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The gaming and computer tech circles were aflutter when NVIDIA went official with its GTX 480 and 470 video cards based on the new Fermi architecture. The video cards promise some big performance for gamers.

When the cards started hitting market and specs were unveiled, some were aghast at the amount of power the GTX 480 consumed and how much heat the thing puts out. This lead to some worrying that the GPU might have a shorter life because of all the heat it creates.

NVIDIA has posted on its official blog that gamers and enthusiasts need not worry about the GPU. Big green says that the GTX 480 GPU was designed to operate at high temperatures and the power consumption was a concession to the performance wanted from the GPU.

Earlier today we visited the A-DATA headquarters here in Taipei and got a close-up look at some of its latest storage and memory products. Watch the video below, accompanying textual information is further below as well.

Probably most interesting for us during our visit was A-DATA's N002 Nobility product. It is a USB 3.0 powered external solid state drive. Chris has filed his review of this product just yesterday, but it will not air until sometime next week - so, we have delivered a bit of an early look at what you can expect in terms of performance numbers.

In the video above we also got a look at the ADATA S599 100GB SandForce SF-1200 SSD, which Chris tested and wrote about here a few days ago. They say that 'seeing is believing' and after checking out the performance of this beast of an SSD in person, it really is a pretty remarkable storage device. The drive that we saw being tested was able to achieve even a little above its spec.

Today our moles were hard at work. They have uncovered a couple of rumors for you to gobble up with your chocolate bunnies and peeps. The first concerns our old friends at NVIDIA. The rumor here is that they have decided to take Fermi GPU's that do not pass QA at any acceptable speeds and resell them to Matel for their new model of Easy Bake Oven.

Jen Sun Haung, NVIDIA's CEO was quoted as saying they felt that by using a Fermi over the traditional light bulb new owners would be getting a 50% decrese in cooking times. The new program will be dubbed TWIMTBB (The Way it's Meant to be Baked). Easy Bake Ovens with Fermi inside will hit the stores sometime in June. There was no word on pricing, but some sources are saying they expect the new Fermi based "nuclear" Easy Bakes to be over $200. An ASUS engineer was also quoted as saying "we can overclock it, too" while a source at GIGABYTE referred to needing more copper in the design.

Next up was an interesting rumor that was heard in the executive wash room over at Google.

Today the USB Implementers Forum held its Taipei SuperSpeed USB Developers Conference 2010 and we were in attendance at the event to check out all of the latest cutting-edge developments to come to the new USB 3.0 connectivity standard.

One of the exhibitors was ASMedia who is a Taiwanese IC maker. These folks were showing off one of the more exciting demonstrations in the exhibitor area. They had an ASUS powered system hooked up with a Crucial RealSSD C300 SATA 6Gbps SSD connected via USB 3.0. The SSD was able to be connected to the system via USB thanks to the use of an ASMedia USB 3.0 controller bridge device that translates SATA 3.0 to USB 3.0 data signals with the ASM1051 chip.

In the video above that we produced and uploaded to YouTube, you get a look at performance numbers of the same SSD hooked up via USB 2.0 with a direct comparison to the aforementioned USB 3.0 setup.

Any chance it gets, NVIDIA will take a stab at Intel and push the importance of the graphics processing unit over the traditional CPU for a whole range of computing tasks with modern computing. Especially when it comes to Intel's low-cost Atom processor platform, NVIDIA will jump through hoops on fire to bring the big Intel down whenever, wherever and however they can.

That is business though, don't mistake it and in this particular case, we like it - a lot. Microsoft just released its Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview and if you didn't know, IE9 will support GPU-accelerated HTML5, JavaScript and Direct2D technologies. Chris Pederson from NVIDIA in a video recently uploaded to YouTube, discusses the performance of a next-generation ION netbook compared to a standard netbook without ION graphics.

In a side by side presentation, Pederson shows off a few examples of how in the future consumers will want to have a system with adequate graphics to improve the changing Internet experience. Demonstrations are displayed such as map rendering and some test games from Microsoft and puts a very good light on ION equipped netbooks.

Today seems to be the day for world records to be broken in the performance area and probably loads of LN2 to be consumed around the world.

Corsair just sent out an announcement that using no less than eleven new Force F200 SSD drives with an Areca 1680i RAID controller (the same one I personally use - it's impressive!) were able to smash the PCMark Vantage world record by almost 2,000 points.

The previous record holder, SteveRo from Xtreme Systems, managed to score 31,333 PCMarks also with a new Intel Core i7 980X processor, but obviously not as many SSDs. The Corsair Labs team were able to score a new record of 32,947 PCMarks to beat the former best score by around 5%. You can see the results over at this page.

The folks over at GIGABYTE just clued us into this news and probably won't be happy we are breaking it before them, but that's news folks.

Using an upcoming motherboard known as the X58A-UD9 according to the ORB database, GIGABYTE were able to break the 3DMark Vantage performance world record by around 500 points and get itself right to the top of the list. GIGABYTE claimed in a recent phone call that they now have the "fastest desktop system on the planet". You can see the results at this page, which we managed to hunt down pretty easily.

The feat was naturally achieved with Intel's latest Core i7 six-core processor, the 980X. According to the ORB database, the processor was only clocked at 3818MHz, but that was no doubt a reporting error as I'm sure plenty of high octane LN2 and overclocking was involved. The video card used was a GIGABYTE HD5870 SOC, no doubt also running at insane clock speeds. More reporting issues were noticed with the video card with no clock speeds being reported and the card supposedly only having 1MB of memory - obviously another error there, too.

NVIDIA's new Fermi (GTX 470 and GTX 480) graphics cards have caused a fair bit of a stir in the video card market leading up to and post release last week; some in awe of their performance whilst others in disgust for a number of reasons.

But who would have thought one of NV's own partners, XFX would be so negative about the launch of these new cards that they'd go so far as to tell NVIDIA 'where to go', abandoning this new line-up of high-end cards altogether and refusing to give support; because that's apparently what's just happened!

It's becoming more clear that XFX has a more positive outlook on AMD/ATIs direction in the desktop graphics card market, at least at the high-end segment. In recent press content regarding XFXs Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition, it put the hurtz on NV with comments like "XFX have always developed the most powerful, versatile Gaming weapons in the world - and have just stepped up to the gaming plate and launched something spectacular that may well literally blow the current NVIDIA offerings clean away" and "GTX480 and GTX470 are upon us, but perhaps the time has come to Ferm up who really has the big Guns".

1981 was the year that the first ever annual Computex trade show was held in Taiwan and show organizers TAITRA are expecting another bumper year according to executives from the pre-show international press conference this morning.

Mr. Yen, executive director of TAITRA, commented that the 30th annual trade show to be held from June 1st through till the 5th is expected to see even higher attendance numbers due to a larger confidence in the ICT business compared to this time last April. He also noted in his speech that it is expected that more than 42% of international buyers will come from mainland China, noting that previously disallowed direct flights between the mainland and Taiwan have assisted those numbers.

Press gathered at the event were told that the technology trends for Computex Taipei 2010 are cloud computing, 3D displays, Google Android and e-reader devices. Yen commented that we could expect to see many (product) surprises from Taiwanese companies at this year's show in these product categories.

This afternoon TAITRA shipped ourselves and many other international press over to the MSI headquarters for a look at some of its new and upcoming products in the mobile space. This was after the Computex 2010 pre-show press conference that was held earlier today and we'll be covering that shortly.

While MSI was showcasing its full range of new notebooks, there were also some all-in-one systems on display. One that got our attention right away was an unreleased 3D capable all-in-one system called, err... it is still new and a model name hasn't been decided on yet. We covered it on video below for you guys to get a closer look.

Did we mention that the panel will also support multi-touch technology and come installed with Windows 7 Home Premium to make that work properly. The Chi Mei made Full HD panel is 23.6-inches in size and of course has a 120Hz refresh rate for the 3D part to work. The system comes with one set of active-shutter 3D glasses also from Chi Mei and extras will be able to be bought, but for what price we were not told. The 3D technology is provided from ATI with the installed Radeon HD 5730 video card.

Whilst not for certain, it appears Apple's next-gen iPhone will be dubbed the "iPhone HD" which they see fit due to the much higher resolution display of 960x640.

The latest news from sources are saying Apple intends to unveil the new iPhone and its accompanying iPhone OS 4.0 on Tuesday, June 22 this year, of which apparently there will be two versions of the phone to come out.

One version will be the standard GSM phone that's designed for networks like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Rogers (Canada), whilst a CDMA version will also be produced that's ideally suited to carries like Verizon, Sprint and Bell (Canada). The reason two separate iPhones had to be created is due to the limitation of the chip Apple is using that cannot provide dual-operation to work on both GSM and CDMA towers.

News first started to emerge of an upcoming monster 12-core processor from AMD some weeks ago after it was leaked by an online retailer. In fact, AMD today announced its new range of Opteron 6000 processors to the world. You can read that announcement over here at their press release.

The lucky lads over at AnandTech managed to get hold one of these new server based processors from AMD, specifically they got their hands on the Opteron 6174 model. Not only did that get one, but they got two along with the required other hardware to compare this 2.2GHz part against the latest Intel Xeon processors in a dual CPU configuration.

We won't spoil all the results, but as you can see from the highly multi-threaded Cinebench 11.5 rendering test above, the AMD system is able to provide very solid results. This is fantastic news for AMD who has struggled for years now against Intel's strong reign in the processor market space.

With the lift on NVIDIA's GTX 470 and 480 graphics card taking place a couple days ago, AIBs were quick to show off their own variants of the cards, although as expected, 99% of them were all identical beneath the unique sticker/color choices on some of the cards to separate them apart.

However, eVGA is one such mob who has gone all out right off the bat and introduced no less than six models; three based on the GTX 470 and three on the 480 :-

• EVGA GeForce GTX 480 (015-P3-1480-TR): 700/1401/924 MHz, reference air-cooled, US $499.99

With the launch of NVIDIAs first high-end DX11 desktop parts finally behind us, word has it NVIDIA is in the midst of planning its refreshment of mid-range and entry-level parts which the company aims to have ready by as early as June'10.

It's believed that there are three cards in the works dubbed the GeForce GTS 450, GTS 440 and GTS 430, all of which will use NVIDIA's 40nm GF104 core that carries with it up to 256 shader cores, 64 TMUs, 32 ROPs and a 256-bit memory bus. The GTS 450 and 440 are both said to use GF104 to the full extent, whilst the lower grade GTS 430 will be cut down with 192 shader cores, 48 TMUs, 24 ROPs and run on a 192-bit memory bus.

Pricing was also mentioned with an expectancy in the region of €200-230 for the GTS 450, €160-180 for the GTS 440 and €130-150 for the GTS 430.

The lucky folks at bit-tech were given a final retail sample of MSI's next stab at a board using the X58 chipset for them to check out in detail.

Dubbed the Xpower X58 which is part of MSI's new Big Bang line-up of enthusiast oriented motherboards, this one brings all the latest tricks to the table, including USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support, as well as support for Gulftown (six-core Core i7s).

Looking at a full shot of the board, what will quickly catch your eye is the six PCI-E x16 slots. However, there's no NF200 chip on the board so it would seem that at best, four of the slots each give eight lanes of bandwidth for multi-GPU setups.

Earlier today I visited the Thermaltake headquarters here in Taipei and was able to get an exclusive look at the near finished products to be launched under the new eSPORTS by Thermaltake brand that caters strictly for the most demanding of gamers around the world.

James Huang from the eSPORTS division of Thermaltake was shy at first, but soon shined to the camera as he gave us a solid introduction and preview of the Challenger Pro professional gaming keyboard, their impressive mechanical keyboard as well as the "Black" professional gaming grade mouse.

Before we entered the meeting room, we filmed walking from outside the building through to where the goodies were waiting for us to check out. You get a look at the non-boring Thermaltake office and all the case mods and such that are on display throughout the building. From time to time, we were told that Thermaltake actually holds mod design contests within the organization and employees who win may receive free products or cash bonuses. This is a look at something that most will never get to see and I thought it would be interesting, especially for Thermaltake fans.

The launch of NVIDIA's first wave of DX11 capable desktop graphics cards is nigh and while ATI don't have any new models on the horizon to answer to it (except for Eyefinity6 variants of existing models), there has been talk of ATI combating GTX 470/480 by lowering pricing on its cards.

However, our VGA guru Shane has heard through the grapevine that while AMD/ATI had considered doing this, it has apparently decided against it and is happy where its lineup of cards sit on the market price wise.

It's likely that this close to launch ATI have a good idea of how NVIDIA's new cards perform and don't seem to be persuaded to adjust pricing on their models; not to mention stock levels not being so much of a problem for Radeon cards these days.

NVIDIA's long awaited Fermi based GXT 400 series GPUs are all set to hit the market on the 26ths of this month. However, as with many past launches of new GPUs we are beginning to see the early peaks and leaks of pictures and specs.

Today it is MSI that is showing of their new GXT 480 in the hopes that at launch time you have them firmly in mind for your NVIDIA DX11 purchase. The card in question is the N480GTX, and like the others that will hit the stores around the 26th it is a reference card.

MSI is making claims of "military-class" components for N480GTX. However, I am not sure that this is the right thing to do. After being in the Military myself, I can tell you that most of what I used was old, used and often in need of constant maintenance. Here's to hoping that they MSI GTX 480 is nothing like that at all.

The popular DirectX 11 benchmark from Unigine Corp. called Heaven has seen a major update this week, taking it to Version 2.0.

Changes include :-

• More tessellation load.

So, Google has lifted the curtain on the searches in China. This is seen by many as a very bold move and one that on the surface proves Google's stated commitment to net neutrality. To do this they have re-routed all Google.cn requests to Google.com.hk. They claim this is a legal way to get around China's censorship laws.

Still, if we look a little below the surface of the move we might see some murky water flowing around. It is important to remember that Google entered the Chinese market with the full knowledge that they would be required to censor search and ad results. They also knew that they would be required to give information to the Chinese government about the people using the search engines, G-Mail and Google Docs accounts.

So, knowing all of this information and bearing in mind the claim that Google made saying that the Chinese Government backed a Cyber Attack on their systems, we could see another motivation for Google's move. Perhaps the Chinese Internet market is not worth the hassle when your search (and ad) results are intentionally limited. After all, Google is an online ad company first and a search engine second these days. It is also important to remember that every business wants to make a profit. There is no company out there that wants to lose money. Simply put, China is a bad investment for Google.