ASRock has kindly allowed us an exclusive sneak peek at its upcoming M3A790GXH/128M motherboard which uses the new AM3 socket with Hyper-Transport 3.0 and carries DDR3 memory support!

Using the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipsets, the board is backward compatible with existing AM2+/AM2 processors and makes use of DDR3 1333/1066/800 memory across four DIMM slots with up to 16GB max capacity.

The now extremely unpopular government in Australia * is planning to launch a trial of its P2P filtering over the Christmas holidays.

To call the filtering idea bad is describe an axe murder as a mild social deviation. When first announced the filter was supposed block access to illegal content such as pornography involving minors. Now it has bloomed into what can only be described as a Film and TV industry driven fiasco.

Despite public disapproval, the warnings of security experts on the dangers of the filters used and the sheer pointlessness of filtering on this scale. The live pilot will go through.

Sometimes being first out with a product is not a good thing. ECS in a rush to get back in the limelight has just announced an AMD AM3 DDR3 mainboard.

This board that will feature the 790GX chipset and the SD750 will be in a class by itself for some time as there are not going to be any DDR3 capable Phenom IIs for a couple of months.

Still ECS can claim they had it first.

Engadget has caught a glimpse of HP's Voodoo-designed Firebird 803 tower PC and it's quite the interesting looking unit indeed. Unlike the monster-ish Blackbird 002, this system is a much more streamlined, compact arrangement whilst still being marketed as a "gaming tower".

The weird yet sleek design of the chassis flips the disc drive and other internal components sideways to keep its width to an absolute minimum. The power supply is also external to the main box to assist in further space saving (and deals with potential heat problems this way as well). The downside is its expansion possibilities are minimized by running this design and pretty much what you get out of the box is what you're limited to.

Some early benchmarking results of AMD's yet to be officially released Phenom II series processors have surfaced on the web which give a good indication of the expected performance characteristics.

A fellow by the name of coolice over at Malaysian tech site BreakTheLimit has somehow gotten hold of a Phenom II X4 940 processor and puts it through its paces at its stock speed of 3GHz in a wide array of tests, including Super Pi 1M and 32M, Cinebench R10, PiFast Multithreaded, WPrime 1.5, Aquamark and 3DMark06.

We've heard and seen a lot about NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce 295 dual-GPU graphics card recently, but little has been mentioned about the next flagship single-GPU offering; the GeForce GTX 285. We know that the card is based on NVIDIA's refined 55nm G200b core and apparently it runs identical specs to the existing GTX 280s, but will come in with higher reference clock speeds yet eats less power.

Now we get to see a bit more about how this relates in real world terms with ChipHell scoring two slides from NVIDIA which show a few of the GTX 285's specs and some benchmark results of the card up against an existing GTX 280 on a Core i7 platform across a series of gaming tests.

The gang over at Psystar are grabbing at straws lately. They have been in an ongoing legal battle with the Mighty Apple over their Apple Clones and now have come up with a very interesting legal argument.

Psystar's lawyers are claiming that Apple never properly copyrighted OSX.

Now there is an entry in the U.S. Copyright database but the date of filing is January 2008. If this is accurate it could be a big blow to Apple as (for the most part) you cannot copyright something after the fact and then sue someone using it.

It looks like there is a new Bug in SQL server that can allow for remote detonation of the server. Well ok not detonation but this newly discovered flaw can allow for remote execution of code.

According to MSA (Microsoft Security Advisory)961040, the flaw affects SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 (with SP 2 or lower) SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, MSDE 2000, WMSDE, and Windows Internal Database.

SQL 7.0 With SP4, 2005 with SP3 and SQL Server 2008 are not affected.

With launch of the GTX 295 comes new drivers. As of right now these drivers are meant for the early testers of the GTX 295 but as is usually the case they have found their way out into the wilds of the internet for the masses to play around with. There do not seem to be an XP version as of yet though

If you want to take a look at them you can head over to TechConnect and grab your preferred flavor here.

We recently saw a swarm of pre-release tidbits hit the web about NVIDIA's upcoming dual-GPU monster, the GTX 295. However, there were a fair number of restrictions in place as to just what was allowed to be revealed about the card's characteristics and performance at the time.

XFastest does away with all that and goes the full hog, getting hold of not one, but two GTX 295s, pairing them up on a Core i7 965 EE based system and slamming out some Quad SLI results using 3DMark Vantage.