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GALAXY is one of several companies looking to bring out modified versions of the GTX 400 series cards from NVIDIA and below you can see the worlds first 100% modified GTX 470 which GALAXY has been working on.

GALAXY calls this the GTX 470 GC and not only is the aftermarket cooling solution a standout, but the PCB itself has also been modified by GALAXY; a blue PCB which is 0.5" shorter than the reference design and re-locates the two 6-pin PCIe power connectors to the rear section of the card.

The cooler itself is unique to other aftermarket coolng solutions not only aesthetically, but by design with an innovative detachable fan setup that allows one to easily remove it for cleaning along with easier access to clean the heatsink under it. The large aluminum fin array spans across the entire card.

Sascha of Netbooknews has been able to get hold of a bunch of info and pics on Sony's new Vaio P netbook series scheduled for launch on May 22nd.

The original article is written in german, but in translation we can ascertain some key characteristics about the series.

As you can see from the shot above, it will be available in a range of colours. The display runs a resolution of up to 1600 x 1280. There is a built-in light sensor which measures ambient light and auto adjusts the display for optimal brightness (giving a helping hand in extended battery life).

Everytime we think we are finally done reporting that notebooks and related accessories pose a burn hazard, a new recall surfaces. Today Targus has issued a recall on about 507,000 notebook power adapters.

The affected power adapters were made by Comarco of Lake Forest California. So far, there have been 518 reports of the connector tips heating up and 53 reports of the tip melting the plastic case.

There have been eight reports that consumers that burned a finger or hand due to the overheating. The recall includes Targus Universal Wall Power Adapters for Laptops. Only models with the following SKU numbers are affected by this recall: APA23US-02, APA23US-03, APA23US-04, APA63US-03, APA63US-04, APM62US-03 and APM62US-04. They were sold at WalMart, Best Buy and other major retailers.

If your looking for more ways to benchmark your system using real world applications as opposed to synthetic methods (FutureMark etc.) Zardon of KitGuru has just made mention of a new update to his real world benchmark script designed for Adobe's Photoshop. It can work with Photoshop CS5, CS4 and is also compatible with Photoshop 7 (but the results will differ depending on what version you run).

Zardon has gone into extensive detail on how his script works, how to prepare your system to run it effectively and the sorts of scores you should be expecting from your hardware (assuming your system's in good shape). If you've read the full article about it here and would like to try the latest version; V1(4), you can download it here.

Whilst the first round of iPad availability in the WiFi-only version resulted in astonishing sales; over 300,000 in the U.S. alone during the first 24 hours, it seems a hell of a lot more people were keen to hold out for the 3G version.

Since the iPad 3G hit the market last Friday, by Sunday afternoon it was estimated that around 300,000 of these were sold (though that figure includes 22 days of preorders). This isn't quite the level of sales we saw when the first round of iPads came out, but it's certainly still a highly successful one.

The estimated 300,000 sales figure comes from Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster. In contacting 50 Apple stores on the Sunday afternoon, it was also learned that 49 of these were completely sold out of iPad 3Gs! Looking at the big picture, Munster has calculated that Apple has now sold more than a million iPads in total.

Did you get a surprise loading TweakTown for your first time today?

Join us in welcoming our new 2010 design refresh. It's pretty similar to what we had before, except the top header part of the website has been completely redesigned for a more modern look. We also designed it to have a better user experience with better placed and less advertising banners.

Our latest videos are featured at the top of the site just under the revamped navigation menu area. At the very top left of the site you can see a running total of how many articles, news posts and forum members we have. Just under that too is the revamped search box.

You might recall that cool dual screen Courier concept that Microsoft was showing off. I know I was looking forward to seeing how the device turned out. If you were interesting in the project, we have bad news today.

Microsoft has decided to kill off the Courier tablet. The cancellation is surprising considering that we had been hearing the device was on track to hit stores in 2011.

Microsoft's Frank Shaw told Gizmodo, "At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time."

Anyone with half a brain knew when Apple purchased online music service Lala that its days were numbered. Apple was either looking to axe some competition or was out to integrate Lala into its own online subscription music offering (or both).

I know I am hoping for the second option and according to TechCruch sources are telling it that is exactly what will happen and perhaps as early as June. Lala will be available for existing subscribers until May 31. No new subscribers are being accepted.

Apparently, anyone with money left in Lala will have the funds transferred over to iTunes. I know many folks who may be sad to lose Lala, but will be hopeful that Apple finally offers that subscription service.

EK Water Blocks has gone all out with support for the GTX 400 series, giving four differing versions of its new supporting blocks each for the GTX 470 and GTX 480, making eight in total for the line-up.

All four for each card use the same shaped, full coverage design, but differ in the types of materials used. The entry level models use a copper base with clear acrylic tops; these are dubbed the EK-FC470 GTX and EK-FC480 GTX with pricing of 74.95€ and 80.00€ respectively.

Moving up the line-up from there are the EK-FC470 GTX Acetal and EK-FC480 GTX Acetal models, which as the name indicates use acetal tops and go for pricing of 77.65€ and 82.9€ respectively.

Multi-monitor mad users who are addicted to connecting as many monitors as they can to a single PC would have been foaming at the mouth when AMD announced its Eyefinity6 technology (giving the ability to connect six monitors to a single video card).

However, while this in itself seems like it would only be fully harnessed by a niche crowd looking to go all out with gaming simulation setups or advanced (overkill?) levels of productivity, Power Color seems to think there are people out there who still feel it's not enough.

Take a look at this picture below :-

It's been known for quite a while Palm has been struggling to keep its head above water and the marketplace tells the story pretty quickly they've been failing to compete at a required level to survive in the ever growing, fast paced smartphone world.

At this rate, the end of the road for the company is not all that far away unless something drastic takes place. And that's exactly what's just happened. HP has just announced it's swallowing them up for 1.2 Billion, working out to about $5.70 per share of Palm common stock.

The deal is set to close on July 31 which is in timely fashion with the end of HP's Q3 fiscal year. From what is known this early on, Pam's CEO Jon Rubinstein is sticking with the company but how operations will change is anyone's guess at this point; it's all speculation.

Microsoft has offered embedded versions of Windows for many different needs for a long time. Today Microsoft has announced the latest version of Windows Embedded called Windows Embedded Standard 7 has hit RTM.

The new embedded OS takes the some of the power, reliability, and features of the Windows 7 OS and puts them into a customizable and componentized form. The new OS will let OEMs create a wide range of devices with enhanced connectivity and differentiated experiences.

The embedded OS will find its way into products like thin clients, digital signage, industrial controls, set-top boxes, connected media devices, and TVs. Microsoft reports that partners and customers have plans in place to start shipping produces using Windows Embedded Standard 7 soon.

If you're tired of the hassles that come with manually and regularly replacing/recharging batteries for your multiple Wii-remotes, Konnet has come up with a sleek looking solution that makes it 10x easier.

using advanced wireless induction charging technology, the PowerV Quad charging station supports charging of up to four Wii-motes simultaneously. Together with the supplied rechargeable battery packs it's as simple as resting a Wii-mote on the PowerV (you can leave your Motion Plus / silicon casing on it) and it will automatically detect the battery life and commence charging the battery if needed; no cable clutter here. If the charging status light is red, it's charging; if blue, it's full.

One very practical and convenient solution that would be impossible to regret the purchase of once you have one in house. For $50 U.S. you get the PowerV Quad, AC/DC adapter cord and four supporting rechargeable Ni-MH 800mAh battery packs.

Ouch! - In being the first to 'get hold of' and show off the next gen iPhone on the web in detail has come at one helluva hefty price for Gizmodo, not only counting the $5k transaction they made to get it into their posession from an unknown entity.

The site's editor Jason Chen has indicated he's in a world of hurt after performing this little stunt last week.

Last week it was reported that law enforcement in the Silicon Valley area had begun investigating how this iPhone was mysteriously lost and had gotten into wrong hands.

Following AMD's recent decision to provide more regular, consistent Catalyst Mobility driver support for mobile GPUs, NVIDIA has now focused attention on giving better support for its mobile GPUs.

In the past notebook users have had to depend on notebook OEMs to make available mobile graphics driver updates for NVIDIA GPUs residing in select models, of which the timeframes between each of these updates was most always significantly longer than the rate at which GPU makers can make driver updates available to the public.

This problem will soon be solved, it seems. NVIDIA is looking to unify its desktop and mobile drivers and will put things into action as of release 256, due to come out in a few months. This will mean updated GPU drivers will hit the web from NVIDIA themselves for both desktop and notebook users at the same time; albeit they will be in separate packages.

There have been stories going around the web this week stating that a limited edition high-end ATI video card had been stolen from the factory carrying the XFX band. XFX had warned people to not buy the card, which was supposedly listed on eBay.

XFX sent out another email this week that again stated the supposed story that one of the limited edition 5970 Black Edition cards had been stolen, specifically serial number 68. The email stated that people involved with the theft would be prosecuted and it looked real overall.

If you glance under the picture of the car in the email, you will notice that it states clearly the email is an XFX Gamertainment Campaign. In other words, a viral marketing stunt that clearly worked very well. Did you fall for it?

While Microsoft's Windows 7 Touch Pack was first made available to OEMs selling Windows 7 PCs last year, Microsoft have now made it available for all at their Download Center.

Weighing in at 239.2MB, this executable file contains six applications that work in with the touchscreen features of MS' latest operating system :-

Microsoft Blackboard, an intricate game of physics in which you solve a puzzle by creating a fanciful machine on a blackboard.

Earlier today we were invited down to the GIGABYTE Technology headquarters here in Taipei where we were given an exclusive demonstration of its new "On/Off Charge" technology for the Apple iPod and other Apple products such as the iPhone and iPod.

GIGABYTE quietly launched a software driver a little while ago that allowed its motherboards to charge Apple products via USB even when your computer was turned off. Now the Taiwanese motherboard heavyweight steps things up some more with its new On/Off Charge tech.

With this new hardware based solution, the engineers at GIGABYTE have programmed their motherboards to be able to detect what sort of Apple product needs charging and allows for Quick Charging by sending out more power over the 3x USB Power ports on some new GIGABYTE motherboards. This is done by detecting the Apple product device ID on a power supply database and sending out more power than a traditional motherboard (can) - that is, over 0.5 amps. We saw an iPad getting over 0.9 amps, in fact.

For a while now we've been seeing some motherboard makers incorporate USB 3.0 into select boards via means of an additional NEC controller (no thanks to Intel being slow to adopt until well into next year), but the list of USB 3.0 supporting boards versus how many new boards continue to hit the market is still somewhat lacking.

However, that may well be changing soon with ASMedia (a subsidiary of ASUSTek) said to be offering up USB 3.0 chips for less than $3 to mobo makers; half that of what NEC charges for theirs, making the inclusion much more attractive on a wider range of boards not only in the high-end market segment, but mainstream and possibly entry level areas, too.

ASUS has of course been quick to make the transfer from NEC to ASMedia and all of its orders hereon will stay with them. Meanwhile, MSI, GIGABYTE and ECS are expected to transfer all their orders to ASMedia in the not too distant future.

A significant update has been made to Extreme.Outervision's popular online PSU Calculator tool that assists in helping one determine not so much just how many Watts their exact system configuration needs, but even more importantly how much amperage is required to back said Wattage up.

You can access their Lite version of the facility for free, but a Pro version is also available for a small charge which will give out more details specific to Amperage on all rails, support for systems with multiple video cards, recommended UPS rating and print-out functions.

This latest update includes stacks of new and not so new hardware not previously selectable in the dropdown lists, including the new GTX 400 series cards, latest Core i5 and i7 processor range, all the latest Phenom and Athlon processors and more.