Solange from Kingston Technology just alerted us to the fact that they have released and started shipping a Class 4 Secure Digital High Capacity card with a huge 16GB of storage space. Part number SD4/16GBFE is the largest in the Kingston lineup of SD cards.

Below is a snazzy shot of the Class 4 card, which makes it capable of a transfer speed of 4MB/s - this is said to be the guaranteed minimum. It is covered by Kingston's lifetime warranty if something happens to go haywire.

Our friends over at PCGH in Germany are reporting that MSI are about to launch a GeForce 9600GT graphics cards with wait for it... not 512MB or 1GB of onboard RAM but a huge 2GB! Zotac and MSI already have 1GB versions of the 9600GT out but MSI one upped them. Not only that, it is also dished up with a side of Display Port.

It is unclear if this is one of those products that are designed as a technology showcase or if the Taiwanese company will actually begin selling it. With CeBIT just about to open its doors, we have no idea.

Intel is not due to officially release their P45 chipset until sometime in April but that hasn't stopped information being leaked early.

Pictures and details of Foxconn's upcoming "ELA" P45 motherboard have appeared on the Internet. This particular board will included three PCI-E x16 slots but it is unclear whether or not they will all run electronically at x16 or not - we would assume not since it is a cheaper chipset.

For my first post in the revamped Digital Lounge, I thought I would run a small commentary which would serve as a basis for all future posts and reviews. It serves two purposes; the first - for readers who may have lapsed interest in home theater, or those hiding under a rock for a few years. Second - so I can look back in ten years time at how things are today, because at that point I will almost certainly have lost my mind, so this will come in handy.

The year is 2008. The month is March.

The DVD format is doing well. Most Australians own at least one DVD player in their home, and prices for both movies and players have dropped massively. A solid player from a good manufacturer retails for under $100. The format has now turned ten years locally. Every year since its inception, sales have grown, though this wasn't the case in 2007. There are many possible reasons as to why this could have occurred such as market saturation or the fact that most big releases have already been released. Piracy is another potential killer, and then there's the looming shadow of new, and improved formats - namely Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

First of all, I should introduce myself. My name is Ben Gourlay and I am the newest addition to the TweakTown staff.

I've spent the last five years, among other things, reviewing DVD's and reporting DVD news for DVDBits.com. But I've jumped at the opportunity to join TweakTown, and head up a new dimension to your favorite site - movie news and reviews. I will also be joined by a familiar TweakTown face; Shane and I'm sure we will be joined by some more as time goes on.

We've been feverishly working behind the scenes for the last few weeks to get things up and running and you may have seen my live blog from the Toshiba press conference and subsequent interview with Toshiba MD Mark Whittard from last week.

During a recent visit to MSI here in Taiwan, we learnt of an interesting and new technology which they are working on with another Taiwanese company called Polo-Tech. It all falls under their ECO friendly design program.

It is still very much a work in progress but from the working concept design we saw in action at the MSI HQ, it is probably not far off from becoming a reality - we hope so too. What are we talking about here anyway? Since power saving is such a hotly discussed topic, MSI has employed the Stirling Engine Theory to power a cooling fan without the need of conventional electricity.

Theo from TG Daily managed to visit the ASUS office in Fremont, California to check out the company's upcoming sound card products.

During his visit he learnt about ASUS' upcoming plans while paying close attention to the Taiwanese company plans to shake up the sound card market well and truly. ASUS is readying two HDMI sound cards, the Xonar DX and Xonar AV1.

Given the success of Thermaltake's latest Xaser VI and Armor+ full tower chassis' since their debut late last year, Thermaltake have decided to shrink both cases down a little whilst retaining much of their distinct styling and features.

If you liked what you saw from the Xaser IV / Armor+ but were hoping for something more compact, quiet and lightweight then you'll be wrapped with these offerings.

Though not officially released to market yet, Thermaltake have kindly posted up video previews of both the new Xaser IV MX and Armor+ MX mid-tower chassis' on YouTube. You can check them out below :-

Following on from some specs and images of NVIDIA's upcoming single-cored 9800GTX graphics card to have surfaced on the web a short while ago, a 3DMark06 run has since been performed with an early sample of the card by the folks over at Expreview.

The result doesn't look to be all that spectacular at 14014 3DMarks in line of what we've seen from existing singular GPU graphics cards on the market. The run was performed with a system comprising a Core 2 Extreme @ 3GHz and 2GB of DDR2 memory running on ASUS' Maximus Formula X38 motherboard. The 9800GTX's clockspeeds were at 675/1688/1100MHz.

Fujitsu have just leveled up with Hitachi in terms of the world's largest 2.5" hard drive to hit the market. The new series of MHZ2 BT 2.5" hard disk drives come in a capacity of up to 500GB. Unfortunately as is the case with Hitachi's recently announced 500GB 2.5" drive, this one also appears to rely on three platters which makes its physical height a few mm higher than standard 2.5" drives; thus making it impossible to fit into some notebook chassis'.

The drives specs include a 4,200RPM spindle speed, 8MB buffer, 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, 12ms read seek time, 21dB noise out and a power consumption of 0.5W at idle/1.8W when reading or writing.

Fujitsu have said that they plan to roll out the MHZ2 BT series of drives into the market at the end of May.

The lads at Fudzilla have managed to get an exclusive shot of ASUS' upcoming nForce 780a based R.O.G motherboard, the "Crosshair II Formula"; this enthusiast oriented board catered to the AMD camp.

It's good to see the likes of ASUS hasn't entirely given up on producing quality feature-rich enthusiast products for the AMD crowd just yet. This particular board sports three x16 PCI-E slots as well as carrying integrated graphics support (and yes, Hybrid SLI is possible here) with HDMI available on the rear I/O. Some of the other features include dual Ethernet, six USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, optical and coaxial S/PDIF out, a PS/2 port for the keyboard and a CMOS reset button.

Nvidia's remainder GeForce 9 series graphics cards have had their fair share of rumors around the forums lately.

DigiTimes goes a step further and confirms most of it. We believe what they are saying as it matches most of what we have heard from our company contacts.

As you know, the mainstream performance 9600 GT was just released and will be followed by the 9800 GX2 (two G92 GTS 512MB cores) on March 11. The GX2 will be followed by the GeForce 9800 GTX and 9800 GT between the end of March and beginning of April.

Gainward are quick to jump on the 9600GT bandwagon today with the launch of two 9600GT cards; a reference based plain jane version, and more interestingly a "Golden Sample OC" edition.

The reference model promises to come in at €157, but for just €20 more you can go for the superior Golden Sample variant with higher than stock clockspeeds of 700MHz on the GPU and 2000 MHz on the GDDR3 memory. The shader clock also takes a bump up to 1750 MHz on this card as well; this all thanks to the beefy dual-heatpipe cooler used for the job.

Palit's continuing trend to flourish the graphics card market with quality products at lower prices has allowed them to grow rapidly over the past few years in particular; as such they have swallowed up a multitude of smaller companies along the way, including none other than Gainward.

Now it looks like they're shifting their attention toward Galaxy which was established in Hong Kong in 1994, then went on to become add-in board partner for NVIDIA in 1999.

The first steps of an acquisition have apparently been made by Palit, this to help offload excess stock to the new subsidiary due to an over-ordering issue under the Palit branding.

BIOSTAR Microtech Int'l Corp. announced today their rendition of the NVIDIA 9600GT chipset called the V9603GT52. The company claims that the compact size and the extraordinary performance (90% performance gains over the comparable 8 series chipset) will make you buy their offering.

Using the phrase "Turn Your PC Into An Immersive Entertainment System", it is clear their ploy is to capture end-users hearts and minds by bringing high-end performance to the mainstream crowds.

A recent event held in Taiwan which ASUS attended allowed an onlooker of the Xfastest forum to take a few shots of ASUS' upcoming P5N64 WS Pro motherboard, this based on NVIDIA's latest flagship desktop chipset; the 790i.

The board demo'd at the event is a workstation oriented version, so there will inevitably be a few subtle changes to the mainstream consumer variants I would imagine.

10:52 - Still waiting out in the lobby outside the board room. The door is closed. They aren't ready for us yet.

Still waiting on confirmation that I will be interviewing someone from Toshiba, post conference.

So very, very tired. That McDonalds was good though.

Toshiba has just announced that they have decided to pull the pin on HD-DVD at a press conference in Japan.

The immediate plan is to slow down production and to have all stock off the shelves as soon as March of this year. There is no denying that a lot of the enthusiasts expected the announcement with the news that has been getting around the interweb over the past week.

Not surprisingly as we edge closer to the release of NVIDIA's next big bad boy; the dual-GPU based 9800 GX2, details have leaked out about the specifications of the card, most interestingly in the way of clock speeds.

Thanks to the crew at Expreview, we see that the GX2 will come in stock form with clockspeeds of 600 MHz, 1500 MHz and 1000 MHz on the GPU, shader, and memory clocks respectively. Not quite as fast as many of us were hoping the card to be, with the memory clockspeed the only somewhat impressive of the three. Though this may have been a counteraction of NVIDIA's to help better manage the immense heat generated by the card.

1GB (512MB per GPU) of memory on a 512-bit (256-bit per GPU) memory interface will reside on the PCB with said memory bandwidth of 128 GB/sec. The card will also sport 256 (128 per GPU) stream processors.

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.