MadboxPC has posted a leaked presentation from AMD covering the upcoming RV670 cards and it looks like most of the already known details are in it. We're talking US$150-250 pricing and the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 cards. There's also a slide that contains a Radeon HD 3870 X2 card and this could possibly be the product that has been known as the R670 or R680 depending on who you listen to.

There's a lot of information about the apparent advantage of DirectX 10.1 although time will tell how important these features really are. Energy consumption also seems to be important to AMD with the RV670 drawing some 50 percent or less power than the R600 or Radeon HD 2900 XT. There's also a lot of talk about AMD's PowerPlay technology and how it now can be adopted to draw less power even in-game.

There aren't a lot of benchmark figures, but the one graph that's on there puts the 3870 just in front of the 2900 XT. The 3850 is some 15 percent slower than the 2900 XT. The benchmarks were done on an Athlon 64 X2 6400+, 2GB of RAM and an RD790 board under Windows Vista 64-bit, so the results need to be taken with a bit of caution.

uy.com is listing an AMD Radeon HD 3870 card for pre-order on its website for pre-order and it's apparently from Best Data which is the company behind Diamond Multimedia. There's no picture of the card an there are very few specs up, but the card will have GDDR4 memory and support for HDMI. It will most likely be a reference design for now and it's listed to have two DVI ports.

The pricing is quite high at US$268.99, especially considering that the MSRP is meant to be US$249 or possibly less. It looks like the online retailers are already trying to cash in on this unreleased product, which is not unusual. With the current shortage of GeForce 8800 GT cards on the market, AMD might have a chance if the company has cards ready to go on the launch day.

Zotac arn't one of the first brands that comes to mind in the mainstream graphics card market, but it seems they are really going all out to try and change that by releasing products that stand out from the crowd.

A clear indication of that is this beefy water-cooled 8800GT card they're working on. It's based on the stock 88GT PCB but apparently will come shipped with Samsung 1.0ns memory and Nippon Chemi-con(NCC) capacitors (both of which are a step up from the reference specs).

If the information posted on Expreview is correct, then Gainward is working on a range of in-house designs for the 8800 GT. They have pictures of two different actively cooled cards, although Gainward is apparently also working on a passively cooled card. Both of the models pictured features Gainwards own PCB and cooling designs.

The 512MB card features some rather large heatpipes sticking out of the card and it looks like the SLI connector might be blocked by this specific design. The little white connector is for S/PDIF input via a small cable and it's meant to be used in conjunction with an HDMI adapter.

E-Ten has announced that it's finally shipping the Glofiish X800 and the company also released its X600 at the same time. The X800 was shown back at Computex earlier this year, but it has taken this long for it to become available. It features a 500MHz Samsung SC3 2442 processor and it has 256MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. The screen measures 2.8-inches and has a 640x480 resolution.

It's a 3G handset which HSDPA support and it works on 2100, 1900 and 850MHz for 3G and it also works on all four GSM bands and as a backup to 3G it does GPRS class 10. Of course it also has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR.

Toshiba Japan has launched a new dynabook Satellite notebook which goes under the WXW moniker. Although it's likely to drop the dynabook branding when it arrives outside of Japan, the name isn't what's important, but rather what's on the inside. This is one of the first notebooks with a pair of GeForce 8600M GT cards in SLI which also features a Core 2 Duo mobile processor and the reasonably new Intel PM965 chipset.

The CPU is a Core 2 Duo T7700 which is clocked at 2.4GHz and this has been paired up with no less than 4GB of DDR2 memory, although it's only 667MHz modules due to some limitations when it come to available modules for notebooks at this size. Each of the graphics cards has 256MB of GDDR3 memory, although they can also use TurboCache if more is needed.

At our visit to Gigabyte yesterday we also got to see something unexpected, Gigabyte's Radeon HD 2950 prototype. The model name on the board was GV-RX295P512, although this will change before the actual launch. The P in the model name suggests Pro and since the card was using GDDR3 memory from Hynix, we presume that this is the Radeon HD 3850, although we weren't specifically told it was.

The card uses a Zalman cooler and as with the 8800 GT, Gigabyte is using their own blue PCB and the power regulation has been upgraded from a two-phase to a three-phase design. The card is quite long, especially compared to the 8800 GT, but the PCB was quite bare. The memory chips apparently don't require any additional cooling, nor should the power regulation.

We also got a picture of Gigabyte's own 8800 GT and by own, we mean full in-house design. This card is quite different to the reference design as it has done away with the large cooler and has been retro fitted with a Zalman cooler. The memory chips apparently doesn't need any cooling and the GDDR3 chips are from Qimonda and are rated at 1ns.

The card uses a Gigabyte blue PCB and it's the same quality as the PCB used in Gigabyte's motherboards. The card is also featuring a three-phase PWM design while the reference cards rely on a two-phase design. Gigabyte is also using all solid capacitors on its graphics cards.

At a visit to Gigabyte's office in Taipei yesterday, we had the chance to take some pictures of Gigabyte's upcoming 780i SLI board and it looks like it's just about ready to enter mass production. The GA-780SLI-DS5 isn't the top of the range version, but it still has a wide range of high-end features.

If you're an avid reader of TweakTown you might remember that we posted a picture that we found online of this board a few days ago and apparently the designs are slightly different between the two which is really odd. You can find the previous news post here. If you compare the two you'll notice that the heatsink is quite different, although, we were told by Gigabyte that the one on the board we saw is likely to change and it is most likely going to extend to the south bridge.

Continue reading: Gigabyte's 780i SLI board pictured (full post)