id Software have dished up a demo of the much anticipated team-based multiplayer title "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars", weighing in at 727MB. The demo allows you to play either with bots or other online players in the "Valley" map.

If you own a Radeon HD 2000 series based graphics card you may also like to know that AMD have released a hotfix specifically for this demo which is said to improve performance, though by how much is unknown. The hotfix is available for both Windows XP and Vista.

Nvidia first pioneered Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) with Corsair and one of the upcoming features of the Intel X38 chipset is Extreme Memory which works in a similar way.

OCZ has just announced that they are first out with Intel Extreme memory modules with DDR3 at 1600MHz (PC-12800).

While every other manufacturer on the planet is busy launching new MP3 players in what can only be described as a traditional manner, Sony had to go and develop something completely new and insane. Say hello to the Sony Rolly.

Yes, we weren't sure what it was at first either, but it really is an MP3 player, although that's a too simple term for what it is. The Rolly features integrated speakers and a mere 1GB of internal memory. It's also got a USB port and built in Bluetooth. So far it doesn't sound all that different from any of the recent players from Samsung, right?

SanDisk has just announced its latest Sansa player, the View. It seems like SanDisk, just like Creative, decided that a short and snappy name was the way to go. Although the original View was a much larger device, it seems like SanDisk has taken the tried and tested approach with the View and just improved upon the e200 series. Mind you, this is by no means a bad thing as the e200 was a real competitor for the iPod nano over a year ago.

What you're looking at is a very slim player, although not quite as slim or as small as the iPod nano, but still smaller than the new Zen from Creative. The View measures 108 x 49.5 x 8.8mm and it weighs in at 82.2g. But this isn't really what makes it stand out, as this just gives it a rather slim and stylish design. It has a 2.4in QVGA LCD display, that's 0.1in smaller than the Creative Zen and 0.4in larger than the nano.

Continuing on our coverage of X38 boards we visited Biostar, a brand that you might not associate with high-end motherboards. However, Biostar has been working hard trying to up its reputation and the T-series proved that Biostar can compete with performance boards from more well known brands. The company has also made a move into the graphics card business and it looks like they're taking the fight to round two.

The board we were shown was the TX38-A7 Deluxe and it has some similarities with the other X38 boards we've already posted information about. Biostar has managed to get some ex Abit engineers onboard and it looks like they've taken some of their expertise with them and implemented it into this board.

Seagate have announced a 1TB hard drive this week which sports native encryption. The Barracuda FDE is the first 3.5" desktop hard drive to enter the market with native encryption, the same technology found in Seagate's Momentus FDE notebook hard drives too.

Seagate's native AES encryption technology works in a manner whereby when the system is powered off the contents of the hard drive are fully protected and inaccessible. When firing the system up, a pre-boot user password is required to allow access to the drive, other layers of authentication are also possible such as smart cards and biometrics technology.

Also launched by Seagate this week is a new Momentus 5400.4 2.5" mobile offering with a capacity of 250GB.

We also made time to visit our friends at ECS today who showed us their upcoming AMD motherboard based on the RX780 chipset - a cheaper and cut down version of the RD790 with a single PEG slot running at x16 full speed.

The RX780M-A is expected to launch after the first bunch of RD790 boards sometime mid October with a street price of around $100 - $110 USD. Pretty good for a brand new motherboard with Socket AM2+ supporting AMD's upcoming bunch of processors.

One thing we quickly noticed was that ECS finally decided to ditch the FDD (floppy) connector on this board and depending on how you look it could be either good or bad.

It's been a busy day here at TweakTown today with loads of company visits. While Cam was out visiting with Abit and ECS, I spent some time with DFI. What we got to see and find out some more about are the upcoming X38 and RD790 based Lanparty boards. It also looks like DFI is about to expand its Lanparty series of motherboards with some slightly more affordable boards that lacks some of the hardcore overclocking features, but will still be premium boards.

Let's start with the Lanparty X38, which has gone through some changes since Computex earlier this year. First of all the colours of the slots have changed from orange to green and yellow, just like the P35-T2R. The board we saw was still in development and some changes might still be done before the final board is ready. The chipset cooling wasn't decided upon as yet, although it will use a cooling solution similar to the one on the P35-T2R.