Today TweakTown take a look at four different sets of Dual Channel DDR-500 kits from OCZ, Kingmax, Mushkin and TwinMOS. While DDR-II has hit the market it will be a long while yet before it fully takes over regular DDR memory. Read on as they compare the modules at 250MHz and as high as we could overclock them on our Intel test bed platform.

OCIA.net has posted an article concerning the recent findings they discovered with the Foxconn AMD 3400 + Heat Guzzler Heatsink. Below is a direct quote from the article:

"Seeing as we have been misled about the base of the heatsink, we could only wonder what other inconsistencies might exist. Moments later, we found some tools, and decided to dismantle the heatpipes. A little voice inside my head was telling me that something was fishy here as well."

Thanks to Mackey D for the heads up! that people are successfully softmodding their X800 Pro Vivo based cards into XT's, enabling the extra 4 pipelines. apparently the Vivo based cards are identical to the XT in every respect, including the 1.6ns memory and intact bridges, all that is needed is the right BIOS to unlock the remaining 4 pipelines.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at NeoWin

Like most technology vendors, Apple seems to have created it's own exchange rate for products being sold in the UK! This seems to be especially obvious with some of Apple's newly launched products. Member Pilsbury in our forums has done a quick comparison. The figures in brackets represent the UK / EU price at the current exchange rate.

Short-Media have a new article up that asks the question what's better? a Socket 940 or a Socket 939 processor! Here's a byte.

AMD have been launching assault after assault intent on battering the competition into 64-bit submission. The introduction of the 939-pin processor has been eagerly anticipated by some and left others with questions. Many have gotten caught up in the drag strip of benchmarks and overlooked the new features this latest introduction brings. Socket 939 does bring support for unbuffered memory but does this mean the death of Socket 940? Cool'n'Quiet has received a cool reception but it's a gem waiting to be polished. Socket 940 versus Socket 939. Which is the winning combination for you?

[H]ardOCP have thrown up a new article that looks at how well ATi and Nvidia latest video cards stack up on different platforms and at different CPU speeds! Here's a snip.

Want one of the new video cards but don't know whether or not you have enough CPU horsepower to back it up? This article is focused on showing you what level of gameplay a video card upgrade could net you today.

Hardware Analysis jumped the gun last night and posted up information about nVidia's soon-to-be-announced SLI dual PCI-e solution.

I'm sure many of you can remember the days of 3dfx, the first Voodoo Graphics back in 1996 and about a year later the introduction of the Voodoo2. Voodoo2 actually made sure that 3dfx reigned supreme for quite some time as two cards could be combined in something called an SLI, Scan Line Interleave, configuration. Each card rendered half of the image scan lines which resulted in double the performance of a single board and the ability to play OpenGL games such as Quake 2 in a 1024x768 resolution.

Fido over at The Inquirer has a rumour that Nvidia might be launching a new line of nForce chipsets that will finally bring PCI Express to the Athlon K8 market.

This chipset will be socket 754/939 ready and 940 compatible and all CPUs Athlon 64s, FX, Sempr0ns and Opterons will work on it. will have one to two PCI express 16 slots making this Geforce 6800 SLI mode possible for not quite as much crazy money as you'll have to invest in Tumwater and Xeon CPU. The good news for Sound Storm lovers is that this chipset finally features these nice audio capabilities. It's now called Sound Storm 2

AnandTech have thrown up their preview of Nvidia's NV45 PCIe reference card! Here's a snip.

In our recent look at the new Intel 925X platform and PCI Express graphics, we bore witness to the final verdict on bridged vs. native performance. It is easy to see that both ATI and NVIDIA have a negligible difference when moving between PCIe and AGP under current DirectX and OpenGL games. Of course, we will take another look at the question when we get boards with both AGP and PCIe slots on them just to further seal the deal.

Hardware Pacers is hosting a random giveaway on the Actiontec 54Mbps Wireless PC Card.

Shipping costs will be responsibility of the winner. All payments by Paypal.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Nvnews.net

ChrisRay, one of our long-time members (and recent staff member), has an excellent thread on the 6800 Series Anti Aliasing Sample patterns in our forums. This is a work-in-progress and will continue to be updated over the coming days/weeks.

Spodes Abode have thrown up part 2 of their review, which looks at the Performance of Nvidia's NV40 and ATi's R420 GPU's! Here's a snip.

Following up on Part 1, we have now had a bit more time with the cards in question, so we can give a more accurate comment on their performance. Over the past few months drivers have been released, fixing bugs, increasing performance and image quality from both sides. Retail cards are not exactly plentiful, but when they are we will certainly follow up with a round up similar to the Christmas DX9 round up.

The Chinese site Gzeasy have scooped some Info about Intel's new line of low voltage Prescott chips! Click Here

There was a strange post by Dave over at Beyond3D last night that had a whole lot of fun speculating, but just now on page eleven either Baron spilled the beans or he's farking around with the Dig again:

SIS'S Core Logic chipsets don't garner as much attention as offerings from Intel, NVIDIA, and VIA, and that's really a shame. Enthusiasts tend to view SiS as a low-end player, and given the company's strong presence in budget motherboards, it's easy to see why. However, few enthusiasts are aware that SiS also makes high-end chipsets that perform well enough to run with the fastest core logic offerings from Intel, NVIDIA, and VIA.

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

Intel has identified a manufacturing excursion that affects a limited number of I/O controllers that are part of the 915/925 chipsets. This excursion -- caused by incomplete removal of thin film on the die pad area ? makes the controller susceptible to excessive leakage in the Real Time Clock (RTC) circuitry. If you were to get one of these controllers, the likely results would be a failure to boot, a system hang, or other anomalous system behavior. We are checking 915/925 chipsets that were shipped prior to, and as of, the day of launch (June 21, 2004). We have asked for affected shipments of this product to be returned to Intel for inspection or replacement.

Today we've checked out a whole range of different nVidia GeForce FX cards from the 5200 right up to the 5900XT. We take a closer look at the Prolink PixelView 5900XT and the Albatron 5700P Turbo as the focus of the comparison style article.

DigiTimes reports that Intel?s planned launch of its next-generation Xeon processor, codenamed Nocona, next week has stirred a wave of market reports that the chipset giant may soon come out with a 64-bit desktop chip, according to sources at Taiwanese PC makers. The Nocona chips will be available at clock speeds of 2.8, 3.0, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6 GHz.

No sooner had the 925X and 915 been launched than the word started spreading that Intel had locked the overclocking on the new chipsets. Are the new chipsets OC-locked? Are there ways to get around the issue?

Just spotted this bit of info over at Xbox-scene.com

Thanks to some people who bombarded my email account with this info. Wish I could give credit where credit is deserved.. but oddly enough their email addresses are from an anonymous remailer.