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 :-

Many details of ASUS' upcoming Striker II Extreme LGA775 motherboard has surfaced on the Xtreme Systems forum. The Striker II Extreme is based on Nvidia's nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset which supports DDR3 memory all the way up to 2000MHz.

There are also details on the Striker II NSE which appears to be a slightly cut-down version based on the nForce 790i SLI chipset. The only difference between the two seems to be that the NSE only supports memory speeds up to 1600MHz.

Toshiba get the snap, throws down to the end zone and it's a fumble!

The question is did Blu-ray recover it or did HD-DVD keep the pig skin. The lads over at Engadget have struck up a neat little poll asking for your thoughts on the $3,000,000 (it looks more expensive using 0's instead of typing "million") ad Toshiba put forth over the Super Bowl game.

At the time of writing 60% of people said the ad was a waste, 10% thought VHS for life, 8% thought maybe it was worth it while less than 20% are in favor of it.

Not only did Futuremark release three screenshots of 3DMark Vantage today but they also added the title to the YouGamers Game-o-Meter website. This handy tool will give you a pretty good indication if your system will be able to handle the upcoming benchmark and even what score it'll roughly attain.

The website also lists the system requirements for the benchmark. It is no surprise that you'll need Windows Vista due to its DX10 graphics testing. Not only that though but you'll more than likely need a graphics card upgrade if you have upgraded recently. You will need a card that is fully DX10 and Shader Model 4.0 compatible.

It seems the folks over at Futuremark are as busy as ever at the moment - they're not only about to start making games but also busily working on the next 3DMark called "Vantage".

We are still not sure when 3DMark Vantage is going to be released but Futuremark sent us a work in progress screenshot from the latest build as a teaser for the upcoming launch. Here it is, we're a little early on releasing this screenshot but we couldn't wait any longer!

According to this story posted over at DIGITIMES, ASUS are expanding their existing Eee PC range with some product lines to cover more than just the notebook market segment.

These new Eee products will include the E-DT which is short for DeskTop PC as well as the E-TV and E-Monitor.

Despite recent news that Microsoft are apparently planning to withhold Windows 7 from being released until early 2011, we've decided to give you the other side of the story.

A recent roadmap suggests that Microsoft will launch "Windows 7", the successor to Vista as early as the second half of 2009. This is contrary to initial reports which stated its release sometime in 2010. According to APC Magazine, there are three milestone projects in the Windows 7 program, with the first stage already in progress. M1 is an Alpha build which has shipped to key partners for code evaluation. Stage two, due around April/May will be an updated version, and stage three is likely towards the end of the year if all goes to plan.

You would've been happy to go with Vista if it weren't for all the bloatware packed in which you have no say about? - A new independent tool has been released which solves that problem.

Some of you may be aware of nLite for Windows 2000/XP; the same team of people who created that are behind the newly released "vLite" currently sitting at version 1.1.

The question has inevitably been asked of them before, but most everyone thought it would never come to be. FutureMark who are most reknowned for their high quality and beautifully rendered synthetic PC benchmarking facilities have just announced that they're now making a bold move to enter the games development business.

This is particularly exciting news for gamers alike; if the 3DMark series is anything to go by then their games should be right up there with the likes of Crysis, if not overshadowing it substantially.

Thanks to their experienced team of highly talented graphics artists and programmers who have proven to us all that they're capable of producing some of the best rendering the computer industry has ever seen, we should certainly be in for a real treat.

Following CoolIT Systems' footsteps, world reknowned PC watercooling specialists Danger Den have also just announced that they're currently working on an aftermarket watercooling solution for the HD 3870 X2 graphics card. This block will also be of a single slot design and will cover most of the PCB as shown here :-

Kindly provided on Danger Den's website are several other pictures of the prototype cooler and a naked HD 3870 X2; given that they've said the final product should be ready within the next 5 to 7 days I dare say it will look very similar if not identical to the prototype shown today.

The third and final part of this update from Gigabyte will talk a little bit about new features that Gigabyte are planning to incorporate onto its graphics cards. If you wanted to know about upcoming GPUs or specific card models, then we're sorry to disappoint, as we'll be talking about slightly different things here. First of all we have Gigabyte's new Gamer HUD and eXtreme Voltage Gear Overdrive, which both works with the latest generation of 8800GT cards from Gigabyte.

The GV-NX88T512HP and the GV-NX88T256H are the first two cards to support these new features and the one relies on the other to make it all work. Let's start with the eXtreme Voltage Gear Overdrive, this is a new Voltage regulator that Gigabyte has added to these cards that allows for a wider Voltage range than we're used to see on graphics cards which tend to have a static setting. Many overclockers voltmod their cards to be able to push them higher, but Gigabyte have of sorts already done this for you. This ties in with the new Gamer HUD software, as this is where you can adjust the Voltage of the GPU.

Nvidia's upcoming GeForce 9600GT graphics card is not due to be released for at least a few weeks but that has not stopped the folks over at CHIPHELL in China having fun with pre-release samples that they managed to get their hands on.

They have just turned things up a notch and tested not just one but two of the upcoming GPU's in SLI dual graphics mode. For comparison purposes, they compare single and dual mode performance to a single GeForce 8800 Ultra in the 3DMark series.