Just recently the hotly anticipated ASUS Eee PC has gone on sale here in Taiwan and we were one of the first to snap up one of the new low cost notebook devices.

It is a product designed for ultra portability weighing in at only 920 grams and affordable costing anywhere from $12,000 - $15,000 NTD (up to about $460 USD) in Taipei at the moment.

After hunting through many Taipei backstreets, we managed to find one for $13,900 NTD - more expense than usual, since these things are almost as rare as gold at the moment. After contacting a company official at ASUS, the Taiwanese company expects shortage issues as the device is so popular.

We haven't heard from these guys in a fair while but they seem to stay alive and continue to dish up some interesting alternatives in the graphics card market to what we're used to seeing from the likes of NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.

Today Matrox pave the way for a new series of fanless graphics cards, these called the "Millennium P690" series. Making up the lineup is a range of cards with different form factor sizes, each with low enough power consumption that passive cooling is made a breeze.

Another interesting feature about these cards is the ability for them to be quad-upgradeable meaning they can support up to four analog displays with the right configuration. Pair two P690 Plus cards together and you have the ability to output to four DVI or eight analog monitors.

Intel's upcoming graphics drivers which should be out in the not to distant future will add hardware vertex processing to the G965, GM965 and G35 chipset, but not for all games. Apparently, Intel has found after rigorous testing that some games benefit from having software vertex processing, such as you can see from the picture below which shows F.E.A.R. running with software vertex processing on the left and hardware vertex processing on the right.

Click to enlarge

Intel also showed of an overclocked version of its upcoming Penryn based Quad Core Extreme Edition XQ9770 which has 12MB of cache, a default clock speed of 3.2GHz on a 1,600MHz bus. It was paired to an X38 based motherboard, some DDR3 memory and a GeForce 8800 Ultra for some performance testing.

The processor was overclocked by Charles "Fugger" Wirth to a "mere" 5.4GHz for the presentation, although he'd hit 5.6GHz the day before. He still managed to break his own SuperPi world record by 0.1 seconds from 8.5 to 8.4 seconds. He also scored some 281,000 points in Aquamark 3 and apparently broke the world record in Cinebench 10, but happened to forget to tell the audience how quick it was, although all four tests were run in 1min 43seconds.

Continue reading: Intel shows quad core QX9770 at 5.4GHz (full post)

We've got one more video for you, of Intel integrated GM965 graphics and in all honesty, it seems like Intel graphics isn't as bad as it used to be. There are several demo's running in the video, but the first two are on Intel integrated graphics powered by the GM965 chipset.

Intel was talking a lot about graphics and with its new programmable graphics core it appears that the company can add features as it goes along. It will add hardware accelerated geometry shaders in its next generation of integrated graphics as well as adding more video decoding and possibly even encoding into hardware as fixed functions.

Power saving was also big on the agenda and we'll talk more about this tomorrow as well as some other interesting features about Intel's upcoming graphics architecture. For now, enjoy the somewhat dark video of a range of Intel powered notebooks.

Calling all FPS gamers and UT fans, you guys will be glad to know a polished beta build demo of Unreal Tournament 3 has been distributed around the web for everyone to download and try out. If your weekend plans were a bit on the boring side before, they certainly won't be now.

The demo includes three levels; a vehicle-based capture the flag map called VCTF-Suspense along with two deathmatch maps, DM-Heatray and DM-ShangriLA. The download size weighs in at a reasonable 740MB and you'll find it available for download over at FileShack or possibly one of your other favourite game demo/news sites.

Epic VP Mark Reign recently commented that they are pushing to get the full game ready for a November release, though this isn't yet confirmed.

It seems like three-way SLI might be closer than we expected with several websites having information about it today. There are some limitations as to who can actually run it, starting with the fact that you need to have a Nforce 680i or 680i LT based motherboard, at least until the 780i comes out. We're not sure about AMD support, as so far no-one has mentioned it, but it should be possible with the 680a SLI chipset.

The next requirement is a graphics card with two SLI connectors on the top, such as the 8800 GTX or Ultra. This limits the audience of three-way SLI even further. A new SLI connector is also needed and we're not sure where you'll be able to get one of these from, unless you buy a new motherboard, but Nvidia will surely figure out a way.

The three cards are then connected to each other by the primary card having links to the second and third card, while the second and third cards are connected to each other as well. It might sound confusing, but the new SLI connector takes care of all the brain work for you. For those that can afford this kind of a setup it should offer some additional performance, but we suggest you get a fast CPU and a high-res display, as otherwise it'll be wasted money. The suggested launch date is the 15th of November.

Futuremark has released a hot fix for 3DMark03/05/06 and PCMark05 which should bring the benchmarks up to date with new graphics cards and processors. The problem is that none of the benchmarks behave properly unless they detect the hardware in the system correctly and as a result some tests might not run properly or at all.

There was a workaround for this, but it meant that you couldn't post the results on the Futuremark website as the results couldn't be verified. The download only consists of three files and it works with all four benchmarks. A new version of 3DMark 06 will be made available with the hot fix included.

You can download the hot fix from here

Abit is a day late with their announcement, but the company also has an X38 board ready to go and it's the IX38 QuadGT. Abit has managed to implement a few interesting features into this board and some rather odd ones too. It's a DDR2 board and it supports memory speeds of 800 and 1,066MHz as well as CPU bus speeds of 1,600MHz.

Abit has gone with a digital PWM design and this seems to have been something of a fad and many of the motherboard manufacturers we've talked to aren't too keen on using this type of PWM as they claim it's not great for overclocking. However, it does reduce the component count on the motherboard and allows for a much cleaner area around the CPU socket.

Abit on the other hand seems to claim that it only has advantages, such as lower noise interference, longer component life span and lower heat output. The IX38 QuadGT has a rather interesting cooling design as well, with the digital WPM being cooled by a separate heatsink which ducts the heat out through the I/O shield. The chipset on the other hand is cooled by a heatpipe solution which goes from the ICH9R to the X38 chipset and then onwards to a small heatsink which is parallel with the memory slots.

AMD have kicked off their new set of Catalyst 7.10 drivers today, these to suit both 32 and 64-bit XP/Vista operating systems.

Nicknamed the 'shoot'em up' driver, FPS gamers with ATI Radeon graphics cards will be excited to know that these latest drivers bring some significant performance gains across a whole host of popular gaming titles, with the biggest performance increases noticed in a Crossfire configuration.