10:52 - Still waiting out in the lobby outside the board room. The door is closed. They aren't ready for us yet.

Still waiting on confirmation that I will be interviewing someone from Toshiba, post conference.

So very, very tired. That McDonalds was good though.

Toshiba has just announced that they have decided to pull the pin on HD-DVD at a press conference in Japan.

The immediate plan is to slow down production and to have all stock off the shelves as soon as March of this year. There is no denying that a lot of the enthusiasts expected the announcement with the news that has been getting around the interweb over the past week.

Not surprisingly as we edge closer to the release of NVIDIA's next big bad boy; the dual-GPU based 9800 GX2, details have leaked out about the specifications of the card, most interestingly in the way of clock speeds.

Thanks to the crew at Expreview, we see that the GX2 will come in stock form with clockspeeds of 600 MHz, 1500 MHz and 1000 MHz on the GPU, shader, and memory clocks respectively. Not quite as fast as many of us were hoping the card to be, with the memory clockspeed the only somewhat impressive of the three. Though this may have been a counteraction of NVIDIA's to help better manage the immense heat generated by the card.

1GB (512MB per GPU) of memory on a 512-bit (256-bit per GPU) memory interface will reside on the PCB with said memory bandwidth of 128 GB/sec. The card will also sport 256 (128 per GPU) stream processors.

Good news if you're looking to pick up a quad from Intel in the near future; as many of you know a new breed of quad-core processors will enter Intel's Core 2 lineup very soon which comprise 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, and 2.83GHz models priced at $266, $316, and $530 respectively.

So what's happening with the current crop of 65nm quad core chips such as the popular entry level Q6600? Fudzilla report that some very nice price cuts are on the way for these; come April 20 the Core 2 Quad Q6700 will take a huge drop from its current $527 RRP down to just $270.

And what about the Q6600? Well, it's drop isn't quite as dramatic, moving down from $270 to $229. But hey, it's a nice shaving nonetheless, and a great opportunity to go the way of quad-core on a budget.

Curtsey of some folks from China and a digital camera, we get an early look at a pre-release version of 3DMark Vantage - the upcoming Vista and DX10 only 3D gaming benchmark software by Futuremark.

This is only a very early release look at the upcoming benchmark which is said to be released at GDC on Wednesday 20th February 2008 in the USA.

It is still spitting out random errors due to its early nature but for reference, an undisclosed test system with GeForce 8800 GTX scored around 4200 - not that this score means much at this stage of the game.

As many of you know, NVIDIA recently made a move on acquiring AGEIA, the makers behind the world's first physics processing card known as PhysX. That deal has now been officially sealed, but the big question on many people's minds is what NVIDIA plan to do with existing PhysX technology.

Thanks to a recent financial results conference call, we now know what little trick NVIDIA is up to and it should make existing GeForce 8 owners quite happy :-

We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes... Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA.

It is amazing that Nvidia has not got on top of this yet.

Online retailer Take 2 in South Africa have the Chaintech GeForce 9600GT listed on its website for $2,107 Rand which is equal to about $275 USD. We managed to take a screenshot of the website before it is taken down.

Soon after hearing that Microsoft has come up with a final build (RTM) of the first Service Pack for Vista, a naughty group by the name of NDN has gotten their dirty mits on a copy of the not yet released SP1. It can already be found on various torrent trackers with five languages embedded (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese), weighing in at 434.5 MB.

Microsoft don't plan to make SP1 available to the public on Windows Update until mid-March.

Plextor has just introduced the new PX-B920SA internal Blu-ray SATA re-writer drive; capable of writing Blu-ray discs at 4x speed (BD-R). One of the special features about this particular drive is that it can also playback HD-DVD ROM discs.

LightScribe technology has also been added for custom text/design printing on supported discs, and a 4MB buffer is used to ensure no data interuption takes place.

Looking at Write speeds, these are 4x BD-R, 2xBD-RE, 16x DVD+R/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 4x DVD+/-R DL, 5x DVD-RAM, 40x CD-R and 24x CD-RW.

More details and images have surfaced of ASUS' ROG series G-SURF 365 motherboard thanks to french website InfoMars; this the final revision to have just started hitting store shelves recently for a little over 100 US Dollars.

I'm not quite sure why ASUS felt this motherboard to be worthy of being a part of their high-end enthusiast "Republic of Gamers" motherboard lineup, it's quite underwhelming compared to its bigger ROG brothers when you take a look at its feature-set.