In order to lower production costs, Nvidia is expected to fully advance to 55nm generation manufacturing in the second half of this year and will have 4-5 new GPUs produced under 55nm before the end of this quarter, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report. Meanwhile both Nvidia and AMD are hoping to complete their 40nm tape-outs by the end of this year, the paper added.

The company's upcoming GPUs including G94b, G96b and G98b, which are scheduled to launch after August, will all use a 55nm process.

You've probably already heard about Nvidia's recent price cuts affecting its latest GT200 series cards. If you're not in the market for a high end graphics board, you probably weren't very impressed, as €400 is still a lot to pay for a graphics card, no matter how powerful it may be.

However, in the past week there were some pleasant changes in the sub-€100 price range as well, and this is what will interest most consumers. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about expected price drops for the HD3850 series, hoping it will end up around the €65 mark. We weren't far off, as reference cards are now available for €69 all over the place. In case a reference card just won't cut it for you, you can get PowerColor's overclocked 3850 with PCS cooling and 512MB of memory for just €10 more.

Sub-notebooks are revolutionising the way we look at portable connectivity. Gone are the days, it seems, where you paid a pretty penny for a ridiculously small and lightweight piece of hardware. Nowadays £300 will get you a cool mini-notebook in iPod white and still leave you with change to spare.

We've previously looked at Asus' 8.9" Eee PC 900 and the HP 2133 Mini-note, but now MSI is releasing it's first attempt to crack the sub-notebook market. The MSI Wind - make fart jokes at your peril.

Despite the fact that MSI told bit-tech it tried its absolute hardest to get the Wind to reach the £300 mark, what we've ended up with is closer to the £329 mark for the XP model instead. That's not exactly a budget killing sum - it's still cheaper than the HP - but it's still more than Asus' ubiquitous Eee PC 901.

Well, this is until we found the Linux version of the Wind on sale for a tidy £291.25. At this price it's very much a bargain.

As of tomorrow, Nvidia plans to drop the prices of Geforce GTX 280 and 260. The reason for this sudden price cut is that the cards are not selling as well as Nvidia expected. The second part of the story is that Radeon HD 4870 ended up better than Nvidia had hoped.

Nvidia will cut $90 off the Geforce GTX 280 price-tag, but this is Nvidia's price to partners and we are not sure just how much this will affect the suggested e-tail price. We are sure that end user prices will also drop, but probably a bit less than $90.

AMD GPG (ex-ATI) is binning the parts to a lowest denominator required for good yields and a level of performance that reaches or sometimes overtakes Nvidia’s GTX 260. But this time around, the company developed an AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which will be much more powerful.

The "Super RV770" will arrive with pre-installed water-cooling and features unlocked BIOS, which enables the GPU to be pushed all the way to 950 MHz, while the memory can be pushed to 4.8 GT/s (1.2 GHz QDR). According to our sources, you may be able to push the GPU even beyond 1 GHz, if you use TEC elements, and keep the temperature of GPU low.

This time we have something not-so-serious for all the modders out there with broken HDD(s).

I had some dead HDDs lying around and I started wondering what could I do with them. After opening one and testing if it still run, I couldn't resist scratching the spinning disk with a screw driver...

Eighteen months ago when nVidia's GeForce 8800 GTX was king of the hill, a multi-GPU setup was either ostentatious and reserved only for the most die hard gamer if you were using a high-end card, or downright silly if you were pairing up midrange and lower. NVIDIA's SLi initiative, started back with the GeForce 6 series, was basically a kludge designed to wring that last ounce of performance out of the cards of the era for the deep-pocketed enthusiasts. ATI's CrossFire, when it debuted up until the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro, was an embarassment, offering poorer performance and compatibility than NVIDIA's solution.

Flash forward to present day, and the advent of Windows Vista coupled the GeForce 8800GT and Radeon HD 3800 series has completely changed the game. NVIDIA's formerly industry standard drivers are now being beta tested on the consumer with each new release and resulting in stability problems in Windows Vista, and a merged AMD/ATI is fighting tooth and nail to stay in the game after the disastrous launches of the Phenom and HD 2900 lines. With the release of the HD 3800s, ATI had no intention of fighting NVIDIA's top end with a single monolithic GPU having learned their lesson from the 2900, and shifted their focus to producing cooler, cheaper, more efficient GPUs and attacking the price/performance market. Not just that, but to compete with NVIDIA's top end and empty the pockets of the die hard enthusiasts, ATI shifts their high end focus to running GPUs in tandem. The result? A rejuvenated, revitalized CrossFire.

Here is how the program works. Customers will choose from three available recycling boxes, sizes Small ($5), Medium ($10), and Large ($15), pack it with as many acceptable items as will fit, and take it to the nearest Office Depot store. From there the old tech trash will travel to a reprocessing facility and be turned into "tomorrow's resources."

It's called "urban mining", scavenging through the scrap metal in old electronic products in search of such gems as iridium and gold, and it is a growth industry around the world as metal prices skyrocket.

Thanks in large part to this code sharing, we are seeing same-day support for the Radeon HD 4850/4870. If you buy a Radeon HD 4850/4870 today, you can go use it on Linux right away! They've actually been running the RV770 under Linux for about eight weeks now, which then gave them the idea and allowed them time to ship this driver to consumers via the driver CD included with the retail graphics cards. For the record, NVIDIA has never included Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris drivers on the disk with their graphics cards. While we would recommend always downloading the latest display drivers, this is a significant step forward and does reaffirm their commitment to the Linux operating system.

Our first impression of this card in the limited time we had is that it is amazing ATI put so much power into a single slot card. It does appear to run very hot, at around 155 degrees Fahrenheit by our initial tests but it is a single slot card and we can say the fastest single slot card on the market. A bigger heatsink/fan could have helped but it seems to be quite a powerful package for an amazing price.

The current 65nm 9800 GTX will also drop in price below the new 9800 GTX+ to $199, and so we expect the rest of the lower card SKUs like the 8800 GTS 512, 8800 GT and G94 based 9600 GT to also drop in price too! However, Nvidia wouldn't confirm this with us yet. Since the 8800 GTS 512, 8800 GT have already reached end-of-life, and even the 9800 GTX is reported to have followed recently this doesn't seem too far fetched as people already try to clear stock, just a short couple of months after it was launched.

As its name implies, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is an improved version of the original GeForce 9800 GTX. The GPU itself is based on TSMC’s smaller 55-nm manufacturing process, and the 9800 GTX+ runs at higher clock speeds than the GeForce 9800 GTX: 738MHz on the graphics core versus the original 9800 GTX’s 675MHz. Meanwhile, the stream processors run at 1836MHz, an improvement of 148MHz over the 9800 GTX. The memory clock speed remains unchanged at 1.1GHz.

Sure, you've already heard the news (and probably seen reviews) of AMD's Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 card - we'll have our own review ready very soon. NVIDIA apparently got the news as well and decide to try and put some additional pressure on AMD to perform. The answer: GeForce 9800 GTX+. What the hell?

We learned a great deal, about how Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD arrive at their reported numbers, but more importantly that each company arrives at their final results just a little differently. We will get into that subject matter and more in our first specific power consumption article. As for today, we are going to provide some quick results based on our current testbeds utilizing the AMD 780G, NVIDIA GF8200, and Intel G35 chipsets.

If the GPU world were a wildlife special on the National Geographic channel, the G80 processor that powers GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards would be a stunningly successful apex predator. In the nearly two years that have passed since its introduction, no other single-chip graphics solution has surpassed it... Of course, even the strongest predator has a limited time as king of the pride, and the G80's reign is coming to a close.

Because we are free of Nvidian handcuffs, we can publish all of this early. It kind of sucks to have to wait, so we won't. That's what you get for signing NDAs, which is why we don't. This is edging dangerously toward poetry, so lets just end it here and pass the savings on to you. Enjoy.

the next issue is with AA scaling. The 3870x2 scores higher than the GX2 in crysis with 4x AA enabled, (as seen in the above link), yet in these benchmarks, it falls even behind the 8800gt! There are sooooooooooooooooo many more stupid numbers throughout the rest of the benchmarks, just compare these numbers to the numbers in the above techreport review.

We did some power draw tests on the GTX 280 cards in single and SLI mode on a QX9650 + 790i SLI setup. With single GTX 280 card, the system is drawing 147W at idle and 292.2W at peak and the 3DMark Vantage score is P10324. With GTX 280 SLI, the system is drawing 190.1W at idle and 508W at peak. The 3DMark Vantage score is P15813. Stay tuned for our full review in a few days time.

When we presented you with a slide saying the RV770 core sports 800 shaders and not 480 like most people believed, it was met with a certain amount of skepticism, which is very understandable as many of the larger news sites have been reporting 480 shaders, although without presenting any proof for it. We know now that the rumor of 480 shader processors was planted by AMD and that RV770 indeed has 800 shader processors. We also know that AMD is aware that the RV770 as a single core is not enough to match the GT200 core from NVIDIA. Not surprisingly, AMD is going to play its trump of price/performance, but that doesn't mean that there's no raw performance to play with.

AMD had to find an answer to Nvidia’s Ageia acquisition and the conversion of the PhysX engine into CUDA. We knew that AMD’s graphics team was up to something, since the manufacturer was highlighting “game physics processing capability” in its RV770 launch materials. Now we know, since AMD just announced a partnership with Havok. In case you are wondering: Yes, that is the same company that Intel acquired last year and now is a subsidiary of the blue team.

Today we will be looking at the Visiontek HD 4850 512MB Video card. First off I would like to thank FXvideocards for supplying me with a review unit, as you can imagine it hasn't been easy, but they never let that stop them before.

The official suggested pricing to manufacturers is the following:
o GeForce GTX 280 - $649
o GeForce GTX 260 - $399

According to current plan, confirmed by high-ranked Nvidia executives, a driver that will drive PhysX on Geforce 8 and 9 GPUs will come at least a few weeks after announcement of GTX 280. Geforce GTX 280 and 260 are about to launch next week, but the PhysX driver will follow a few weeks after. Nvidia simply wants to be ready, and as you know Nvidia uses its CUDA marchitecture to make this possible.

In order to make this article possible, we teamed up with Scan, who gave us free rein to order what we wanted to order from its online store. The components we ordered were delivered off the shelf in much the same way that any paying customer would have experienced. We challenged ourselves to build a complete PC designed with the gamer in mind for about £400 (including VAT) and it would include our choice of operating system, but excluded the keyboard, mouse and monitor.

The reason for this is that they're generally considered to be very personal items and we could go on forever finding the right mix of keyboard, mouse and monitor for everyone — and truth be told, there isn't an all-encompassing answer for the best of these components on a budget. It's something we felt we should reserve for another article, at the very least.

With this in mind, off we went to Scan's site and found what we could do with just £400 in our pockets...

Bill Henriksen, the manager of the McMurdo base station, said nearly 16,500 condoms were delivered last month and would be made available, free of charge, to staff throughout the year to avoid the potential embarrassment of having to buy them.

The base only has a skeleton staff through the long winter.

"Since everybody knows everyone, it becomes a little bit uncomfortable," Henriksen told the Southland Times newspaper.

For invested money, you will really get a lot. Picture quality of Sanyo PDG-DSU 20E is great, colors are saturated, projector works well in areas with good and poor lighting, it is quiet… So much qualities and one big fault – resolution of projected picture is only 800x600px. But for this price range you can’t have it both ways.

Today we have the Cyber Snipa Dog Tags on the review block. What exactly are the "Dog Tags"? Well, you are in for a treat. The big thing about the Dog Tags is the USB thumb drive, which in our case is a roomy 4GB sample. There's more to the Dog Tags though. On the other tag, it holds a small pair of pliers, a philips and flat head screw driver, and a small LED light.