chance against the SP-97´s heatpipes? Time to find out

Earlier this week, I toured Abit's factory in Suzhou, China. Read on to see what motherboard production looks like, complete with video of some of Abit's high-speed machines in operation.

gzeasy.com has snagged a couple of box shots from the new Radeon lineup at Gigabyte.
There's pictures of the X800, X600 and X300 boxes.

Since article.php still seems to be missing, i'll post the link here instead.

Check the pictures out here

I't looks like Creative has a line of soundcards up their sleve that is targeted for the more professional enthusiast.
These system comes with a multitude of input/output ports and looks very interresting.

thanks to saweetnesstrev for the heads-up

Apple Computer Inc. announced that the company will release a high-end Mac computer with its liquid cooling technology.

CoolTechZone

PCMag have thrown up a roundup of latest Six-megapixel camera's on the market! Here's a snip.

If you thought you couldn't afford a 6 megapixel camera?or wouldn't be able to operate it if you did buy one?think again. No longer the province of $1,000 prosumer cameras aimed at photo enthusiasts, 6MP sensors have now come to user-friendly point-and-shoots?and for as little as $500. Here we test three of the latest.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at [H]ardOCP.

We posted yesterday that socket-775 CPUs are being rumored a bit frail. An anonymous source had this to input on the issue and it sounds like he has had a good amount of hands on and knows what he is talking about. If you are planning on taking the 775 plunge you might want to file this mentally.

CD Freaks.com has made a first preview of 16x DVD recording. Many people wondered if 16x DVD recording would be too fast and data could not be delivered by the hard disk. The first tests show that this is not a real problem. 16x DVD recording means that a DVD disk is written in about 6 minutes . The test drive, a BenQ DW1600 also supports dual layer writing and writing to 16x at 8x media. Read this article for more information.

HTPCnews.com has teamed up with Tigerdave to bring the entire Gaming and HTPC community the ultimate resource on getting your games to run in HD on a HDTV. We've got everything that you'll need to be up and running in no time flat at 1080i resolutions and experience a level of gameplay that no console on earth can possibly touch. Don't believe us? Just check out the images... It's time to show the world another feature of HTPC's and how console's days could be very well numbered in many of our homes. For more information and absolutely JAW DROPPING images.

Thanks to Digitalwanderer for pointing me to this post over at Beyond3D's Forum posted by Ufon.

If you check out his benchies that were run on a Inno3D GeForce 6800 Ultra 400/1100 MHz and a Leadtek A400 TDH (GeForce 6800) 335/700 MHz! It seems that these Cards are runing with 8 pipes and not the 12 Nvidia claimed.