iXBT has scored a picture of Nvidia's upcoming 790i based board and although it doesn't look all that special from the pictures, it has a range of new features. Although no specifications were revealed we already know a fair bit about the chipset. It will support DDR3 memory and as such Nvidia had to design a new memory controller.

The chipset will also have native PCI Express 2.0 support, although from what we've heard this will not be for all three x16 slots due to chipset limitations, but there should be some spare lanes for accessories.

Pictures of a retail Radeon 3850 have appeared on a Chinese website and they're from a China only brand as far as we know, since the company behind the card is Yeston. It's a reference card with a sticker on it, so nothing to get too excited about, but since the cards are about to launch within the next two weeks, it's good to see that manufactures have cards already.

According to the source, the card is clocked at 700MHz for the core and it has 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1,800MHz. The retail price is apparently going to be 1,699 Chinese Renmimbi which is about US$227 or AU$245.

Saitek has launched a new range of PC peripherals under the Cyborg brand, which it has used for some time for some of its gaming accessories. Although it announced the availability of the new Cyborg Command Unit, the Cyborg 5.1 Headset and the Cyborg Rumble Pad some time ago, the company has now added a Cyborg Mouse and Keyboard to the lineup.

The mouse features a 3,200dpi laser sensor which puts it right in there with the high-end gaming mice from all the big players. It has a range of fairly common features such as a pair of programmable buttons, but it also has some rather unusual ones like a four-way low profile hat switch.

Though we've recently seen that the performance of AMD's soon to be released Phenom X4 quad-core processors is looking quite underwhelming at the moment, there is one very cool feature that the platform can take advantage of and is sure to be particularly useful to enthusiasts and overclockers alike.

AMD call it "OverDrive", and it allows one to take their overclocking adjustments a step further with an array of individual settings being possible across all four cores. You can even set a different multiplier for each of the four cores, all this on the fly from within Windows.

Western Digital have managed to squeeze even more space out of 2.5" mechanical HDDs for notebooks, introducing a new monster to the masses which is capable of holding 320GB of data, though it's not the first to have reached this goal as Toshiba have already released a new 2.5" drive recently with similar specs.

This new drive tops their Scorpio series lineup and runs at 5400RPM with 8MB of cache onboard. Read seek times are reported at 12ms with a said noise level of 24dBA at idle and 26dBA during seeking.

Pricing comes in at an RRP of $199.99 and it should become available in stores anytime soon.

It seems like the cat is out of the bag as someone on a Taiwanese forum seems to have already got hold of Gigabyte's upcoming GA-780SLI-DS5 motherboard and has kindly posted a picture of the board. It looks like rather a nice board as well with support for three-way SLI among its features. Besides the three x16 slots, Gigabyte has squeezed in a single x1 PCI Express slot and two PCI slots, but neither can be used if you've got three double width cards in the board.

It seems to feature a similar I/O layout as Gigabyte's X38 boards, but it's really too hard to see from the picture, but it looks as if it has dual Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire, as well as a serial port as oddly as it might seem. There are also six USB 2.0 ports and 7.1-channel audio outputs around the back. The addition of a Gigabyte SATA controller at the back of the board suggests eSATA, but we can't be sure about this.

We had a chance to get a picture of the Albatron 8800 GT yesterday and although this was only an early Nvidia based sample, it shouldn't be long before Albatron has their own cards. There isn't really anything all that different with this card from the rest of the ones out there, but Albatron said that they'll add S/PDIF input to their card for adding audio to HDMI output.

The card features stock clock speeds at 600MHz for the core, 1,500MHz for the shaders and 1,800MHz for the memory. It will ship with a component, composite and S-Video out adapter as well as a DVI to D-sub adapter. It should be one of the cheaper 8800 GT's on the market once it becomes available.

If you're a fan of small form factor systems you're most likely familiar with Albatron's KI690-AM2 board. Although it's taken the company a while to actually get product out in the market, you can actually buy this board quite easily now, but if it's not what you've been looking for, the good news is that the company has a new board for Intel's Mobile Core 2 Duo or Celeron processors, the PI965.

It has some rather interesting features that set it apart from most other mini ITX boards of this type, as it has been designed with AV usage in mind. It has component video and DVI outputs onboard and it also has an optical S/PDIF out alongside 7.1-channel analogue outputs. The board also features dual Gigabit Ethernet and four rear USB 2.0 ports with a further four via onboard connectors.

Shuttle has got slightly delayed with the new X38 based XPC Prima SX38P2 Pro due to some minor glitches as well as some performance tuning that needs to be fixed before they want to ship the barebone. We got to have a look at the latest production model yesterday, but we didn't shoot the case, due to some changed being made to it before it will ship. Besides, the front of the P2 chassis will look the same.

As you can see from the picture above, Shuttle has added support for CrossFire and this should be a nice system to fit a pair of RV670 cards in. Shuttle has also dropped PS/2 ports on this system, although there will be an accessory cable you can buy which will add PS/2 ports if you really want it. The chipset cooling is also quite different from the current crop of XPC's and it had to be changed due to the extra heat dissipated by the X38 chipset.

The lads over at NGOHQ have stumbled across a neat little trick which supposedly allows one to tap into some DirectX 10 graphical enhancements even when confined to a DX9 GPU and/or they're using Windows XP.

It's apparently as simple as modifying some configuration files, but if you don't feel up to doing that yourself using the instructions provided, NGOHQ have kindly made available a zip file with the already modified config files.

They seem to be pretty assured of themselves it works, so for the sake of a couple minutes to update the config files give it a shot!

I've just spotted some brief details on this new GeForce 8600GTS graphics card from Sparkle over at TechConnect which has a rather interesting feature that sets itself apart from the rest.

As a member of their Calibre series this 'pimped out' version sports a GDP2 daughter card/LCD display which is able to report such information as real-time GPU temps, voltages and fan speeds. Additionally, they glamour it up a bit more by giving it a black PCB and cooler as well as increasing the shader clock from the stock 1450MHz to 1512MHz.

3G network operator 3 has announced a new Skype co-branded handset which goes under the slightly naff name of the 3 Skypephone. Nonetheless, it's a matter of what you get here that's the big deal, as it offers owners of the handset to make calls via Skype or chat with your Skype friends on the handset, for free.

Yes, you read that right, 3 is offering the Skype service for free, although there's of course a catch, although it's not as bad as you might think. Depending on the type of user you are, you either have to top up your pay as you go service with at least £10 a month (this being in the UK where the phone launches later this week) or just pay whatever contract you're on, which you'd be doing anyhow with a normal handset.

Fantastic news for all the gamers out there; one of the most anticipated FPS gaming titles for the year is almost ready to hit store shelves, that being none other than "Crysis". But what's even more exciting right now is that today the official single player demo is released for us all to try out. It's a hefty 1.8GB download but I don't doubt every single kilobyte of it will be rather rewarding.

Your favourite game demos download site will probably have it up for grabs already, but if you're struggling to find it give these links a shot :-

Although the press release hasn't been sent out as yet, we spotted the new Poseidon 310 case on Gigabyte's site today and it looks rather good. The Poseidon range is the 3DAurora's little brother and it shares many of the 3DAurora's excellent features. The design is quite appealing as well and although we're talking about a steel case here, the front is still made from brushed aluminium.

The Poseidon 310 features blue front lights, an interchangeable side panel with the option of a vented mesh or an acrylic window. It's also prepared for watercooling, especially Gigabyte's own kit. Furthermore it has a front mounted removable dust filter, anti-vibration mounts for the 120mm fans, one in the front and one in the rear, modular drive bays and tool free drive mounts.

We've just got our first 8800GT sample and it comes from MSI. We couldn't help ourselves, we just had to post a couple of pictures of the card before we started to benchmark it. The card itself isn't anything that remarkable to look at as it follows the reference design and MSI have only added a couple of stickers.

It is also clocked at the reference speeds, 600MHz for the GPU, 1,500MHz for the shaders and 1,800MHz for the memory. However, this card should be quite overclockable and we will give this a go while test the card. Check back with us on Monday for the full review.

An Australian PhD student by the name of John Papandriopoulos seems to have solved the issue of telephone copper wire being unsuitable for data communications by applying some very clever maths. He figured out that the biggest problem with telephone copper wire is the fact that you get cross talk on the lines, something which was common for voice calls back in the days before digital telephone exchanges.

His solution to the problem took over a year to complete and it is meant to reduce or even remove the crosstalk that you get on the copper wire which is shared with everyone else that connects to the same telephone exchange. This is meant to be able to boost xDSL speeds up towards 250Mbps, compared to the theoretical top speed today of about 24Mbps.

Patent applications have been filed in the US and Australia and hopefully it won't take too long for this technology to make it onto the market. Dr John Papandriopoulos also received an award for his research in the form of the Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in the PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Although information about the OLED equipped DGL-4500 gaming router from D-Link has already leaked out onto the web, the company has finally launched it and it looks like it might be worth it for serious gamers. Not only does it have four Gigabit LAN ports, but even the WAN port supports Gigabit speeds, which is great if you happen to have a really fast internet connection unlike most.

It also features Draft-N Wi-Fi and it has three removable antennas and D-Link has added an extra twist by allowing it to work on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz band with speeds of up to 300Mbit. There's a USB port on the back as well, but sadly this is not for external storage, nor will it function as a print server, as this is simply for Windows Connect Now profiles to be copied onto a USB flash drive.

Sony has just announced its latest addition to its T-series of digital cameras, the DSC-T2. It's yet another pocket camera with an 8.1 Megapixel sensor, but what makes it stand out is the fact that has 4GB of built in memory. It will also accept Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo cards just in case 4GB isn't enough for you.

On the back is a large-ish 2.7-inch touch sensitive LCD display which is used as the main controls, although there's still separate buttons for zoom and playback. This is very much a consumer camera and Sony has added easy picture and video sharing features to the camera and it even has a built in scrapbook feature.

Fujitsu has just announced its latest notebook in Australia, the LifeBook N6460 and this baby packs some serious hardware. Starting from the top, well, of the spec sheet at least that is, it comes with a Core 2 Duo T7700 processor which is clocked at 2.4GHz and has 4MB of L2 cache. This is just about as good as it gets when it comes to mobile processors at the moment, although there are a couple of faster models, but we're not going to be that picky now and they would've made this notebook even more expensive.

The N6460 also comes with 2GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM, although it supports up to 4GB. Fujitsu has also fitted a 1GB Intel Turbo Memory module to the system and it has no less than two 250GB 2.5-inch SATA drives, although sadly these are most likely only 4,200rpm drives. However, the Australian Fujitsu site doesn't list the drive speeds, so we can only go with what's available on the US site.

A Blu-ray drive is also part of the package and again we have to rely in the specs from the US website which lists the drive as a single speed Blu-ray burner that will write to both BD-R, BD-R DL, BD-RE and BD-RE DL media as well as DVD+/-R at 8x and 4x for the re-writeable versions and 2x for dual layer media. Finally it will also write to CD-R at 8x and oddly enough to CD-RW at 10x, but our guess is that the CD-R writing speed is wrong. It will of course read all those format as well.

Microsoft have just made a new update available for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista which is said to improve overall compatibility, reliability and stability of the OS.

This update improves the compatibility, reliability, and stability of Windows Vista. This update includes the following improvements and fixes:-