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:

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.