The word on the street is even more worrying, as we're hearing rumours of Nvidia considering to pulling out of the chipset business altogether. Considering that Intel didn't grant Nvidia a QPI license, what is left for Nvidia's chipset business? Not much, that's for sure and with the announcement last month that Nvidia will use the nForce 200 bridge chip as a solution for adding SLI to the X58 platform, these rumours might not be too far from the truth.

But Lehman analyst Tim Luke writes this morning that his checks with Nvidia management in both the U.S. and Taiwan finds that the company remains committed to staying in the chipset business, which is 17%-18% of Nvidia’s revenues.

Now comes word that their high-end desktop mobo, famous for rumored data corruption problems, is being silently killed. The three companies mentioned above have pulled the boards from their product pages without so much as a footnote. The pages for Foxconn and Gigabyte look like this, note the lack of high end NV parts.

The official story is that it was a batch of end-of-life parts that used a different bonding/substrate process for only that batch. Once again, the trusty INQUIRER bullshit detectors went off so loudly that the phone almost vibrated out of my hand. More than enough people tell us both the G84 and G86 use the same ASIC across the board, and no changes were made during their lives.

Right after 9800GTX+, NVIDIA begin shrinking 9600GT to 55nm. But this time is a bit different, there will not be another plus mark after 9600GT’s name because NVIDIA want more stealth.

The only change of 55nm version is the mark on die. The mark on a 65nm die is G94-300-A1 and 55nm die is G94-300-B1. The clock keeps 650MHz/1625MHz/900MHz (core/shader/mem) so more overclocking headroom can be leave to customers and vendor partners.

The gray area shows 55nm die is a bit slim than 65nm die.

Although the Eee is my favorite laptop for traveling, its Xandros-based Linux distribution is getting crufty and beginning to show its age. I was unable to install Firefox 3 on it, for instance, because it lacks a current version of the GTK+ toolkit. In preparation for OSCON, I decided to infuse my Eee with new life by installing Ubuntu 8.04. I used a community-driven derivative called Ubuntu Eee that is designed specifically for Eee laptops. It has nearly full hardware compatibility right out of the box, including support for suspend/resume, sound, and the built-in webcam.

Games for Windows - Live multiplayer features are free, effective today, Microsoft announced at today's GameFest 2008 conference in Seattle.
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In other news from GameFest, DirectX 11 was unveiled [and adds the ability for] compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor.

Microsoft today announced that its Games for Windows initiative is set to expand with the launch an online PC gaming marketplace this fall. The service will deliver free and paid downloadable game content, along with trailers, demos, and other content comparable to the company's Xbox Live offerings.

In addition to the added features, the Games for Windows Live interface will also be redesigned to be "much more PC friendly." Microsoft has not yet specified whether full games will be made available for purchase on the network.

So when the Radeon HD 4870 gets busy with a very graphics-intensive application and gets hot, the fan spins up. Not to a troublesome level, mind you, but enough to hear the whine in my super-quiet PC at home. In fact, some users are more concerned about the GPU temperature and have set the fan to manually spin at around 35–40%, claiming you "can't hear it." If I do that, I definitely hear it. It all depends on how much noise the rest of your machine makes.

So I stopped by my local PC white-box shop, Central Computers and picked up a Zalman VF900-Cu VGA cooler for $40 (you may find it, or similar products, online for a bit less). It's made to fit a variety of cards, including Radeon HD 3000 series; almost all the coolers that fit 3000 series cards fit the new 4000 series. After 15 minutes with a small screwdriver, it was installed and ready to roll, still taking up two slots as the card did before.

A few days ago, we published a story about how much better our Eee PC 1000H performed when we swapped the system’s 5,400rpm Seagate Momentus hard drive out for a Samsung SATA II SSD drive. Not only did the system boot faster and all apps load faster, but we got 20 more minutes of battery life with the SSD.

However, when we posted our story, we heard from users that Tom’s Hardware, a site we admire a great deal, recently published an article which claims that SSDs use more power than traditional hard drives. The Tom’s Hardware story got some major attention from sites like Engadget and even got a responses from SSD-makers Super Talent and Micron, who both claim that the drives used in the Tom’s test are “early generation” and therefore more power hungry than newer models.

Is Tom’s Hardware right? We don’t think so.

First of all, we want to take this opportunity and apologize to our readers, for we made a procedural mistake when we compared battery runtime of various Flash SSDs, which we used to replace a 7,200 RPM hard drive on a business notebook in an effort to compare battery life of SSDs versus a conventional hard drive. As it was commented by our readers (see comments of that article) and other sources (thanks, George), part of the test procedure was inaccurate because of varying workload. This may cause other system components such as the CPU to be used more intensively, hence contributing to draining the battery earlier than on a slower drive.

The conclusion, however, that Flash SSDs are often misleadingly presented as energy savers to increase your battery mileage on notebooks, is not invalidated. The truth is that more and more Flash SSDs will be increasingly efficient. But many conventional hard drives can also be more efficient than today’s Flash SSDs in the scenarios some of you were demanding: when providing data under a defined workload such as video playback or in idle until the notebook battery runs empty.

When AMD began talking about no longer building high end hardware using single monolithic GPUs a few weeks back, we let them know that improving CrossFire support would be incredibly important going forward. AMD told us that they are putting a lot into that but also that they have some exciting technology up their sleeves with R700 to help out as well. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten as much detailed information on how it works, but the new technology is GPU to GPU communication.

Until now, CrossFire has done zero GPU to GPU or framebuffer to framebuffer communication. As with the first iteration, each card fully renders the parts of the screen for which it is responsible (be it a whole frame in AFR, the top or bottom half of a screen, or alternating tiles). These results are sent to a combiner where the digital signals are merged and output to the screen. This is the only communication that takes place in CrossFire at the moment. R700 will change that by allowing GPUs to communicate.

Ever wonder why some PSUs claiming huge wattages are so cheap? Why should you buy a branded one - or are you just paying for the name and some fancy cables?

Well, no, you're paying for the fact that it won't blow up - that's why we test PSUs to their limits and we never, ever recommend anything other than branded products. Some people don't listen though and Corsair recently took it upon itself to test some of shoddiest looking power supplies we've seen.

When testing with games such as Crysis, we quickly discovered that the X48 chipset was able to deliver 10% more performance when compared to the X38, while it was slightly faster than the P45. While this was impressive, Crossfire is not all that well suited to Crysis, so we continued on and hit Devil May Cry 4, which works a treat.

Now when testing with the new hit title Devil May Cry 4 we found that a typical P45 setup is going to be 36% faster than a P35 system at 1920x1200 when running Crossfire Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards for example. The X48 was also roughly 6% faster than the P45 chipset, and I would suggest that this is a best case scenario for the high-end X48 chipset. That said, this did make the X48 around 15% faster than the older X38 chipset.

For the most part the X48 is just 5% faster than the cheaper P45 chipset, while this chipset held roughly the same margin over the older X38 chipset. Therefore as we see it, X38 owners really would need to purchase an X48 motherboard to see any real performance gains, while the P45 is a massive step up from the P35 chipset when talking Crossfire performance.

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?