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HP launched no less than nine new compact digital cameras today, an extensive new line up to say the least. The one that looks the most striking is the new Photosmart R937, as it has a rather odd looking centre mounted lens and a 3.6-inch touch screen display. It also features an 8Mega pixel sensor, anti-shake mode, 32MB of built in memory and 3x optical zoom. It's expected to cost around US$300 when it arrives in August.

Next up is the Photosmart R847 which shares the 3x optical zoom 8Mega pixel sensor, 32MB of built in memory and the anti-shake mode, but doesn't have a touch screen. It should retail for around $230, also in August.

Then we have the entry level Photosmart E337 which is a basic 5 Mega pixel point and shoot model with a 1.5-inch display and 16MB of internal memory. At $80 this is quite a bargain, but don't expect too much from it. It will be available from next month.

The people behind The Piratebay have launched a new image hosting service, bayimg and it is meant to be complete free from censoring. If this is a good or a bad thing is a matter of how you look at it, but it also means it will be hard for any big corporate pressure to remove content. However, they do reserve the right to remove illegal images.

The bayimg hosting service supports 140 different image file formats as well as ZIP and RAR archives. File size is limited to 100MB per file, but if you upload an archive, an album is automatically created for it and you get a URL for the whole album.

There are also options for automatic resizing of your pictures to a wide range of standard resolutions.

Creative has added another MP3 player to its range of products, the Zen Stone Plus. The main differences between it and the original Zen Stone are the addition of a tiny round OLED display, an FM radio and an extra Gigabyte of memory.

The OLED display features a blue backlight and has a resolution of 64 x 64 pixels, enough for basic track info, but not much more. The 2GB of memory should be able to fit around 500 MP3's or 1,000 WMA's according to Creative.

The battery life is rated at around 9.5h, which isn't bad considering the original Zen Stone is rated at 10h. Somehow Creative has also managed to decrease the weight by 4 grams, not a bad feat at something that only weighs 21 grams to start with.

Transcend have announced some new Ultra-Speed models to their "JetFlash" range of USB flash drives this week, these being the JetFlash 160, 168, 110 and 2A series.

All of these new models use quality dual Hi-Speed SLC NAND Flash chips which are capable of a max read and write speed of 30MB/s and 25MB/s respectively. As such, they are also suited to the Windows ReadyBoost feature in Vista.

Each of the models can be had in 2, 4 and 8GB capacities, with a 16GB capacity also available with the JetFlash 2A variant.

Alienware has started to offer its P2 chassis as a barebones option, for a whopping US$399. It's really quite amazing that no-one has thought about this before, but it seems like Alienware is selling the most expensive case ever.

This is a limited time offer and you can only choose between Silver and Black. The P2 case is an extended ATX case, so it should fit just about anything apart from some larger dual or quad CPU boards.

Seagate's Cheetah series of enterprise SCSI hard disks are reknowned for their sheer awesome performance, spinning at 15,000RPM. But as of today there is a new type of Cheetah hard drive now available; Seagate call it the Cheetah NS, which when first glancing over the specs it oddly spins at just 10,000RPM.

The reason for this is that Seagate deliberately backed off the drive's spindle speed for the sole reason of reducing power consumption (given most of these drives end up running in 24/7 servers which dont utilize all of that 15,000RPM more than 90% of their working life).

The NS series Cheetah has a rather large 400GB capacity (for a SCSI drive) across four platters, and is reported to consume around 34% less power at idle and 33% less during normal operation over Seagate's native 10K RPM drives.

Sparkle have just kicked off a budget oriented GeForce 8500 GT graphics card with a clearly noticable difference. The new Calibre P850LV has a neatly positioned daughter card attached to it which displays real-time GPU and PCB temperatures via its 3bit digital tube display. You can switch between the two temperatures manually.

Sparkle knew not to stop there though, they also made the card stand out some more with its overclocked 650MHz core, 1300MHz shader and 1600MHz mem clock speeds, along with a unique looking cooling solution to boot.

I guess it just comes down to the price now (not yet known), being an entry-level card I cant imagine many people forking out much more for it over a standard 85GT, otherwise the more tempting option would be to simply move to a bigger/faster card no doubt.

The latest Walkman phones from SonyEricsson are some seriously feature packed handsets. The two new models are the W910 and W960i and they're both 3G handsets. Apart from this and the Walkman functionality, the two aren't exactly close relatives, as they have quite distinct features.

Let's start with the W910i, of which some spy shots leaked out last month. The good news is that it won't be available in orange, instead it will come in red or black. It's a slider and it has a Sony M2 memory card slot and comes with a 1GB memory card in the box. It has a 2.4-inch 320x240 display and you can change tracks in the music player application by pressing the Walkman button and flicking the phone. It does quad-band GSM with GPRS and EDGE and it also adds HSDPA. Around the back is a 2Mega pixel camera and there's a front mounted camera for video calls.

As you might have noticed, AMD has moved to a new naming scheme with the latest Athlon X2 BE-2xxx processors. So what does the new letters and numbers mean? Well, it's not as hard as you think and AMD has given it some thought.

The first letter will be G, B or L, G being a premium product, B an intermediate product and finally L is for entry level value processors. The second letter is related to power consumption. P is for processors over 65W, S for parts around 65W and finally E for those under 65W. It wouldn't have hurt to have a few more categories, but it seems like AMD is trying to keep it simple.

AMD will have four families once the Phenom launches, although the Athlon and Sempron brands will be kept for a little while longer. This means that a 1000-series CPU will be a single core Athlon or Sempron, the 2000-series is a dual core Athlon, then there's a jump to the 6000-series which is the dual-core Phenom and this is followed by the 7000-series which is the quad-core Phenom.

According to the Inquirer, AMD has four new desktop chipsets coming out this year. The top of the range model here being the RD790 which we reported about from Computex last week. As you probably already know, this is the next CrossFire chipset and it supports PCI Express 2.0 which allows for 150 Watts of power per PCI Express slot. This chipset will come out for socket AM2+ and 1207+.

The next version down is the RX780 which is the mainstream version of the RD790, but without CrossFire support. What's missing here is the RD780, which is a cut down version of the RD790 with support for CrossFire but it is limited to x8 bandwidth per card. The Inquirer should double check their roadmaps before missing out a key chipset like this one. So the total is actually five, not four, so if you thought our headline was a type, then we're sorry to dissapoint you.

Next up we have two integrated graphics models, the RS740 which is a DX9 part and the RS780, which is a DX10 part with support for UVD. All the above chipsets will be paired with the current SB600 or the upcoming SB700 depending on AMD getting the new southbridge done on time. Remember the delays of the SB600?

As first discussed here at TweakTown, Diamond Multimedia today announced they are first out with their Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT, which comes with 1GB of GDDR-4 memory.

We are unsure on clock speeds at this stage but we have emailed the folks at Diamond and are awaiting a response - we will update this post shortly.

UPDATE: Diamond got back to us and let us know there will be two versions of the 1GB card. One with 745MHz core / 2000MHz DDR memory and the souped up version with 825MHz core and 2100MHz DDR memory.

Remember the original Razer Boomslang mouse? If you don't, then you might not be all that excited about the 2007 collector's edition of the Boomslang, but Razer will have it out in time for DreamHack Summer this year. The Boomslang was the first real gaming mouse for FPS games, but it wasn't to everyones taste. It used a ball and was higly sensitive compared to other mice back then.

The 2007 collectors edition will be a limited run of 10,000 units and will feature a titanium finish and it will have a green under glow as well as a green scroll wheel. There's no mention if the collectors edition will use a ball or if it has been given an upgrade to a laser sensor. Nor has Razer released any price information.

Up until this week, DivX Inc. specialised soley in software with its excellent mpeg4 compression algorithm. But a posting on the DivX Labs website today reveals information relating to beta tester signups for a (now not so) secret project.

So far whats known is that they are working on producing a dedicated hardware device for streaming media, this dubbed the "GejBox;-)". Engadget have posted up some pictures and info on it here, but they also comment that it's most probable this device wont actually hit the market (at least in its current form).

The Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI-e has finally arrived, although it's only an OEM card so far as it doesn't come in a retail box. It looks rather basic with support for 7.1-channel analogue outputs and optical S/PDIF in and out. This card doesn't seem to have support for any of the upgrade options that the current X-Fi cards have and the audio processor looks like it comes from the newer entry level cards.

The blue PCB also makes it look more like he entry level products, as the higher end cards are using a black PCB. It also seems to lack support for some of the more advanced audio features, again akin with the lower end models. Interestingly it seems to have a standard connector for case mounted audio connectors, so it would be easy to use this card with the front audio connectors on your case. At US$65, it is priced quite reasonable and it ships with Windows Vista drivers.

Toshiba is first out with a notebook based on the new 8700M GT GPU from Nvidia and it looks like a real stunner. Apart from the new GPU which Toshiba has paired with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, the Dynabook Satellite WXW also features a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor clocked at 2GHz as well as either 1 or 2GB of DDR2 RAM. It's based on the Intel PM965 chipset and comes with a 120GB SATA hard drive. It has a 17-inch widescreen display with a native resolution of 1,680x1,050.

There's also a built in TV-tuner, a Super Multi DVD drive, HDMI and a 1.3Mega pixel web camera. Other features include an Express Card 54 slot, a multi format card reader for SD, SDHC, MMC, xD and MemoryStick, S/PDIF out, and a four pin FireWire port. It has no less than six USB 2.0 ports and it does of course have support for 802.11 a/b/g wireless networking and Gigabit Ethernet. A finger print reader is also part of the package.

Nvidia has launched its latest mobile GPU, the 8700M GT, which is its top of the range GPU in the GeForce 8M series, for now. It has 32 stream processors, just as the 8600M GT, but the core clock is up from 475MHz of the 8600M GT to 625MHz. The shader clock has been increased from 950MHz to 1,250MHz and the memory has also been given a boost from 700MHz to 800MHz. Nvidia is also using something it calls dual-rank 128-bit memory, although we're not quite sure what this does at the time of writing this, but it sounds like some kind of dual channel memory interface. It can be paired with up to 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

The memory bandwidth is up from 22.4GB/s to 25.6GB/s and the texture fill rate has been improved from 7.6 billion instructions per second to 10 billion instructions per second. The 8700M GT is between 27 and 70 per cent faster than the older 7950 GS mobile part. It is manufactured at an 80nm processor and has a TDP of 35W. It features PureVideo HD and Nvidia's PowerMizer technology.

MSI has launched a new overclockable notebook today, the Turbobook GX600 Extreme Edition. It has MSI's Turbo Drive Engine Technology that with a simple press of a button when the notebook is attached to a wall socket and the CPU and system bus will be overclocked by up to 20%. MSI also claims that it takes a mere 40 seconds to boot up the GX600 when in Turbo mode. The GX600 is based on the Intel PM965 chipset and will be offered with a range of Core 2 Duo processor options.

The graphics chipset comes from Nvidia and is an 8600M GT with 512MB of graphics memory. The system will also have 2GB of RAM, although this can be expanded to 4GB. A wide range of hard drives will be offered from 80 to 250GB. The optical drive will either be a Super Multi DVD or an HD DVD drive. Sadly the 15.4-inch display is limited to 1,280x800 resolution which feels a little bit too low on a powerful notebook like this.

CoolIT Systems have entered the market with a bang, producing the first reference series liquid cooling solution which is capable of keeping HD 2900 XTs in CrossFire configuration mighty cool (providing for very nice overclocks).

The system itself is a rather clever factory sealed maintainence free single slot design.

As we prepare and setup our booth at Computex Taipei 2007, we were joined by our friend Coolaler who did some initial LN2 overclocking at our booth in Hall 1. Using a GIGABYTE P35 DDR-3 board and Intel Core 2 Duo 6850 processor, we managed an initial OC of 5.4GHz (600 x 9) at around -125c. Keep in mind, thi was done in a less than ideal environment - there is no air con on at the moment and we expect things to only get better throughout the week.

This resulted in a high detail 3DMark01 run of around 85,000 with stock clocked HD 2900 XT in Crossfire mode, which ranks us about 4th for world records, even at this early time. Tomorrow and throughout the week we will tweak the system (no OC to VGA or RAM so far) and try and break some records as we push things further. We are rock stable at 600MHz FSB, so after some tender love and care, we should be able to crank out around 5.6GHz.

TweakTown takes on Computex Taipei 2007 with huge media presence

TAIPEI, TAIWAN - Friday June 1st 2007 - TweakTown, one of the worlds's most respected and trusted online computer publications in Asia and the world is set to make a big splash at Computex Taipei 2007. TweakTown will host a one of a kind media party on Monday evening attended by top media and manufacturers. The party will be assisted by a demonstration machine running DDR-3 memory at over 2000MHz on an Intel P35 motherboard. Cool new hardware and software will be given away to members of the press as they celebrate the beginning, of what many say, is the most important computer trade show in the world.

TweakTown will rock the socks off Hall 1 as it showcases a highly overclocked liquid nitrogen system featuring Intel Core 2 QX6850 quad-core processor, Intel P35 DDR-3 based GIGABYTE GA-P35T-DQ6 motherboard, Corsair DDR-3 1333MHz DHX memory and GIGABYTE Radeon HD 2900 XT in Crossfire. OCZ power the show with their ProXStream 1000-watt power supply. The booth will be joined by famous guest Taiwanese overclocker Coolaler who will take things to the absolute limit, live at the show, for all to see. World record holders might want to hold onto their hats, as we attempt to break records!