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.

PC World is reporting that MSI are preparing a low cost ASUS Eee PC notebook competitor.

After contacting a representative from MSI in Taiwan, we were told that the low cost notebook will be displayed at CeBIT trade show in March. We'll get a preview before then, though.

How do you make an awesome performing graphics card even better? Why slap on a hardcore liquid cooling solution onto it of course; and this is exactly what CoolIT Systems has done for the newly launched Radeon HD 3870 X2.

The cooling specialists have just announced their third installment of their Reference series line of liquid cooling systems for Radeon graphics cards. Not only does this cooler provide much better overclocking headroom for the card's GPU and memory clocks, but it also trims the monster down substantially whereby it'll only occupy a single PCI slot.

You can read CoolIT's official PR on the new cooler here.

Continuing the Gigabyte update, we've got some motherboards for you and we promise there won't be a lot of talk about DES this time, even though it's a key feature for Gigabyte this time. Only one of the three boards we are going to show you today has anything to do with DES. Although this might not be the most exciting product of the three, it's yet another X48 board, this time the GA-X48-DS5. This isn't quite the final version of the board, as Gigabyte will add a second Ethernet controller to the final revision. This will be a slightly cheaper board with the X48 chipset than the DQ6 series, although with Gigabyte moving the DS5 and now also the DS4 series of boards to become something more of an overclocking platform, it will be interesting to see how they diversify their product range.

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We had the opportunity to visit Gigabyte last week and we thought we'd share some of what we saw and heard with you and to try to let you know a little bit of what to expect from Gigabyte over the next few months. When you think about Gigabyte, you normally think about motherboards and maybe graphics cards, but the company makes so much more and this time we had a chat with some people from G-Style which is the notebook department and Gigazone which is the case, cooling, PSU and display department.

Let's start with the notebook news or rather UMPC and MID's as Gigabyte is looking at releasing some rather interesting devices this year. Gigabyte has been in the notebook market for a couple of years now, but the company hasn't exactly had any headline products, although its first UMPC, the U60 is a rather attractive and interesting device. The U60 will be joined by the M704 later this year and we wrote about it here, although the product page has been taken down for now. The M704 won't replace the U60, it will rather be an addition to the product range.

However, later this year we'll see some Intel based UMPC and MID products from Gigabyte and they'll be rocking the upcoming 1.6GHz Diamondville processor and the Shelton platform. We didn't get too much information on these models, but we were told that the new UMPC model will feature a tablet pc style design with a touch sensitive display. The MID will feature a pull-out keyboard and both devices should have 1024x600 resolution displays. If all goes to plan, then Gigabyte will be showing both devices at CeBIT in Hannover in March.

We just got word from Oliver Baltuch from Futuremark that they have just released a new service on the YouGamers.

The feature allows you to quickly determine which hardware provides the best bang for buck, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Lenovo has leaked some specs on their latest ThinkPad to Gizmodo, dubbing it the "Ultimate ThinkPad X300". This comes a few days after the Macbook Air was released to the public and the leak is intended to keep those few "on the fence" individuals about to embrace the elitist Apple brand, in-check.

Fortunately they were tempered by good sense (or hesitation about expense) and have now got an alternative competing product.

Back over at CHIPHELL in China, one of their forum users has managed to get their hands on a 55nm and DX 10.1 based mid-range Sapphire Radeon HD 3690 graphics card.

AMD has just announced the HD 3650, 3450 and 3470 yesterday which should begin selling very soon if not already but it is so far unclear when the faster HD 3670 and 3690 models will go on sale.