Expreview have unravelled the workings of a unique locking mechanism spotted on one of ASUS's upcoming ROG series motherboards for the AMD AM2 platform.

Dubbed "G-Guardian", this feature is aimed to be a protective system used to stop unwanted intruders at a LAN or other publicly accessible location from stealing your expensive memory modules or keyboard/mouse.

To come with Intel's first batch of 45nm desktop CPUs early into the new year is the replacement chip for the very popular Q6600, Intel's entry-level quad core part.

Known as the Core 2 Quad Q9300, this processor will come clocked in at 2.5GHz (100MHz faster than the Q6600) but will carry only half the L2 cache (6MB).

On the upside, being a 45nm Penryn chip it's going to run a lot cooler and with a lot more overclocking headroom to boot; potentially making it the new chip of choice for many enthusiasts.

The folks from Hard Spell in China who call themselves a professional IT hardware product website managed to scoop up one of GIGABYTE's upcoming Intel X48 chipset based DQ6 motherboards for some early testing over in the mainland.

On an early production board from GIGABYTE which we believe is still being fine tuned according to our sources at the Taiwan motherboard company, they compared Intel QX9650 and QX9770 processors.

The folks over at Sapphire sent in a press release today announcing their passively cooled ULTIMATE Edition based on the ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPU.

They claim "to deliver the fastest performing passive cooled graphics card in the World - ever!". That might be the case for fastest passively cooled Radeon graphics card but not for graphics cards on the whole as surely the recently released passively cooled Sparkle 8800GT will beat it in most tests.

Following news of a passively cooled 8800GT to show up very soon from Sparkle, ECS are following suit with their new 8800GT Dual Turbo Version Graphics Card which sports Arctic Cooling's beefy S1 cooler.

This massive heatsink with large heatpipes does have a couple of fans sitting on it for really bringing down those temps to gain some more overclocking headroom, but the cooler is easily capable of managing the G92's heat levels passively as well.

A fresh Multi-GPU Performance Hotfix has become available for Windows Vista users which deals with a DMA latency issue of sorts between the two cards. Microsoft describe it in full detail below :-

In some scenarios, games and benchmarks perform more poorly than expected on a Windows Vista-based computer. This issue occurs when the games and the benchmarks use multiple display adapters in a Linked Display Adapter (LDA) configuration.

A graphics processing unit (GPU) or part of a GPU link may incur a small scheduling latency on a new Direct Memory Access (DMA) packet. This is true if the DMA packet is submitted to the GPU that has previously run out of work and if another GPU in the linked configuration is very busy. In some scenarios, significant starvation of one or more GPUs in the linked configuration reduces the expected performance of an application.

Information on Intel's upcoming lineup of Penryn based mobile processors has surfaced today thanks to the folks over at Dailytech.

It's expected we'll see these chips officially unveiled very early into the new year (possibly at CES 2008), and it would appear that five models will become available to cater towards notebooks ranging from the budget to high-end market. No doubt Apple will be sure to get in on the action with their MacBook Pro series as well. The lineup shapes up like so :-

If some images to recently surface on the big back Internet are to be believed, ASUS may soon launch an all-new GeForce 8800GT graphics card with a whooping 1GB of GDDR3 memory - this, of course, compared to the current 512MB model and the 256MB versions about to hit the market.

At least according to the source, clock speed would remain the same as the reference version at 600MHz core clock and 1800MHz DDR memory clock. There are also claims being thrown around which suggest it might be using a custom-made PCB.

LG has done its bit in helping bridge the HD format wars by releasing the Super Multi Blue GGCH20L ROM drive which is capable of reading both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks!

On top of that, it will also read regular CD's and DVD's and burn DVD+R at 16x. Being a new drive, naturally is utilizes the much more future-proofed Serial ATA interface and includes 4MB cache buffer.

Gamers around Asia can now rejoice! Well, at least ones who are heavy into World of Warcraft, which just happens to be a market of millions and obviously why we are even seeing the following product.

American notebook maker Dell has teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment to create a special edition World of Warcraft notebook based on a revised version of the XPS M1710 series of notebook computers.

Sparkle sparked our sparkling interest with their announcement of their sparkling (ed. note - you went too far) new passively cooled GeForce 8800GT with 256MB graphics card.

It should also spark a lot of interest in the consumer market as it is one of the few silent operating DX10 cards on the market with the insanely popular 65nm G92 GT GPU.

The folks from Razer have just announced the latest addition to its product lineup - the Razer Boomslang Collector's Edition 2007 mouse.

It claims to have all the same features as the regular version and more. Topping the list is the 1800dpi 3G infrared sensor, 1ms response time and even 32KB of memory, on a mouse of all things! That of course allows you to save programmed settings for the five Hyperesponse buttons.

Patriot have just released a complete new lineup of "Viper Series" DDR3 memory modules which sport aluminum-copper composite heat spreaders for more effective heat management.

The lineup comprises the following kits :-

Many of us are eagerly awaiting Intel's mainstream lineup of 45nm Core 2 CPUs to arrive. Sure the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is now up for grabs, but to come with its "Extreme" branding is an extreme price tag to match.

It's been a little uncertain as to when the more affordable refined Core 2 offerings will arrive, but the latest news has it that we should see some action come January 20 next year.

It is said that this will be the day we see 45nm chips roll out with price tags as low as $169, and that if previous rumours hold true we will see no less than nine chips hit the market. The lineup will comprise three quad-core models coming clocked in at 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, and 2.83GHz; four dual-core chips ranging from 2.66GHz to 3.16GHz and a couple more not yet clarified.

News from Transcend today has it they've just added a new MP3 player to their T.sonic series. Dubbed the T.sonic™ 650, this is a very compact little player available in two styles/capacities; there's the 2GB model which uses an Ivory coloured casing, and also a 4GB model which is charcoal in colour.

Features-wise isn't at all lacking; it sports FM radio with 20 station presets, voice recording, playback of several mainstream file formats, sleep timer, seven equalizer effects, variable track playback speeds, lyrics synchronization abilities and more.

You can find the PR here for full details folks.

You have already seen how Nvidia's upcoming G92 based GeForce 8800GTS 512MB graphics card performs in stock and overclocked conditions in the past week here at TweakTown.

Nvidia has gone a step further and confirmed its specs a full one week ahead of its launch. Below is a screenshot from the Nvidia website in case they take it down.

Information has recently surfaced about Intel's plans for its new 4 series chipsets to be released in Q2 of 2008. These include the onboard graphics supporting G45 and G43, which are to be paired with the ICH10/R southbridge.

Both are DX10 compatible and carry the Vista premium logo certification. Each also will have embedded support to output HDMI, DVI, Display-Port and SDVO video up to 1080p. There is no info currently available about clock speeds and the only disguising feature between both is that the G43 lacks hardware AC1 and H.264 decoding.

During IDF Taipei this year we did manage to speak to an Intel chap about these parts and he mentioned this is the time you can expect to see Intel make a better showing in game performance but of course judging on history, that would seem a big call. Only time will tell.

During a recent press conference in London, OQO announced their brand new model e2 UMPC with one important change - the inclusion of HSDPA support!

Expansys are already selling the revamped model with mobile Internet access via your SIM for £1,286.29 (including tax). It is on pre-order, so you may have to wait a little for them to ship.

Super Talent just announced their latest product, a 256GB solid state drive using the Serial ATA interface.

Up until now the biggest solid state drives available on the market were 128GB but Super Talent tells us that these products are sampling now and they are ready to ship to their OEM customers worldwide.

Although we're a couple of days late with covering the new mini PC from Asus which goes under the name of Nova P22, we can bring you the first picture taken of it, straight from the Taipei IT Month show. Well, to call it a show isn't quite fair, as it's more of a computer faire, as everything is on sale. It opened on Saturday and the show goes on for nine days and it held at the same location as Computex.

It was very crowded on opening day and busier than Computex as the show is open to the general public and there's no admission fee. It's not as big as Computex though, as it's limited to two of the halls instead of all four. There wasn't much new to see, since this isn't a launch event for most companies, although Microsoft soft launched the Xbox 360 Arcade in Taiwan at the show.