[H]ardware Round-Up

Power Supplies

Antec 500W EarthWatts EA500 Power Supply Unit @ Bjorn3D

Cooling

VIZO Armada RAM Cooler @ Tech ARP

ETC

USB Ashtray from USBGeek @ DSM

GeForce 8600 Series In 2Q?

DigiTimes says that NVIDIA will launch its 8600 series in the middle of the second quarter. The 8600 series is expected to be on display at CeBit in March.

According to the release plan several versions are currently being prepared, the sources claim. The GeForce 8600 GT with 512MB memory will be priced between US$219 and US$229, while a 256MB version will be available at US$199. Additionally, targeting an even lower price point will be the GeForce 8600GS at between US$159 and US$165, the sources have revealed.

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NVIDIA CUDA Unleashes Power of GPU Computing

NVIDIA Corporation today released a public beta of the NVIDIA® CUDA™ Software Developer Kit (SDK) and C-compiler for computing on NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). GPU Computing with the CUDA SDK is a new approach to computing where hundreds of on-chip processors simultaneously communicate and cooperate to solve complex computing problems.

AMD Aiming For 30% Market Share

DigiTimes says that AMD’s goal is to reach a 30% share of the quad core server market this year.

With Intel having reportedly pushed back its new quad-core server CPU schedules to late 2007 and early 2008, industry sources suggest that if AMD's plans to launch its new Quad-Core AMD Opteron (Barcelona) CPUs in the second half 2007 remain on target, the company should be in a good position to compete with Intel for market share.

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Ratpadz XT Risk Free

Buy a new Ratpadz XT. Think it sucks? We will buy it back and pay your return shipping.

AMD's “Frantic Price Cuts” May Pressure Intel

If you are like me, you read the headline from this article and thought “I sure hope so!” I don’t think there is an enthusiast alive that doesn’t like a CPU price war.

"Intel will likely feel pressured to respond with cuts of its own," Mok contends, driving down profits for both firms. "We would avoid both names here, as believe lower prices and higher capital spending may continue to limit margins."

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Abit Announces The Fatal1ty F-I90HD

Universal abit is revealing the next generation entertainment center for fast paced high definition lifestyles. Based on the ATI Radeon™ Xpress 1250 chipset, and developed in cooperation with 12x computer gaming world champion Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, the Fatal1ty Performance F-I90HD motherboard is catering to everyone who wants to enjoy the benefits of the Digital Home without holding back on performance.

NVIDIA Cascades Demo

If you own a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series video card and Windows Vista you might be interested in this DX10 Cascades demo over at NZone. The demo weighs in at just over 168MB and requires the new 100.64 ForceWare drivers. So, if you have all of the above, happy downloading!

Gears Of War For The PC?

Mark Rein is now saying that Gears Of War will “eventually come to the PC.” Mark compared it to the way Halo came to the PC and said that Unreal Tourney 3 will also help GoW by helping to optimize the engine for the PC platform. Thanks to GWN for the tip.

’Til there’s something else. (chuckles) People ask me, “Are you going to do it on PC?” Yeah, eventually…I don’t think that’s any great secret that we would like to do it on PC, but for now it’s a 360 game. Eventually we’ll get around to a PC version. I just don’t know when.

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AMD Preps RV610 – RV630 Launch

This report from DigiTimes claims that “some industry players” expect ATI to display the full R6 series at CeBit in March. The report also mentions that RV610 manufacturing will skip 80nm and move directly to 65nm.

All the R6-series graphics cores will support DirectX 10. AMD had previously mentioned that the company will introduce a full series of R6-series graphics, after the launch of the R600, for other market segments. Volume production of RV610 is expected to commence during late April and the RV630 should be available in the channels in May, the sources noted.

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Talking About ATi Vista Drivers

With Windows Vista driver support being such a hot topic lately, it seems that very few companies are getting it right the first time. PCPerspective takes a look at ATi’s Windows Vista driver support as well as current and upcoming features.

ATI discussed the sheer size of the Vista driver development project. In all, ATI estimates that 200 man years or more was required to get their Vista drivers up to the level of performance and stability that was expected of them by both users and executives. It was by far the largest software project ever taken on by the ATI software team simply because everything was rewritten from the ground up.

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New Vista ForceWare 100.64 Drivers

Those of you in need of new Windows Vista drivers for your NVIDIA video card should head over to the company’s website and grab the new ForceWare 100.64 drivers. You can get the 32-bit version here and the 64-bit version here. I recommend you download the release notes as there are a ton of features that do not work yet under Vista. The issues that have been addressed in this driver release are:

A black screen bug with Quake 4. An issue with the NVIDIA DirectX 10 demo “Cascades”. A Control Panel bug. A flat panel scaling issue. A number of other bugs to improve overall stability.

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