Just got word Firingsquad's Brandon Bell has posted his RADEON 9500 PRO vs. 9600 PRO Shoot-out! Here's a snip.

As we discussed in our RADEON 9600 PRO review, the RADEON 9600 family was meant to address ATI?s need for a DirectX 9 part that offered RADEON 9500 PRO class performance, but at a lower production cost. In order to accomplish this objective directly, ATI has reduced the number of pixel pipelines from eight in RADEON 9500 PRO, to four in RADEON 9600 PRO, and shifted to a newer manufacturing process.

Elite Bastards.com have a press release from BFG announcing that the Asylum GeForce FX 5600 and Asylum GeForce FX 5200 are now shipping but the most interesting bit is this:

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Currently, there are two reasons to unlock the multiplier on your processor. The first, and most common, is to lower the multiplier so that the FSB can be raised to the max, yielding a better overall system overclock.

But what about those of us who still have the KT133A chipset? The reason I wanted to unlock the multiplier on my 1700+ JIUHB Tbred B is so I could raise it and achieve as good of an overclock possible with my setup, since my FSB cannot go past 144. In comes the XP Unlocking Kit, an all-in-one solution provided by HighSpeed PC, which has all the tools necessary to unlock the multiplier.

Here's an interesting article posted by John Smith over at The Inquirer.net called NV40 will give Nvidia performance lead by year end! It's well worth the read.

This is where we see pricing and technology from ATI and Nvidia for their family of products close to the end of this year and the beginning of next year.

ATI

Up to $400 - R9900 family on R350 with DDRII memory

This just in from Ilya Gavrichenkov at Xbitlabs.com, who managed to get hands on an engineering sample of the AMD Athlon 64 2800+ processor. They couldn?t help testing it and this article discusses the major features and benchmarks results for this processor.

Sony's next-generation Dual RW drives, the internal DRU-510A and the external DRX-510UL, are the first DVD+R/DVD+RW drives in the industry capable of recording to compatible 4X DVD+RW discs at up to 4X speeds, which enables users to burn a full 4X DVD+RW certified disc in about 15 minutes. The drives also support up to 4X DVD+R and DVD-R recording, as well as 2X DVD-R, 24X CD-R and 16X CD-RW recording, making them among the fastest and most proficient on the market. The internal DRU-510A Dual RW drive will be available in early May for an estimated retail price of under $350, and the external DRX-510UL model will be available in June for less than $430. Sony DVD/CD rewritable drives are sold through resellers and retailers nationwide, mail order catalogs, and select online shopping sites, including SonyStyle.com.

Just spotted this at Digit-life.com.

Time flies by, IT industry is rapidly developing, especially 3D accelerators. Their power and capabilities have markedly improved over the past 5 years. 5 years ago, in 1998 we got the unexampled 3dfx Voodoo 2. It was a separate video card supporting 3D modes only. It had to be installed together with a 2D card...

Intel Corporation yesterday introduced three new processors for mobile PCs, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor - M at 2.50 GHz and the mobile Intel Celeron processor at 2.20 and 1.26 GHz. The Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor - M delivers high performance for desktop replacement portable PCs. Notebooks based on this processor allow users to take advantage of processor-intensive applications such as business multi-tasking, collaborative workgroups, video encoding, digital media and gaming. The mobile Intel Celeron processor brings Intel technology, quality and reliability to the mobile value PC consumer market segment. In 1,000-unit quantities, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor - M at 2.50 GHz is priced at $562. In the same quantities, the mobile Intel Celeron processor at 2.20 GHz and 1.26 GHz are priced at $149 and $107, respectively.

This just in from Dave Baumann at Beyond3d.com: Yesterday we published our ATI Radeon 9600 PRO Review, however today we managed to get an overclocker application to work with the board as we had heard of some rather insteresting overclocking potential. The actual overclock, and the results were quite surprising.

Ozren Zagmester - editor at PCEkspert.com - and his team have discovered a pretty unusual behaviour of GeForce FX Ultra cards. There appears to be a serious flaw in the Flow FX cooling control routine - a bug that could damage your brand new hardware. According to his report, this affects at least the Nvidia reference models, Gainward and MSI FX products.

On April 14th Intel launched the new high-end Pentium 4 core chipset i875, formerly code-named 'Canterwood'. While Intel provides a reference mainboard - D875PBZ - a couple of manufacturers already have their modified versions announced and soon to be shipping. We have collected pictures and specifications for the most interesting boards from Abit, Asus, MSI, EPoX, Gigabyte, Tyan, Iwill and Chaintech.

PC.Watch published a nice interview with William M. Siu, the Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Platforms. They asked some details about the upcoming Intel Prescott. The guys at Newsware.ws have read the interview and gathered some details about the Prescott. CPU speeds up to 5Ghz are said to be possible with the new processor.

ExtremeTech.com pops the question if the Intel CPU Bug does matter. As you know Intel has had problems with the latest 3GHz 800Mhz CPU. Here's a snip:

On Monday, April 14th, Intel announced the 875P chipset, nee' Canterwood. ExtremeTech covered it as news, as well as an in-depth performance preview. However, as Monday morning dawned, Intel also revealed that it had run into potential problems with the 800MHz (effective) frontside bus Pentium 4, which runs at 3.0GHz. Spokesman George Alfs noted that the issue, which isn't yet fully understood, seems to be specific to that Pentium 4 variant; there's no problem with Canterwood running with 533MHz FSB parts.

According to Intel, i875P chipset announced yesterday will become the top solution for desktop systems for about a year. The manufacturer claims that the dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM, supported by i875P, will remain the most up-to-date memory type for this time interval. It?s true, DDR I seems to be hardly able to get any faster in terms of working frequency, so that the future is definitely with DDR II. This statement is exactly the basis for Intel?s ongoing strategy in the chipset market.

The Inquirer.net have posted information about ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro clock speeds! Here's a byte.

Using a high-end processor the card will give you about 11500 marks in 3dmark 2001SE and about 3500 in 3dmark03. The latter benchmark is faster than Nvidia's FX 5800 Ultra results with non tweaked drivers and at 1024x768 no Aniso or FSAA used. In Quake 3 it will result with 250+ FPS.

Uttar over at Nvnews.net's forum has posted the full - what he believes is the - NV35 official feature list. I advise you to take it with a barrel of salt and a dead fish as the writer himself stated: "It's PR talk."

Here's a couple of news items from Xbitlabs.com.

First Socket A Mainboard With 400MHz FSB From MSI for Sale: MSI started to sell its K7N2Delta-L (MS-6570) mainboard based on NVIDIA nForce2 core-logic with support of 400MHz EV-6 FSB. If I a not mistaken, this is the first mainboard with official support for the upcoming AMD Athlon XP ?Barton? processors with 400MHz bys that has reached retail-channel. As always, the first country to see the novelty is Japan.

Plextor, one of the leading companies for the development and production of CD-ROM drives, CD-Recorders, CD-ReWriters and media is expanding its range with the PlexWriter Premium, which writes CD's at 52-speed, rewrites at 32-speed and reads at 52-speed. The PlexWriter Premium is the ideal instrument for both professional and private users who want to copy CD's, archive large files, or create multimedia productions. There are two products under the name - an internal E-IDE and external USB2.0 52x CD-RW drive (PlexWriter Premium and PlexWriter Premium-U).

Intel Corporation today announced a significant improvement in overall PC performance by introducing a new Pentium® 4 processor with a faster system bus and a new chipset platform. The new platform provides more balanced system performance, resulting in smoother operation and less time waiting for data. The new chipset contains two technical innovations that accelerate the speed at which data flows between the computer's processor and system memory and also doubles the computer's networking bandwidth. A chipset consists of one or more chips that act as a computer's nervous system, transmitting signals from the computer's brain, the microprocessor, to the rest of the system. These new products support Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology and are targeted for high performance and feature-rich workstations and desktop computers.

Just spotted this at The Inquirer.net:

We always knew that the AMD processor could do much better than the appalling 3dmark 2001SE of 7913 and we were right. The Athlon 64 at 1.8 GHz this time, 200 MHz faster than the one we tested before, combined with a Radeon 9700 should give a Pentium 4 a run for its money.