Intel is not due to officially release their P45 chipset until sometime in April but that hasn't stopped information being leaked early.

Pictures and details of Foxconn's upcoming "ELA" P45 motherboard have appeared on the Internet. This particular board will included three PCI-E x16 slots but it is unclear whether or not they will all run electronically at x16 or not - we would assume not since it is a cheaper chipset.

For my first post in the revamped Digital Lounge, I thought I would run a small commentary which would serve as a basis for all future posts and reviews. It serves two purposes; the first - for readers who may have lapsed interest in home theater, or those hiding under a rock for a few years. Second - so I can look back in ten years time at how things are today, because at that point I will almost certainly have lost my mind, so this will come in handy.

The year is 2008. The month is March.

The DVD format is doing well. Most Australians own at least one DVD player in their home, and prices for both movies and players have dropped massively. A solid player from a good manufacturer retails for under $100. The format has now turned ten years locally. Every year since its inception, sales have grown, though this wasn't the case in 2007. There are many possible reasons as to why this could have occurred such as market saturation or the fact that most big releases have already been released. Piracy is another potential killer, and then there's the looming shadow of new, and improved formats - namely Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

First of all, I should introduce myself. My name is Ben Gourlay and I am the newest addition to the TweakTown staff.

I've spent the last five years, among other things, reviewing DVD's and reporting DVD news for DVDBits.com. But I've jumped at the opportunity to join TweakTown, and head up a new dimension to your favorite site - movie news and reviews. I will also be joined by a familiar TweakTown face; Shane and I'm sure we will be joined by some more as time goes on.

We've been feverishly working behind the scenes for the last few weeks to get things up and running and you may have seen my live blog from the Toshiba press conference and subsequent interview with Toshiba MD Mark Whittard from last week.

During a recent visit to MSI here in Taiwan, we learnt of an interesting and new technology which they are working on with another Taiwanese company called Polo-Tech. It all falls under their ECO friendly design program.

It is still very much a work in progress but from the working concept design we saw in action at the MSI HQ, it is probably not far off from becoming a reality - we hope so too. What are we talking about here anyway? Since power saving is such a hotly discussed topic, MSI has employed the Stirling Engine Theory to power a cooling fan without the need of conventional electricity.

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.