Good news if you're looking to pick up a quad from Intel in the near future; as many of you know a new breed of quad-core processors will enter Intel's Core 2 lineup very soon which comprise 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, and 2.83GHz models priced at $266, $316, and $530 respectively.

So what's happening with the current crop of 65nm quad core chips such as the popular entry level Q6600? Fudzilla report that some very nice price cuts are on the way for these; come April 20 the Core 2 Quad Q6700 will take a huge drop from its current $527 RRP down to just $270.

And what about the Q6600? Well, it's drop isn't quite as dramatic, moving down from $270 to $229. But hey, it's a nice shaving nonetheless, and a great opportunity to go the way of quad-core on a budget.

Curtsey of some folks from China and a digital camera, we get an early look at a pre-release version of 3DMark Vantage - the upcoming Vista and DX10 only 3D gaming benchmark software by Futuremark.

This is only a very early release look at the upcoming benchmark which is said to be released at GDC on Wednesday 20th February 2008 in the USA.

It is still spitting out random errors due to its early nature but for reference, an undisclosed test system with GeForce 8800 GTX scored around 4200 - not that this score means much at this stage of the game.

As many of you know, NVIDIA recently made a move on acquiring AGEIA, the makers behind the world's first physics processing card known as PhysX. That deal has now been officially sealed, but the big question on many people's minds is what NVIDIA plan to do with existing PhysX technology.

Thanks to a recent financial results conference call, we now know what little trick NVIDIA is up to and it should make existing GeForce 8 owners quite happy :-

We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes... Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA.

It is amazing that Nvidia has not got on top of this yet.

Online retailer Take 2 in South Africa have the Chaintech GeForce 9600GT listed on its website for $2,107 Rand which is equal to about $275 USD. We managed to take a screenshot of the website before it is taken down.

Soon after hearing that Microsoft has come up with a final build (RTM) of the first Service Pack for Vista, a naughty group by the name of NDN has gotten their dirty mits on a copy of the not yet released SP1. It can already be found on various torrent trackers with five languages embedded (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese), weighing in at 434.5 MB.

Microsoft don't plan to make SP1 available to the public on Windows Update until mid-March.

Plextor has just introduced the new PX-B920SA internal Blu-ray SATA re-writer drive; capable of writing Blu-ray discs at 4x speed (BD-R). One of the special features about this particular drive is that it can also playback HD-DVD ROM discs.

LightScribe technology has also been added for custom text/design printing on supported discs, and a 4MB buffer is used to ensure no data interuption takes place.

Looking at Write speeds, these are 4x BD-R, 2xBD-RE, 16x DVD+R/-R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 4x DVD+/-R DL, 5x DVD-RAM, 40x CD-R and 24x CD-RW.

More details and images have surfaced of ASUS' ROG series G-SURF 365 motherboard thanks to french website InfoMars; this the final revision to have just started hitting store shelves recently for a little over 100 US Dollars.

I'm not quite sure why ASUS felt this motherboard to be worthy of being a part of their high-end enthusiast "Republic of Gamers" motherboard lineup, it's quite underwhelming compared to its bigger ROG brothers when you take a look at its feature-set.

One of our bestest drinking buddies, Adrian from Sapphire, just sent us some photos of a new product they are currently preparing for launch real soon.

After Chinese New Year (that is, after February 11th) Sapphire will start selling a Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card with factory water cooling setup, they call it "Atomic WaterCooled" and claim to offer ultra high performance. By the looks of it below, we don't have many doubts about that.

We haven't got many details on the card yet such as clock speeds but you'd think with such a luxurious factory cooler, it should pump out some very decent frame rates.

A small PC case making company in New Hampshire, USA by the name of Spotswood Custom Computers is about to get attention from all over the world with the release of a new bass-drum style enthusiast PC chassis.

Looking at the clickable thumbnail pictures above is enough for you to realise the company has gone to great lengths in designing a high-quality well finished product here.

About a year after Vista saw light of day, its first Service Pack has reached RTM (Released To Manufacturing) status, meaning an imminent launch is now on the cards.

Don't get too excited just yet though, as Mike Nash of the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft has outlined the availability plan on the Windows Vista Blog today which goes on to say :-