If you have a PC laying around that you were looking to get rid of, you'll be delighted to hear that Office Depot is taking free dropoffs of old PCs, monitors, TVs, fax machines, cell phones, and similar products. Only one product is allowed to be dropped off per visit per customer. But for free, hell, saving the earth never felt so good. The program is going on at all nationwide Office Depot locations.

EXCLUSIVE to The NGO Group!
ECS (EliteGroup),PCChips,Syntax are tricking millions around the world ?

these 3 companies are selling all-in-one boards with CPU bulit-in under product codes as "Proxxxx+" one of our mate obtained "L7VMM3" board by ECS. the banner on the box says "Pro3100A+"

Our own Brian Cochran has a new article up that covers overall gaming impressions on an NVIDIA 6800 video card. This is not your traditional uber-analysis filled review. Rather, this is the 10,000' view that you will find to be a concise change of pace. Brian even went a bit old-school and included his impressions of playing Morrowind on the 6800.

Tom's Hardware Guide have thrown up their latest article which compares the performance of Intel's previous line of 865/875 chipsets for socket 478 to the current line of 915/925 chipsets for socket LGA 775! Here's snip.

Last month, Intel introduced the new platform generation for DDR2 memory, PCI Express and the new LGA 775 socket. Technologically, this generation breaks with everything that has been seen before. The new chipsets are superior to all competing products on the market feature-wise. The question is, however, do we need all that right now?

BBC News reports electronics giant Sony is planning to show off the console at the annual E3 video games trade show in Los Angeles. But the chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kutaragi, did not say when the machine would go on sale to the public.

Want a new Asus i915 chipset, but rather keep your old Socket 478 Pentium 4 and Celeron processors than upgrade to Intel's new LGA775 Socket?

Xtreme Systems.org have posted information on AMD's 90 nanometer Athlon 64 processors with Benchmarks:

The 90nm A64 is not a simple die shrink but features several enhancements, such as:

Just spotted this bit of Info over at OCWorkbench

I am currently testing the ASUS A8V (PCB ver 1.2) with official BIOS 1006 and it does not include PCI/AGP Fix and multiplier control. 1006.004 beta does include a multiplier control but missing PCI/AGP FIX.

Today Digit-Life checks out Realtek's all new ALC880 high definition audio sound solution found on Intel's latest motherboards the 915 and 925 chipsets! Here's a snip.

Comparing the audio quality of HD Audio Realtek ALC880 with that of Live!5.1, the superiority of Realtek ALC880 is obvious: better-balanced and smoother playback without the abrupt, rough tones. Note that the difference between ALC880 and Live!5.1 is much more pronounced than with Audigy. While Audigy and Realtek ALC880 sound almost alike, the Live!5.1 playback differs even in tembre of some instruments.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Overclockers.com.

Intel said that they were going to work on power reduction in its next stepping of the PIV.

Well, the D0 stepping is now available for socket 775 PIVs, and so are the datasheets for them. If you look at page 74 of the datasheet, you'll find out that D0 stepping chips have a Thermal Design Power rating of 84 watts up to 3.2GHz, and 115 watts for CPUs up to 3.6GHz.

GamePC have posted up their Mobile CPU shootout with processors from Intel and AMD! Here's a snip.

While AMD and Intel battle it out in the high-end sector with their Athlon64 and Pentium 4 lines, another less publicized but equally important battle is happening in the mobile markets. Any big shot analyst can tell you that the mobile computing market is growing year by year, and is quickly overtaking desktop PC's in terms of new sales. Of course, both AMD and Intel have realized that the mobile market is becoming increasingly important in terms of sales and platform visibility, and are tailoring their new products for this very large and important sector.

Fido over at The Inquirer reports there's good news for all Athlon XP and Duron owners and people who love Socket A is that this platform is about to stay with us for quite some time. Only a BIOS update will enable Sempr0ns to work on current Socket A boards, perhaps not all but I guess the majority of them. We suspect that you need FSB 400 to have those CPUs work as all K8s are working at FSB 800 or should we say 200 MHz. Yes we know that Hypertransport is AMD's FSB these days.

Eyeit points out there are some new microsoft mice on the way.

Fido over at the The Inquirer has snagged some more nForce4 Specs?

The chipset will be Socket 754/939 and 940 capable and will have multiprocessing capabilities. You will be able to use it as a single CPU platform. And you will also be able to use it as a two way, four way and up to a maximum of eight way as a multiprocessing platform. As for sound freaks, this chipset will feature SP-10, Soundstorm 2 audio that will be Dolby Digital 5.1 compliant and it will be able to do EX effects at 20 GFlops processing power. Soundstorm 2 supports 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 speaker configurations

Driverheaven have just posted their latest article which looks at the Radeon 9550, Geforce 5500 and Geforce 5200 graphics cards!

Not everyone has the finances to be able to purchase high end graphics hardware and even those who do sometimes run an inexpensive second system in another room for their children. The hardware ill be looking at today is classed as the "bargain basement" of GFX hardware and features two Nvidia cards from Aopen and one from HIS based on ATI technology. Im going to be running all three cards through their paces in a variety of yesterdays and todays games and ill even try a little Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on some titles to see how they hold up

Digit-Life have thrown up their review of Leadtek's WinFast A400 TDH and WinFast A400 Ultra TDH Based on NVIDIA GeForce 6800/6800 Ultra Graphics Cards! What's so interesting about their review is they've thrown in some Half-Life2 (beta) benchies comparing Nvidia's Geforce 6800 Ultra againist ATi's Radeon X800 XT.

Vr-Zone reports that Our good friend, Boss50 has got his hands on the Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz) based on 90nm "Winchester" core packed with 512KB of L2 cache just like the "Newcastle" but the die size is much smaller at ~83mm2 compared to 144mm2. The revision stepping of the upcoming 90nm Athlon 64 processors is "D0" compared to the current "CG" stepping that denote a silicon change due to die shrink. AMD is going to launch the 90nm Athlon 64 processors in Socket 939 during Sept/Oct period with the highest speed grade, Athlon 64 4000+ (2.6Ghz) at launch and other lower speed grades like 3000+, 3200+, 3500+ and 3800+.

Game PC have a new article out called Battle of the 2.4 GHz Hammers - AMD?s CPU Sockets Compared! In which they look at five different 2.4 GHz "Hammer" processors! Here's a snip.

AMD is right in the middle of two simultaneous transitions, which have created some overlap in their high-end processor lineup. The Athlon64 FX is transitioning to a Socket-939 interface, as are the standard Athlon64 processors. At the same time, the first generation Athlon64 processors based on Socket-754 are moving down out of the spotlight in order for them to merge with AMD's upcoming "Sempron" processors for the budget market.

Tweakers.net have snagged the first Picture's and benchmarks for AMD's soon to be launched Sempron 3100+ 1.8GHz, 256KB L2-cache Processor! I think the sites in Polish but i could be wrong? but the benchmarks, as always, talk a universal language.

Over the last few weeks ive been testing an array of ATI boards and comparing with new game engines and older game engines to try and help people ascertain if its really worthwhile spending masses of money on a new XT800XTPE for their particular favourite games. So the cards im playing with are: