Danish specialist gaming accessory maker SteelSeries has launched it long awaited 7G series keyboard and it had been designed specifically for professional and competitive gamers. SteelSeries claims that it has the most powerful PS/2 buffer system ever created and it allows you to press every single key on the keyboard simultaneously. It's meant to reduce any ghosting effects that you can get with regular keyboards which tend to result in a kind of lag.

Each of the keys features a gold plated mechanical switch and a 50 million operation life time. SteelSeries claims that this gives the 7G an edge for gamers as it offers more actions per minute than any other keyboard in the world. Any takers? All keys also operated at 60g with a travel time which is meant to be about 50 percent faster than other competing products.

We happened upon a few pictures of a somewhat different Radeon HD 3850 card from a Chinese manufacturer that we're not familiar with and we can't really make out the name, as it's only in Chinese, although the card also says Zero on it, but if this is the brand, then we're still not familiar with the company behind this card.

What makes this card so different is the fact that an onboard HDMI connector, rather than relying on a DVI to HDMI converter commonly used on ATI cards. This could be an advantage in tight spaces, as you don't need to make room for those extra couple of centimetres that the dongle takes up.

Though still in beta status, NVIDIA have made available their latest ForceWare 169.09 drivers today; these are particularly Crysis happy as they add full SLI support to the game, fix a major water reflection bug and also add Control Panel anisotropic filtering support.

Running Crysis in SLI should now yield a 40 to 50% increase in overall performance, and an upcoming patch from Crysis is said to push SLI performance even further again.

Thermaltake have reached new heights in the PSU market this week, announcing the world's first NVIDIA SLI Certified "1500W" power supply, this as a member of their Toughpower series.

With four 6-pin and four 8-pin PCIe power connectors, this PSU is suited to beefed up systems with next-gen quad-graphics card arrangements. The PSU is of modular design and sports four individual +12V rails as well as an efficiency level of over 85%. A 140mm dual ball bearing fan is used to cool the monster.

For further information on it, you can read the official announcement here or head straight to the product page on Thermaltake's website.

Intel is working on a new platform for ultra low cost computers for what the company refers to as the "Next Billion Users". This was talked about at IDF Taiwan earlier this year, although no real information about this new platform was revealed. HKEPC has now managed to get some further information on this new platform and it will go under the name of Shelton.

Although the first product is already available and it's the D301GLY2 motherboard you can see below which is using the SIS671 chipset. Intel is planning to use its own 945GC chipset in the future and it will be paired up with the Diamondville processor. The CPU will be soldered onto the motherboard to reduce cost, but it also limits any possible upgradability of these low cost machines.

AMD's new platform codenamed Spider has made its way onto the internet and it looks like quad CrossFireX is on the menu. The pictured system contains an RD790FX based board with a Phenom processor of unknown speed, but most importantly, it has four Radeon HD 3850 cards in it.

The system appears to be all up and running, but we wouldn't bet on the fact that the quad CrossFireX setup is working properly, bridges connected or not. We're also curious as with regards to how the first and the last cards communicate with each other, as there's no direct connection between the two, unlike Nvidia's three-way SLI which connects all three cards together.

There doesn't seem to be anything stopping Asus from releasing a multitude of X38 boards and the latest addition is the P5E64 WS Professional. This board differs slightly from the previous workstation offerings by having four x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots. It's targeting a very small and specialized market, those that need more than four displays connected to the one and the same PC. It might actually work with four-way CrossFireX as well, but the future will have to tell that story.

The board features a PCI Express switch, which splits the 32 lanes of PCI Express bandwidth into four, which means that each x16 slot ends up with x8 bandwidth. There's also a single open ended x4 slot, but this one is not PCI Express 2.0 compatible, as well as a pair of PCI slots. But the special features of the board don't stop here as Asus has also implemented something it calls the G.P. Diagnosis card.

OOooooh looky here folks! Seems retailers are starting to jump the gun on AMD's yet to be officially released HD 3800 series graphics cards, these based on the highly anticipated next-gen RV670 GPU.

Aussie retailer TEK CORP has listed GECUBE's HD 3870 card on their site with a full rundown of the specifications along with pricing, a quite reasonable $358.00 AU. ITSky has followed suit and listed the same card on their site, though for a whole dollar more.

American website Buy.com has disregarded the official launch date as well, posting up U.S. pricing for both a HD 3850 and HD 3870 card.

It appears that Sony did indeed change the CPU in the new 40GB version of the PS3 to a 65nm chip after all, despite what you might've read earlier. It took a while for Sony to admit to doing so, but Kazuo Hirai, the president of SCEI came clean and said that the Cell Broadband Engine in the 40GB model is indeed produced using a 65nm process.

The story started in Japan with some journalists noticing a much lower power usage of the 40GB model, although Sony did initially deny that there were any new chips in the latest revision of the console. However, now the company has come clean and although the Cell processor has had its die shrunk, the RSX graphics chip remains at 90nm.

The Japanese website Impress PC Watch has stripped one of the new consoles and they've also done some power testing. The old model draws 170W at boot, while the new model only draws 117W. During DVD playback we're looking at 198 versus 140W and playing Ridge Racer 7 the old model draws 191W while the new model only draws 136W. It seems strange that the PS3 draws more power during DVD playback than when you're playing games though.

What appears to be a brand new review site has got its hands on a pair of ATI Radeon HD 3870 cards and they've put the cards through their paces to see how well they perform in CrossFire. The cards are apparently clocked at 777MHz for the core and 2,252MHz for the memory. These aren't exactly the expected stock speeds, but at least it's not far off.

They've kindly dissected one of card for everyone's viewing pleasure as to show you what the card looks like without all that plastic and metal on top. The test system specs are very vague at best, the site used the 7.10 Catalyst drivers as well as the brand new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU, but apart from that very few details are available. It looks as if the cards are on a board that was only capable of dual x8 PCI Express, at least that's what showing on one of the driver screenshot pages, but it's a PCI Express 2.0 board.

The benchmarks for the CrossFire setup are limited to 3DMark06, but there are also some Crysis numbers from a single card. We're looking at scores of 12,590 3DMarks for a single card, while two cards in CrossFire manages 20,383, compared to 13,837 for a single 8800 GT at 1,280x1,024. At no time does the single card outperform the 8800 GT in 3DMark06, although it seems like this is a very limited review, as no other resolution was used.

In celebration of having turned 20 years old this year, Kingston have kicked off their "Totally Awesome 20th Anniversary" contest today, this exclusive to TweakTown!

There's a fantastic lineup of goodies up for grabs; these including Apple iPods, Kingston HyperX series memory modules, Kingston DataTraveler flash drives and much more.

Update: It was originally thought that what I was looking at here was an all-passive cooler for the 8800GT graphics card; this was a mistake of interpretation from the images provided without taking the time to fully understand what this product is.

Stupidly, I failed to note the 'Aqua' in their company name as being indicative of what this product actually is. This is NOT a passive cooler as first thought, rather an aftermarket *waterblock*.

I sincerely apologise for inaccurately reporting the details of this product, and as a news writer for TweakTown who takes a lot of pride in his pieces, I am amazed that I have made such a big mistake here.

MadboxPC has posted a leaked presentation from AMD covering the upcoming RV670 cards and it looks like most of the already known details are in it. We're talking US$150-250 pricing and the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 cards. There's also a slide that contains a Radeon HD 3870 X2 card and this could possibly be the product that has been known as the R670 or R680 depending on who you listen to.

There's a lot of information about the apparent advantage of DirectX 10.1 although time will tell how important these features really are. Energy consumption also seems to be important to AMD with the RV670 drawing some 50 percent or less power than the R600 or Radeon HD 2900 XT. There's also a lot of talk about AMD's PowerPlay technology and how it now can be adopted to draw less power even in-game.

There aren't a lot of benchmark figures, but the one graph that's on there puts the 3870 just in front of the 2900 XT. The 3850 is some 15 percent slower than the 2900 XT. The benchmarks were done on an Athlon 64 X2 6400+, 2GB of RAM and an RD790 board under Windows Vista 64-bit, so the results need to be taken with a bit of caution.

uy.com is listing an AMD Radeon HD 3870 card for pre-order on its website for pre-order and it's apparently from Best Data which is the company behind Diamond Multimedia. There's no picture of the card an there are very few specs up, but the card will have GDDR4 memory and support for HDMI. It will most likely be a reference design for now and it's listed to have two DVI ports.

The pricing is quite high at US$268.99, especially considering that the MSRP is meant to be US$249 or possibly less. It looks like the online retailers are already trying to cash in on this unreleased product, which is not unusual. With the current shortage of GeForce 8800 GT cards on the market, AMD might have a chance if the company has cards ready to go on the launch day.

Zotac arn't one of the first brands that comes to mind in the mainstream graphics card market, but it seems they are really going all out to try and change that by releasing products that stand out from the crowd.

A clear indication of that is this beefy water-cooled 8800GT card they're working on. It's based on the stock 88GT PCB but apparently will come shipped with Samsung 1.0ns memory and Nippon Chemi-con(NCC) capacitors (both of which are a step up from the reference specs).

If the information posted on Expreview is correct, then Gainward is working on a range of in-house designs for the 8800 GT. They have pictures of two different actively cooled cards, although Gainward is apparently also working on a passively cooled card. Both of the models pictured features Gainwards own PCB and cooling designs.

The 512MB card features some rather large heatpipes sticking out of the card and it looks like the SLI connector might be blocked by this specific design. The little white connector is for S/PDIF input via a small cable and it's meant to be used in conjunction with an HDMI adapter.

E-Ten has announced that it's finally shipping the Glofiish X800 and the company also released its X600 at the same time. The X800 was shown back at Computex earlier this year, but it has taken this long for it to become available. It features a 500MHz Samsung SC3 2442 processor and it has 256MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. The screen measures 2.8-inches and has a 640x480 resolution.

It's a 3G handset which HSDPA support and it works on 2100, 1900 and 850MHz for 3G and it also works on all four GSM bands and as a backup to 3G it does GPRS class 10. Of course it also has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR.

Toshiba Japan has launched a new dynabook Satellite notebook which goes under the WXW moniker. Although it's likely to drop the dynabook branding when it arrives outside of Japan, the name isn't what's important, but rather what's on the inside. This is one of the first notebooks with a pair of GeForce 8600M GT cards in SLI which also features a Core 2 Duo mobile processor and the reasonably new Intel PM965 chipset.

The CPU is a Core 2 Duo T7700 which is clocked at 2.4GHz and this has been paired up with no less than 4GB of DDR2 memory, although it's only 667MHz modules due to some limitations when it come to available modules for notebooks at this size. Each of the graphics cards has 256MB of GDDR3 memory, although they can also use TurboCache if more is needed.

At our visit to Gigabyte yesterday we also got to see something unexpected, Gigabyte's Radeon HD 2950 prototype. The model name on the board was GV-RX295P512, although this will change before the actual launch. The P in the model name suggests Pro and since the card was using GDDR3 memory from Hynix, we presume that this is the Radeon HD 3850, although we weren't specifically told it was.

The card uses a Zalman cooler and as with the 8800 GT, Gigabyte is using their own blue PCB and the power regulation has been upgraded from a two-phase to a three-phase design. The card is quite long, especially compared to the 8800 GT, but the PCB was quite bare. The memory chips apparently don't require any additional cooling, nor should the power regulation.

We also got a picture of Gigabyte's own 8800 GT and by own, we mean full in-house design. This card is quite different to the reference design as it has done away with the large cooler and has been retro fitted with a Zalman cooler. The memory chips apparently doesn't need any cooling and the GDDR3 chips are from Qimonda and are rated at 1ns.

The card uses a Gigabyte blue PCB and it's the same quality as the PCB used in Gigabyte's motherboards. The card is also featuring a three-phase PWM design while the reference cards rely on a two-phase design. Gigabyte is also using all solid capacitors on its graphics cards.