Just got word that SpeedRacer over @ Overclockers Australia has posted his look @ the technology behind Soundstorm...

SpeedRacer has given us an overview of the Soundstorm technology in NVIDIA's nForce and nForce2 chipsets. Also found in the Xbox, Soundstorm offers the unique ability to output an AC3 or Dolby Digital 5.1 digital signal which can then be decoded using an appropriate receiver.

Gigabyte Maya II Radeon 9700: Simply mentioning the words "GeForce FX" sends a shiver down the spine of enthusiast's users in the tech community as its retail release draws near. Don't forget about the graphics company from Canada though, ATI still currently have the speed crown in the Radeon 9700 Pro.> Gigabyte are one of the third party manufacturers who switched to ATI from nVidia and today TweakTown's Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at their Maya II Radeon 9700 - a cheaper, cut down version of the Pro version."

GeForce FX Q&A with nVidia: TweakTown have just posted their GeForce FX Q&A interview with Hazel Heng, Marketing Manager of nVidia Asia in Singapore, where she was kind enough to answer our questions regarding their upcoming GeForce FX.

Ok folks, since we expect a lot of FX reviews popping out of nowhere today we will be adding them to this list. You will find a small snip of the editor's opinion as well as the URL hyperlink to the complete review. ExtremeTech were the first non-german to go live. Check back regularly because we will update the list during the day. ExtremeTech Review: 'Not a home run' Admittedly, noise level doesn't top the list of considerations for anyone buying a GeForceFX, but a 2X increase in overall fan noise level is pretty serious. If you've already got enough fans getting air in and out of your CPU case to power a wind farm, then the GeForceFX will be right at home in your rig. [H]ardOCP Preview: 'A lot of engineering' Using coolbits which fully allows the card to be overclocked in 2D and 3D I was able to achieve a top stable overclock of 530/535. At 540Mhz the core would run for a few minutes then generate a hard lock up of the system. Only way to recover was a reboot. At 530Mhz core it was 100% stable in everything we threw at it. On the RAM At 550Mhz, 545Mhz, and 540Mhz there was polygon corruption causing the games to be unplayable. However at 535Mhz it was completely stable with no corruption at all. 530/535 (1070) was our final stable overclock. Tom's Hardware Review: 'Brute force attack against the king' [Ed.: Sound samples available! Is it a vacuum cleaner?] In its current state, the noise produced by the card is really unbearable. However, the noise is due to the fan, which has a very high rotation speed, and it's difficult to imagine how the noise level could be reduced to a level that could be considered acceptable. [...] The GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is faster than the competition from ATI's Radeon 9700 PRO in the majority of the benchmarks. However, its lead is only slight, especially compared to the distance that ATI put between its Radeon 9700 PRO and the Ti 4600. Still, when compared to its predecessor, the GeForce4 Ti, the FX represents a giant step forward. AnandTech Review: 'Expectations not fulfilled' While we were reviewing the FX, looking at its performance and investigating its image quality, we found ourselves reminiscing of ATI's launch of the Radeon 8500. A card that was long overdue, but in the end unable to outshine the top performer at the time. Although the current state of the GeForce FX is much better than what we had with the first Radeon 8500, the word impressive isn't what we'd use to describe it. The performance is an improvement over the Ti 4600, without a doubt, but it does not place NVIDIA back in a position of dominance, which is what everyone was expecting from NV30.

Who thought it would be a german professional IT website to publish world's first GeFroce FX review? Well apparently no one but this is the case. TECChannel.de has posted it. The test sample was provided by Nvidia Germany. But already the introduction adds tension to what many have foreseen. Read more...

VR-Zone have posted their MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR review. The board is based on VIA's KT400 chipset. Here's a snip.

The backpanel of the KT4 Ultra-FSIR features four USB 2.0 ports, the standard PS/2 ports, two com ports, a parallel port, audio ports, and a gigabit Ethernet port. That's right, the MSI KT4 Ultra-FSIR supports 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet via the Broadcom BCM5702CKFB controller. The MSI KT4 Ultra-FSIR is definitely the most feature packed board around. It's amazing that MSI was actually able to fit all the controllers and ports onto the PCB of the KT4 Ultra-FSIR, as just about anywhere you look you see different devices embedded on the PCB.

The Kiss-DP450, the first home DivX player has been released and looks amazing.

Samcheer from Belgium is relatively new to the PC enthusiast case modding and overclocking scene. They do however offer a wide variety of products ranging from LED fans, rounded IDE cables, acrylic and aluminum cases. Since we have a reference review database of Lian Li products, we wanted to take a look at Samcheers PC99 aluminum case which in fact is available in four different colors. We chose classic black. Click on the picture to read the review.

Tonight, we've taken a look at two of the most talked about i845PE based motherboards currently available, the Abit IT7 Max2 v2.0 and the Iwill P4HT-S. These are two of the most full features i845PE based boards on the market today. We pit these bad boys against each other in a heated head-to-head battle.

Abit has done an excellent job with the IT7-Max2 v2's bundle. Included with the board there are two, black, 80-Wire ATA/133 IDE cables as well as a standard floppy cable. A very complete User's Manual is also included in the package, along with a simple BIOS optimization guide and a set of adhesive cable hold-downs and wire ties. We also found the obligatory driver CD and a 3.5" floppy disk with drivers for the on-board HPT374 RAID controller.

Read the complete review over @ HotHardware.com.

Teschke has informed me that they have written a quick review about the Engelking AP2 - 6300 SFC PSU. Here's a snip: Like in the specs described , the fan of the Engelking powersupply switches on , when the temperature reaches 49°C . Under normal windows working enviroment the fan switches on after 22 mins. With fullspeed (3D mark 2001 loop) the fan switch after 14 mins on. Head over by clicking the above shown link.

VR-Zone has reviewed the latest phase change cooling unit from Asetek, the VapoChill PE S478 Titanium which is sleek in appearance and performs great. As the processors get hotter and overclockers get more extreme, a product like this will definitely satisfy this group of consumers who are constantly trying to maximize performance out of their current systems. With this VapoChill PE S478 Titanium cooling unit, they were able to overclock a cheap P4 1.8AGhz to over 3.5Ghz which is an impressive 95% improvement in clock speed!

DoGMaN from TheCrucible.ca has put the latest memory from Kingston, HyperX PC3500 on the docket. Can Kingston's entry into the overclockers market live up to the hype? Check out the review to find out.

Unsere Kollegen von Hardtecs4u haben den neuen AOpen Brenner getestet...

The guy's over @ Hexus.net have posted their OCZ EL DDR PC-3500 memory review! Here's a snip.

All the major players have at least some form of DDR-400 in their range. Some have gone further and qualified their best modules at higher speeds. I remember writing about some excellent Corsair XMS3500 C2 RAM. One point I made applauded the fact that they could ratify a module to operate at 217MHz (PC-3500) with a CAS Latency of 2 clocks (lower is better). Shortly afterwards I remember receiving an e-mail from OCZ Technology stating that Corsair weren't the only ones with PC-3500 C2 memory. In fact, looking through OCZ's website, it transpired that PC-3500 C2 (or EL DDR PC-3500) wasn't even their top-of-the-line module; EL PC-3700 was. OCZ Technology, like Corsair and Mushkin, specialise in providing high-performance memory modules.

Just got word from Crow @Darkcrow.co.kr that he's posted his 12 page Leadtek Quadr4 980 XGL, Quadro4 380 XGL, Quadro4 900 XGL and the Leadtek A250 UltraTi4600 review and he used the following benchmarks SPECViewperf 7.0 and SPECapc 3dsMAX, 3ds mas r5 Benchmark, MAYA, etc

Today Beyond3D takes a look at the Entry level, in terms of 3D performance, MultiMedia board from ATI's All-In-Wonder range. The 'Beast All-In-Wonder 9000 PRO' is brought to us by Sapphire and will soon have widespread European availability.

"The use of BGA modules also easily facilities 128MB variants, as seen by the empty module positions on the backside of the board. While the RAM on the standard 9000 PRO is rated at 3.3ns, the BGA modules on the A-I-W 9000 PRO are rated at a slower 3.6ns, however it is DDR SGRAM, not SDRAM. Also, the default RAM clock speed of the standard 9000 PRO is set at 275MHz, but in the case of this A-I-W 9000 PRO it's set at a slightly lower 270MHz (540MHz effective) -- testing will indicate whether the supposedly better performing SGRAM will alleviate the consequences of a lower memory clockspeed."

As everyone is waiting for GeForce FX cards to arrive next month, NVIDIA has quietly added two more GPUs recently and no official announcement was made about it. The two new GPUs are GeForce 4 Ti4800 and Ti4800SE with AGP 8X interface which are just GeForce4 Ti4600 and Ti4400 with AGP 8X respectively.

VR-Zone has the chance to test out the new Triplex GeForce 4 Ti4800SE Deluxe card which has a very nice packaging and cooler design. This card runs at a default core/mem speed of 275/550Mhz and i am able to overclock it to 325/670Mhz, reaching the performance of a ATi Radeon 9700 card.

VR-Zone has just posted a review on the AMD Athlon XP 2600+ running on the 333 FSB! Here's a byte.

Like we saw earlier, the 2600+ and the 2700+ were very close performance wise in all resolutions. Surprisingly, the 2600+ actually got a higher 3D Mark 2001 SE score at 1280x1024x32, showing you how close these two CPU's really are to each other when looking at gaming performance

VR-Zone has just posted a review of the Abit KD7-Raid motherboard, based on the VIA KT400 chipset! Here's a snip.

With the KD7-Raid able to unlock the multiplier on AMD Athlon XP chips, we changed the multiplier to 11.5 and made it our goal to reach at least 205 FSB with the KD7-Raid. Using SoftMenu III, we increased the CPU voltage to 1.95v, and kept pushing the FSB until it could not go any more. We ended up getting the board up to 209 FSB, using a 11.5x multiplier, giving us an effective system clock of 2.41ghz. An outstanding overclock by any means."

TweakTown: It wasn't too long ago when buying a budget graphics card meant a huge sacrifice to both performance and video quality. But things have changed of late. Come join Cameron "Sov" Johnson as he takes a look at the Gigabyte Maya II Video Card based on the ATI Radeon 9500. Can we finally get a reasonable mix of performance and price in our video output? Lets find out