Theo from TG Daily managed to visit the ASUS office in Fremont, California to check out the company's upcoming sound card products.

During his visit he learnt about ASUS' upcoming plans while paying close attention to the Taiwanese company plans to shake up the sound card market well and truly. ASUS is readying two HDMI sound cards, the Xonar DX and Xonar AV1.

Given the success of Thermaltake's latest Xaser VI and Armor+ full tower chassis' since their debut late last year, Thermaltake have decided to shrink both cases down a little whilst retaining much of their distinct styling and features.

If you liked what you saw from the Xaser IV / Armor+ but were hoping for something more compact, quiet and lightweight then you'll be wrapped with these offerings.

Though not officially released to market yet, Thermaltake have kindly posted up video previews of both the new Xaser IV MX and Armor+ MX mid-tower chassis' on YouTube. You can check them out below :-

Following on from some specs and images of NVIDIA's upcoming single-cored 9800GTX graphics card to have surfaced on the web a short while ago, a 3DMark06 run has since been performed with an early sample of the card by the folks over at Expreview.

The result doesn't look to be all that spectacular at 14014 3DMarks in line of what we've seen from existing singular GPU graphics cards on the market. The run was performed with a system comprising a Core 2 Extreme @ 3GHz and 2GB of DDR2 memory running on ASUS' Maximus Formula X38 motherboard. The 9800GTX's clockspeeds were at 675/1688/1100MHz.

Fujitsu have just leveled up with Hitachi in terms of the world's largest 2.5" hard drive to hit the market. The new series of MHZ2 BT 2.5" hard disk drives come in a capacity of up to 500GB. Unfortunately as is the case with Hitachi's recently announced 500GB 2.5" drive, this one also appears to rely on three platters which makes its physical height a few mm higher than standard 2.5" drives; thus making it impossible to fit into some notebook chassis'.

The drives specs include a 4,200RPM spindle speed, 8MB buffer, 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, 12ms read seek time, 21dB noise out and a power consumption of 0.5W at idle/1.8W when reading or writing.

Fujitsu have said that they plan to roll out the MHZ2 BT series of drives into the market at the end of May.

The lads at Fudzilla have managed to get an exclusive shot of ASUS' upcoming nForce 780a based R.O.G motherboard, the "Crosshair II Formula"; this enthusiast oriented board catered to the AMD camp.

It's good to see the likes of ASUS hasn't entirely given up on producing quality feature-rich enthusiast products for the AMD crowd just yet. This particular board sports three x16 PCI-E slots as well as carrying integrated graphics support (and yes, Hybrid SLI is possible here) with HDMI available on the rear I/O. Some of the other features include dual Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, optical and coaxial S/PDIF out, a PS/2 port for the keyboard and a CMOS reset button.

Nvidia's remainder GeForce 9 series graphics cards have had their fair share of rumors around the forums lately.

DigiTimes goes a step further and confirms most of it. We believe what they are saying as it matches most of what we have heard from our company contacts.

As you know, the mainstream performance 9600 GT was just released and will be followed by the 9800 GX2 (two G92 GTS 512MB cores) on March 11. The GX2 will be followed by the GeForce 9800 GTX and 9800 GT between the end of March and beginning of April.

Gainward are quick to jump on the 9600GT bandwagon today with the launch of two 9600GT cards; a reference based plain jane version, and more interestingly a "Golden Sample OC" edition.

The reference model promises to come in at €157, but for just €20 more you can go for the superior Golden Sample variant with higher than stock clockspeeds of 700MHz on the GPU and 2000 MHz on the GDDR3 memory. The shader clock also takes a bump up to 1750 MHz on this card as well; this all thanks to the beefy dual-heatpipe cooler used for the job.

Palit's continuing trend to flourish the graphics card market with quality products at lower prices has allowed them to grow rapidly over the past few years in particular; as such they have swallowed up a multitude of smaller companies along the way, including none other than Gainward.

Now it looks like they're shifting their attention toward Galaxy which was established in Hong Kong in 1994, then went on to become add-in board partner for NVIDIA in 1999.

The first steps of an acquisition have apparently been made by Palit, this to help offload excess stock to the new subsidiary due to an over-ordering issue under the Palit branding.

BIOSTAR Microtech Int'l Corp. announced today their rendition of the NVIDIA 9600GT chipset called the V9603GT52. The company claims that the compact size and the extraordinary performance (90% performance gains over the comparable 8 series chipset) will make you buy their offering.

Using the phrase "Turn Your PC Into An Immersive Entertainment System", it is clear their ploy is to capture end-users hearts and minds by bringing high-end performance to the mainstream crowds.

A recent event held in Taiwan which ASUS attended allowed an onlooker of the Xfastest forum to take a few shots of ASUS' upcoming P5N64 WS Pro motherboard, this based on NVIDIA's latest flagship desktop chipset; the 790i.

The board demo'd at the event is a workstation oriented version, so there will inevitably be a few subtle changes to the mainstream consumer variants I would imagine.