Sony today introduced their high capacity minidisc audio format, known to all as Hi-MD. This new media holds 1GB, storing 7 hours and 55 minutes of SP mode audio on a single disk.

The Sony MZ-NH1, MZ-NH600D, MZ-NH900 and MZ-NHF800 are a few Hi-MD recorders which are soon to be released.

Source : nikush.com

Seems that Kyle Bennett over at [H]ardOCP has scoop himself a world exclusive with the news that VIA will be showing off a brand new gaming console.

Here is just about as much scoop as you are going to get before this thing is officially unveiled at CES this week. It seems that VIA is carving out their own segment of the emerging console market under the APEX brand name with the new "ApeXtreme Personal Gaming Console and DVD Player", or PGC.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at The Inquirer.net

Petr Loc says that he's discovered software allowing some AMD chips to be unlocked. Apparently AMD forgot to lock the L5 bridges.

Tom's Hardware have thrown up a new article which looks at liquid nitrogen cooling for your Intel P4 CPU!

Just how much cooling can the P4 withstand for maximum overclocking? We cranked the CPU down to -196°C with liquid nitrogen and, with compression cooling for the chipset, we managed to clock the processor at 5.25 GHz. For those of you with any doubts, it's all on the 11th THG video.

Just spotted this bit of Info over at Rage 3D

PROHARDVER has posted a few pictures of an ATI prototype board. There's also pics of a Nvidia board. The picture shows a picture of the Viper chip using GDDR3.

Hardware Pacers are hosting a giveaway on the Coolmax Silent Cooling Fan Switching Power Supply (CX-450B). Giveaway Date: January 2, 9:00 PM US Eastern Time / 6:00PM Pacific (Friday)

Just got word from Anton Nilsson over at Nordic Hardware that their 12 board videocard roundup is out! Here's a snip.

It is time for this year?s last graphic card roundup. NordicHardware have been busy over the past year reviewing more retail boards than pretty much any publication out there. With this last roundup of the year we'll take a look at a few of the later boards that were released during 2003, twelve of them to be specific. Eight ATi based and four from nVidia (most often, the ratio is turned the other way so I thought I would redress the balance with this review).

Thanks to Mackey D for pointing me in the direction of this article over at HardOCP called Prescott and Upgrading! Here's a snip.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent months about whether or not the upcoming Intel Prescott CPUs will work with current Intel 848/865/875 chipset based boards. After compiling information from a variety of sources, including the web and some of our insider contacts, we think we have finally gained some real insight into this question that is on a lot of enthusiasts? minds. Let?s just say there is some good news, some bad news, and some news that will make you wonder just what in the world Intel is doing.

Bi-Tech have snagged the first photo's for ATi's Radeon 9600 showing of the new PCI-Express bus!

Whilst at an ATI shindig in old London Town last night, we managed to sneak off to the wazzeria? for 5 minutes with a pre-release PCI Express board that the Canadian chaps were showing off. With no NDAs in sight (although the same couldn't be said for drunken ATI execs), we thought you might like a peek at what we saw!!

Just spotted this bit of Info over at OC Forums posted by c627627! For those of you that haven't heard, new Bartons, Thoroughbreds and Durons are factory multiplier locked, (not even wire tricks work with them.)

It's finally official: ""...we now have a policy to lock down the frequency of all the products so there?s one product that will continue to be open and it?s the FX product line." Henri Richard, AMD Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing

Madshrimps goes in search of the best aircooling solution money has to offer, taking into account those who like their systems silent and those seeking to achieve the highest overclock!


Exotic heatsinks. Some people buy them for the looks, others buy them for the performance. Which one suits your needs ? We reviewed the Scythe Kamakaze, Swiftech MCX478-V, Speeze EE429B0 CopperSnake and the Thermalright SLK947-U

The Intel 875P Chipset Motherboards is being reviewed at Xbitlabs.com. DFI has came a long way from being a budget VIA motherboard supplier to On-The-Edge enthusiast motherboard manufacture. I used to use DFI VIA KT133 with Duron 800 some long time ago. The DFI LANPARTY PRO875B with fluorescent Glowing colored PCI / AGP slots looks targetted at the MODDERs (Lan-Party-Gamers) who build their boxes with see-thru window to see whats inside. You can read the review here Xbitlabs.com

This just in from our bro's over at VR-Zone

We have first gotten our hands on the LGA 775 Prescott/Tejas back in June and many people are curious how it looks like inside when the IHS is removed. The procedure of removing the IHS is similar to the current Pentium 4 as you would need a thin blade to slice through the rubber padding nicely and slowly.

GeekExtreme's Tyberius just finished this article on a memory latency fluke found on Nvidia Nforce2 motherboards. Perhaps lower latencies may not always be best. "The general idea of memory performance is that higher speed and lower latencies means more bandwidth and better performance. However there seems to be a fluke in this concept when it comes to Nvidia's Nforce2 motherboards. Raising a certain latency with these boards may actually improve your bandwidth and, from what I found, your stability." He found some interesting results when testing all the different tRAS latencies on my board. For all you Nforce2 fans out there, you might want to check this tweak out, it could get you a few more mhz out of your system.

WE PREVIEWED S3's new DeltaChrome graphics chip exactly three months ago. At the time, the DeltaChrome looked like it could become a competent alternative to ATI and NVIDIA's two-fisted stranglehold on the DirectX 9 graphics market. Instead of looking to challenge for the high-end graphics crown, S3 was preparing a line of mid-range and low-end DeltaChrome products that would balance 3D performance and DirectX 9 compatibility with a suite of new video features and high-definition video output.

Gigabyte announced a cool looking new CPU cooler today. Their new 3D Cooler has a copper base, and weights 430g. It must be associated with both performance, and silence they say.

For More Info Warp2 ...... DV Hardware.net

Lost Circuits have thrown up their latest article which investigates Nvidia's nForce3 and does the said board have a locked PCI bus?

ONE OF THE DIFFERENCES between the two main contenders in the Athlon64 arena, namely the nForce3-150 and the VIA K8T800 is that the VIA chipset derives its PCI bus by means of a 1/6 divider of the external CPU clock whereas rumor has it that the nForce3 chipset, similar to the nForce2 chipset has a frequency locked PCI bus. In turn, this is often used as an argument to explain the better overclockability of the nForce3 chipset.

Intel will begin mass-producing its long-awaited 802.11g wireless networking module at the end of this month, a senior Intel Asia Pacific executive has said.

The Pro Wireless 2200BG unit will be offered alongside Intel's existing 802.11b and 802.11a/b products, all components of the chip giant's Centrino platform. The new unit is based on the second generation of 'Calexico', Intel's wireless chipset architecture. Calexico 2 comprises two chips rather than the previous generation's four.

The Register

Is PC4200 (DDR533) memory still too slow for you? For most people this will be more than enough, so it is very questionable if there really is a need for faster memory at the moment. Anyway real die hard overclockers will be happy to hear that Corsair launched a few new PC4400 memory sticks today. These memory sticks are able to run at an amazing speed of 550MHz DDR and are all tested with the Asus P4C800E Canterwood motherboards. XMS4400 modules are tested at 550MHz with 3-4-4-8 latency settings at 2.75V. The two new parts, TwinX1024-4400 and CMX512-4400, will begin shipping immediately.

Johan De Gelas of Aceshardware.com has a nice review comparing performance between a quad Opteron 848, dual Opteron 248, and dual 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon DP (1 MB L3). Some of the apps used were Java application server benchmarks, MySQL datamining benchmarks, 3D max 5.1, Cinebench 2003 and much more. AMD opteron Quad Opteron 848 (4 thread) wins hands down. The performance of Quad Opteron 848 is so good that Johan De Gelas says the 3.2 Xeon DP with 2 MB L3-cache, coming early next year will have a hard time dethroning Quad Opteron 848. How did Opteron 848 win? To see the complete results read the detailed review here: www.aceshardware.com.