Yesterday Telstra opened the doors for the first time to the Telstra Experience Centre (TEC) in Melbourne. This comes after the first TEC was launched in Sydney in November 2007, which has seen triple growth in customer traffic numbers in its 3 years of operation with over 1000 customers visiting the centre last year.

The Melbourne centre was constructed over a 190 day period in which over $13 million was outlaid. The complex is Telstra'a largest customer facility yet covering a total of 3,055 square meters and features 16 demonstration areas used to showcase various active technologies as well as two user-testing laboratories and two product design areas.

The Experience and Collaboration zones alone cover 2,185 square meters, while the eight video conferencing demonstration rooms cover an additional 870 square meters. Over 40km of cabling was used during construction with 897 data points, and 8km worth of fibre optic cabling ran in the wall of the New Horizon room.

If you're looking for a decent entry level Z68 on the cheap, you may be interested to know that Biostar are delivering what looks to be a fairly well rounded budget board in the new TZ68K+ that they've just launched this week.

Biostar actually already has what looks like an identical board in its current lineup, the TZ68A+, however the new TZ68K+ differs in that it sports a stronger CPU VRM arrangement with 8 phases vs. the 4-phase VRM setup on the TZ68A+, making it a bit more attractive if you want to get a decent overclock. As a result of the chunkier VRM setup, it now has its own heatsink to assist in keeping temps at bay.

Otherwise, the board or more or less the same with its two PCI-E x16 slots (x16 / x4 electrically), a single PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot, and two legacy PCI. The rest of the board is closely bounded by the chipset's native feature-set with two SATA 6Gb/s and four SATA 3Gb/s ports, all of which are internal. Biostar has also left LPT and COM headers resident on this board and it has a range of USB 2.0 ports along with a couple USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O.

This can't be confirmed as 100% truth yet, but it seems AMD has "accidentally" leaked out the pricing of their upcoming eight-core Bulldozer chip. AMD announced a give away of 5 x AMD FX-8150P processors and if you scroll through the terms and conditions of the competition, the following line can be found:

Top tier prizes: Five (5) AMD FX series eight-core processors. Approximate Retail Value: $300 USD each.

Oh really... well, it seems the processor will compete against the Intel Core i7 2600 Sandy Bridge CPU which is currently retailing at $300. Can AMD bulldoze Intel over with this chip and the competitive pricing, we'll have to wait and see!

Based on user feedback from its June beta release, Skype has now rolled out the final 5.5 build of its software which is available for download immediately.

Skype 5.5 adds deeper Facebook integration in that you can view which of your FB friends are online from it directly as well as being able to instant message them from the new 'Facebook Contacts' tab. The ability to view and update your Facebook status is also possible as well as being able to view and 'like' posts from your wall directly from Skype Home.

Focusing more on Skype specific functions, there has been a number of updates made to improve general Skype calling with better controls for video and group video calling in Windows as well as more solid video calling reliability and some design changes to help make things a little easier in all.

A new beta driver for NVIDIA cards has been made available over at GeForce.com today in the R280.19s. It promises a ton of fixes along with new and updated 3D Vision profiles as well as a couple new features.

Furthermore, while it isn't mentioned in the release notes, these drivers are recommended for testing the BattleField 3 Alpha release as they are said to address a number of in-game glitches seen in previous driver releases while helping in the performance dept.

If you happen to be running an SLI rig in conjunction with a 3D Vision kit, these drivers are also recommended to enable 3DVisionLive.com and YouTube 3D video support. On that note, the 280.19s will also give you the ability to enable Window mode in the most recent version of the 3D Vision player.

A member of both "Anonymous Operations" and "Lulz Security", 'Topiary' has been arrested on Wednesday, news coming from the Metropolitan Police Service. 'Topiary' served as the publicist of both hacker groups and often posted press releases and statements via Twitter. He had an apartment in Shetland Islands, Scotland and the apartment is currently being searched. A second 17-year old person in Lincolnshire, England is also being interviewed by has not yet been arrested.

The FBI began raiding apartments and arresting a number of people believed to be involved with Anonymous and LulzSec starting on July 19th. The hacker groups have said in response to the arrests that there is "nothing - absolutely nothing - you can possibly do to make us stop." During that time, Topiary is said to have tweeted "Arresting people won't stop us, FBI. We will only cease fire when you all wear shoes on your head. That's the only way this is ending," which is from the official LulzSec Twitter account.

Just before the end of the month and in keeping with AMD's new Catalyst driver every month thing, we get word of Catalyst 11.7 as well as a bonus driver Catalyst 11.8 preview.

As you would expect, there are a long list of resolved issues.

• All issues experienced with mouse cursor lag have been resolved

In a repeat of what we saw two years ago when AMD launched the HD5000 series and slipped down to the slender 40nm process, it seems as though AMD will beat NVIDIA to the punch again and have 28nm GPUs by the end of the year. AMD let slip that they'll have 28nm GPUs in the following quote:

AMD also said they'll be working with both TMSC and GlobalFoundaries on the chip production using a 28nm bulk silicon process. This is set to give it some extra flexibility, especially if 28-nm yields fail to meet expectations at one or both foundary firms. I did post that we could expect AMD 28nm-based GPUs as early as September, with NVIDIA trailing behind [again] with a release of 28nm GPUs sometime in early 2012.

This is something I have covered in my editorials, forums and Facebook, that games should be created and developed on the much more powerful PC platform and scaled down to consoles that are no way near as fast. Instead of being developed on ageing hardware and then ported across to PC where they don't scale up in graphics or use DX11 properly, or multi-GPU setups properly, etc.

DICE have come out and said that the biggest difference between the PC and console versions are shown in the multiplayer side of things, down from 64 players on PC to just 24 on consoles. DICE studio head, Patrick Bach says:

ASRock seem to be pumping out an astonishing number of feature packed motherboards these days, with most of them looking quite respectable indeed and select models even getting some additional support from Mr. Fatal1ty these days. Gone are the days when everyone was so fast to think ASRock was all about budget level 'dodgey' offerings any enthusiast wouldn't go near.

If you're not up to date on the type of quality assurance and attention to detail ASRock has peaked at these days, just check out the large batch of ASRock motherboard reviews here at TweakTown over the past few months. Our picky motherboard reviewing extraordinaire Shane generally finds they're leaps and bounds ahead compared to years past.

Having said that, ASRock has just dished up another very attractive board for those looking to build a compact high performance system or HTPC. Their new Z68M-ITX/HT was revealed to the world today which is a mini-ITX motherboard using the Intel Z68 chipset. As far as we're aware, only two other Z68 based mini-ITX offerings are currently on the market, both of which are from ZOTAC.

Cooler Master has added three new CPU coolers to its lineup today, with two high performance models being only mildly different to each other in the Hyper 612 PWM and Hyper 612S, along with the release of the GeminiII S524.

The Hyper 612S/PWM models are based around the traditional tower design, measuring 140 x 128 x 163 mm with a weight topping about 910g. They sport a copper base with six uniquely oriented heatpipes that are said to help the heatsink give maximized heat dissipation at lower fan speeds. The all-copper pipes pass through the base then along the length of the airflow optimized fin stack.

The Hyper 612S's spinner runs at 1300RPM (or just 900RPM when using the included silent mode adapter), while the Hyper 612 PWM's fan runs at between 600RPM and 2000RPM, depending on the current temperature.

So, I just got off the phone with the folks at Kingston who had some very interesting news to share about their first HyperX SSD.

They recently took delivery of the latest SandForce firmware and after some tinkering around on their drive they managed to boost performance even further over the originally claimed numbers. The drives are already packed up and ready to ship this week and they will come with the old firmware that provides the SSD with a 525MB/s read and 480MB/s write.

The new firmware which will be on the Kingston website soon for download improves things even more and gives the HyperX SSD a read speed of 555MB/s and a write speed of 510MB/s. This makes it a smidgen faster than the best 2.5-inch SATA III drive from OCZ and others who have drives that operate at 550MB/s.

Patriot has today announced the Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 flash drive that is meant to combine portability and a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface for maximum performance at an affordable price. The Patriot Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 flash drive sports a stylish cap-less design that hides the USB 3.0 connector when it's not in use, all that is required is to push the drive like a pen which then reveals the connector.

Patriot Memory's Flash Product Manager, William Lai talks about the Supersonic Xpress USB 3.0 flash drive:

While we're yet to get our hands on some octo-core processors in the form of the upcoming FX series from AMD to battle it out against their thriving competitor, a freshly leaked roadmap today reveals that AMD has even bigger plans already in the works, with some beefy 10-core desktop CPUs scheduled for release next year.

These 10-core chips (codenamed Komodo) will be the successor of the upcoming (Zambezi) FX-Series models. Word of Komodo was out as far back as last year, but at the time was said to have up to eight cores.

A bit about the CPU. It will use 10 'Piledriver' cores, have Turbo Core 3.0 technology, built-in DDR3 memory controller, housed in an FM2 package and manufactured on 32nm tech. It's being designed for the 'Corona' platform along wit hthe Hudson D4 chipset which supports four native USB 3.0 ports and eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports.

Internode have announced their retail pricing for the NBN-based phone and broadband bundles packages, with prices ranging between $59.95 and $189.95. If you'd like the 100MB speeds, it will cost you a minimum of $100 per month. Internode were quick to say that the pricing for broadband could easily escalate, this is because of the flaws in NBNCo's wholesale charging model, compounded by the ACCC's "121 points of interconnect" decision.

Managing director of Internode, Simon Hackett, has criticised the NBNCo's wholesale fee of $20 per megabit per month, which is charged at the point where retail service providers physically connect to the NBN. He says:

Another huge tech company has posted record profits and this time it's Microsoft. Microsoft have just announced a record fourth-quarter revenue of $17.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2011 and 8-percent increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $6.17 billion, $5.87 billion and $0.69 per share, which represents increase of 4, 30 and 35-percent respectively when compared with the prior year period.

For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011, Microsoft reported record revenue of $69.94 billion, a 12-percent increase from last year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the year were $27.16 billion, $23.15 billion and $2.69, which represented 13, 23 and 28-percent increases when compared to last year.

Peter Klein, chief financial officer at Microsoft sais "Throughout fiscal 2011, we delivered to market a strong lineup of products and services which translated into double-digit revenue growth, and operating margin expansion. Our platform and cloud investments position us for long-term growth."

Apple's OS X Lion was downloaded 1 million times yesterday. Apple made the announcement just as Microsoft announced their earnings results for the fiscal fourth quarter, another swipe of the claw from Apple. If every one of those million downloads were paid, that means Apple grossed $30 million yesterday just from Lion, within 24 hours. Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing said in a statement:

Apple's full press release is below:

The folks behind the PowerColor lineup of graphics cards, Tul Corp, have just released a couple interesting new cards under their VTX3D (Vertex 3D) branding. The two cards are based on the HD 6670 and HD 6570 mid-range models from AMD, but sport a rather unique inclusion that helps them stand out amongst the pack and its not just the aftermarket onboard.

These cards have built-in DVB-T tuners to allow users to watch digital TV on their PC, doing away with the need to use up another slot on the motherboard for a standalone DVB-T card.

Both cards have three outputs - D-Sub, DVI and HDMI and as you can see in the photos, they use custom cooling solutions. As for internal specs, they both run on a 128-bit memory interface, using the Juniper GPU (with 480 Stream Processors) and 1GB of memory (with an additional 1GB of system RAM that can be used via the Hyper Memory tech).

They seriously can't be doing this for the LOLs, but a 27-year-old blogger "BirdAbroad" has posted on his blog about an Apple Store he found in China. It looks liked an Apple store, the winding staircase with a sitting area upstairs, employees wearing the blue t-shirts with the clunky Apple name tag around their necks. But this Apple store in Kunming is actually a complete rip-off. As BirdAbroad says "China warps your mind into believing anything is possible". He says that it is the best rip off store they've ever seen, but some things were out of place. The stairs were poorly made, walls were not painted properly.

Even the sign itself, Apple never displays "Apple Store" on its signs, it just displays the gloriously delicious looking fruit symbol. The name tags on the staff did not actually list a name, just "staff" and an Apple logo. The funniest thing about this all is the employees actually think they're working directly for Apple. As the blogger took photos, multiple salespeople and security guys (plain clothed) outside came in and told him to stop. It was not allowed. Why wasn't it allowed? Their boss told them so. He did tell them that he was an American Apple employee visiting China checking out the local stores, this was the golden ticket.

Mozilla has been blowing air into the hot air balloon that is 64-bit browsers. Finally, there are people working on Firefox for Windows x64 and this means that from Firefox 8, there'll be two builds; 32-bit and 64-bit. The 64-bit version will obviously take advantage of operating in native 64-bit and use its memory space. The x64 build of Firefox 8 is roughly 10-percent faster than the 32-bit version, but its not just speed.

Encryption and filtering functions are superior on Firefox 8 x64, the handling of DOM Operations benchmark shows a 25-percent increase, this results in every dynamic website loading faster and feeling more responsive. The 64-bit build of Firefox 8 does however use more memory. In a benchmark by ExtremeTech, the 64-bit build had a memory footprint of 320MB with the 32-bit build using just 230MB.

The plug-in container was also double the size in the 64-bit build at 100MB versus 50MB when playing a YouTube video. But, in the days of memory being so cheap, this isn't really such a big problem. I'm sure people will make their minds up when the time comes and I'm definitely looking forward to taking the x64 build of Firefox 8 for a spin.