As many of you would now know, Palit recently entered the motherboard industry with some budget oriented motherboards designed for the AMD platform. Today they expand their lineup with a couple of new boards based around NVIDIA's MCP73 line for Intel LGA775, these being the N73V with integrated GeForce 7050 GPU, and N73PV with integrated GeForce 7100 GPU.

You can learn more about each of the boards in the announcement here, as well as the product pages on Palit's website.

This week in Taipei, both the 2007 WiMAX Forum and the IP Comm Asia show is on and TweakTown paid both shows a visit to see what was new. WiMAX is getting closer to become a reality by the day and Intel talked about it at IDF Taiwan earlier this month and there are several hundred test networks already up and running. The biggest hurdle is not the hardware implementations as you'll see from the pictures from the show, but rather to set it all up and make all the various parts and components to talk nicely with each other.

It's funny that WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, since there are already issues with the various frequencies used as there's no global standard, although it seems like three different frequencies are currently being worked on, 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz. This doesn't mean that these are the only frequencies that will be used and there are talks about using the free 5GHz band as a backhaul channel for data as well as the use of a 3.3GHz spectrum in some countries.

i-mate has announces two new Windows Mobile 6 Pro devices, the Ultimate 8502 and the Ultimate 9502. Let's start with the 8502, which is powered by a 400MHz Qualcomm processor, has 256MB of ROM and 128MB of RAM. The touch screen measures 2.6-inches and it has a standard 320x240 resolution. Apart from the rather high amounts of memory, nothing all that special so far. It's also got a 2 Megapixel camera with an LED flash, again, pretty standard.

However, this is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset which also features tri band 3G, HSDPA and HSUPA connectivity. On top of this it has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP support. Furthermore it has an integrated GPS, although there's no mention of what chipset is used.

Some brief details have been revealed about Futuremark's next installment of their popular 3DMark benchmarking software, this to be called "3DMark Next".

Up until now we've not heard or seen anything about the new badboy to bring the most extreme of systems to their knees, but what is now confirmed is that it will be based around DX10 / Shader Model 4.0, thus will require Windows Vista to run.

All you folks out there with 8800GTX/Ultra graphics cards looking to spruce up the cooling capabilities without the cost of more noise, you may like to look into a new aftermarket cooler designed for these cards from Cooler Master, they call this the Hydra 8800.

This cooler is particularly interesting due to the fact that it is designed to use both air and water for the removal of heat. The block itself is made out of aluminum with an all-copper base and the fan is rated for a lowly 1800RPM, dishing out a noise level of just 19dBA.

Nokia has finally started to ship the 8GB version of its N81 as well as the standard version of the N81 globally. Both handsets features a wide range of multimedia features and Nokia even goes as far as calling them multimedia computers which we can't quite agree with. None the less, the N81 series has support for audio and video playback and supports a wide range of formats such as MP3, AAC, ACC+, WMA, WAV, RealVideo 8/9/10, MPEG4, H.263 and H.264.

But one of the big sellers is the inclusion is Nokia's gaming platform, N-Gage and the handsets ship with Space Impact Light and demo versions of Fifa soccer 2007 and Asphalt 3: Street Rules. More games will be available for download later this year. The N81 series also uses a new 3D multimedia menu system which Nokia claims will make it easier to use digital content and internet services on the N81.

Although AMD announced its HyperFlash technology some time ago, no products have appeared as yet and it looks like we'll have to wait for the SB700 south bridge before anything will happen in terms of real products. The reason for this is because some new features had to be added to support HyperFlash, something that couldn't be strapped onto the SB600.

HyperFlash uses an open standard and AMD doesn't charge any royalty fees, unlike Intel with its Turbo Memory technology which has proven to be more expensive than upgrading the system memory which in many cases seems to have a better overall effect. HyperFlash will come in three different sizes, 512MB and 1 and 2GB.

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.