Dell recently entered the tablet PC market with the introduction of their Latitude XT which is a convertible 12.1" system which claims to be one of the lightest on the market at under four pounds.

The American company will begin taking orders by the end of the year and the starting price is set at $2,499 USD. It packs either a Core 2 Solo or Duo ULV processor which enables the tablet PC to provide impressive battery life of up to 9.5 hours.

Albatron thinks it is time to get excited about the launch of their 88GTS-512X based on the new G92 core, which is finally being unveiled today by Nvidia.

Albatron are mostly focusing on the price surprise of the new part saying it is able to run with the big boys without costing a fortune. We tend to agree on that.

Fujitsu is one of the very first off the blocks with their AMILO Xi 2550 notebook which sports the latest mobile graphics chip from AMD; the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2700 GPU, which made its rather quiet debut today.

The 2550 is a 17" notebook capable of 1920 x 1200 resolutions and if you have enough bucks, it will ship with a Blu-ray reader for a pretty kick ass entertainment experience since the LCD is capable of 1080p.

Based on an Intel 965PM chipset based motherboard, it comes with either the T7250 processor at 2GHz or T7700 processor which operates at 2.4GHz. Strangely enough, only 2GB of memory is supported but should be just enough for most usage.

Along with Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 being released recently, Microsoft also let Service Pack 3 for Windows XP out of the bag.

It is not the final release which is expected sometime next year but still manages to pack in a total of 1073 fixes. It also includes four new features including a new activation scheme, Network Access Protection Module, Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module and a Black Hole Router detection algorithm.

There was talk of Windows XP SP3 including DX10 support but that didn't end up being the case. If you are still using Windows XP and haven't made the move to Vista yet, BetaNews is hosting the beta service pack for download.

A new breed of HD 3850 has been spotted in the wild; Expreview has pictures of a "UNIKA" branded offering which uses a modified PCB with the reference GDDR3 memory replaced in favour of Hynix 16Mx32bit 0.8ns GDDR4 chips. With this significant change comes a non-standard cooler (which looks a little...odd) and superior clockspeeds of 700MHz core and 2200MHz memory; not that far behind the 3870.

Details and more images here.

They just keep flowing in!

Three more companies have announced their new 8800GTS 512MB cards. Without further ado:

Fudo from Fudzilla managed to make some time to visit Vadim Computers in the UK for a first look at a water-cooled 8800GTS 512MB based system. The results of the outing were impressive, to say the least.

During an overclocking session, they managed to overclock the water-cooled G912 512MB to 800MHz core clock (650MHz is standard), 2080MHz shader clock (1625MHz is standard) and 2300MHz DDR memory clock (1940MHz DDR is standard).

Naturally, the resulting 3DMark06 benchmark runs speak for themselves.

Walton Chaintech are first off the blocks with the announcement of their brand spanking new 8800GTS 512MB graphics card based on the new and improved G92 core. You have seen the benchmark results previously her at TweakTown and now they are up for grabs.

The GAE88GTS 512MB is equipped with the higher level G92-400 chip in comparison with GeForce 8800GT. The folks at Chaintech reckon what makes this card special is its heavy-duty dual slot cooler and extra shaders on tap for optimizing the cooling performance and for noise reduction.

Transcend sends word of their brand new Curvy Pure-White USB pen drive - yet another USB flash product from the Taiwanese company who seems to produce a new model each week.

The V33 is pure white which may make a good addition to your girl's Christmas stocking. Among the top features are its ultra-compact body measuring in at 60mm x 16.5mm x 8.1mm and it is a lightweight coming in at a mere 7 grams.

Vista's first service pack isn't all that far away from completion, and up until now there's been no definitive details of what exactly it will bring.

Today that changes though, as Microsoft has let fly some documents which share explicit details of the service pack in terms of every single update to be implemented. The mass of updates fall into the following sub-catagories :-

Though NVIDIA's highly anticipated "nForce 780i" flagship desktop chipset is yet to be unleashed for the Intel platform, ASUS took it upon themselves to put details of their upcoming 780i motherboard on their website which will be known as the "P5N-T Deluxe".

With 3-Way SLI support, an 8-phase power design and support for the 45nm Penryn processors, this board will no doubt find it's way into many enthusiast's and gamer's systems once it hits the market; which surely won't be too much longer given ASUS have already set up the official product page on it.

Tim Smalley, editor of bit-tech in the UK, paints a bitter picture of AMD's current state of affairs reporting that, as of last week, AMD was worth less than it paid for ATI back in July of 2006.

He claims that AMD's market value has dropped to around $5b USD, which is $400m USD less than what ATI was worth when AMD made the questionable decision to buy the Canadian based company - but that is easy to say in hindsight at the struggling chip firms' defense.

Worse still for AMD, bit-tech goes on to say Intel is now 32 times as big as AMD in terms of stock market value and Nvidia is even estimated at almost 4 times larger with $19b in market capital.

If it has anything to do with the ASUS Eee PC, it is big news!

Today ASUS issued a statement in regards to its "Warranty Void If Removed" seal over the single SODIMM slot on some models of the their hugely popular super ultra portable and affordable notebook.

The press release states: ASUS Computer International ("ASUS") recently received feedback from one of its valued customers with questions concerning the purpose of a seal stating, "Warranty Void If Removed" over the access door to the single SODIMM slot on some models of the ASUS Eee PC. ASUS wishes to assure its customers that merely breaking or removing this kind of seal will not void the ASUS Limited Warranty. Although ASUS recommends that customers use ASUS-approved service facilities and components, ASUS is committed to honoring the terms of its Limited Warranty and making sure that its customers are free to make appropriate hardware and software modifications and upgrades, regardless of whether the service is performed by an approved facility, a non-approved service provider, or by the customers themselves. ASUS will replace the warranty label with a label to warn users that ASUS will not be responsible for the damage caused by improper hardware change.

In what seems like an endless flow of graphics card news the past few weeks, Palit are next to step into the fray with news of a couple new products.

Palit announced they will be offering 1GB versions of the Super+ with the GeForce 8600GT and 8500GT. This doubles the usual amount of RAM on offer and the cards are also factory overclocked out-of-the-box with custom coolers.

EVGA to the best of our knowledge is first out with their 256MB GDDR3 8800GT graphics card.

Clock speeds of the 256-P3-N791-AR is 650MHz core clock, 1800MHz DDR memory clock and 1620MHz shader clock. EVGA is claiming to be the price and performance leader now with an even better price tag.

GIGABYTE are next on the list with their custom made Radeon HD 3800 series graphics cards including the GV-RX387512H and GV-RX385512H which both have 512MB GDDR3 of memory onboard.

GIGABYTE are trying to send the message that "Quality Components make Quality VGA cards" and "More Power Phases + Ultra Durable 2 = Lower System Temperature + Extreme Power Efficiency".

Scott Wasson from The Tech Report is on the ball - he benchmarked an AMD Phenom processor affected by the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) and L3 cache bug which is said to be rare but could cause system crashed under virtualization mode.

AMD promised a fix by way of a motherboard BIOS update but the sad news for AMD fans is that patch causes a penalty hit which Scott was kind enough to test.

The folks over at BCC Hardware managed to get their hands on an upcoming Nvidia nForce 780i SLI reference motherboard.

As you may know, this is the upcoming chipset to replace the aging 680i SLI chipset which lacks proper support for new 45nm processors from Intel.

Thermaltake relentless in their endeavors for the ultimate product range today announced a couple dedicated graphics card power supplies - a 450-watt and 650-watt model.

With some high-end graphics cards these days chewing up as much as 300 watts of power, not all main system power supply units will be able to cope with the stress. If you're using a 400 watt power supply for instance and do not particularly want to upgrade it, this is where the VGA PSU from Thermaltake could come in handy.

Galaxy recently informed us about the release of their brand new 8800GT graphics card with native HDMI port for HD output up to 1080p resolutions.

As the Hong Kong based company likes to do, it comes with a customized cooler along with higher 3-phase power system compared to the usual 2-phase, SLI (but not 3-way SLI since it only has one SLI bridge connector) and all the usual GT trimmings.