Here is one for the books! If you've been in the PC scene for some years, you'll remember back in the day that a guy by the name of Jonathan Wendel or "Fatal1ty" as he is known in the online world by his gaming tag, made some of the best gaming motherboards on the market with the once king we knew as ABIT.

Fast forward several years. I get a call from ASRock earlier this week saying that they have a special guest in town and I should come out to their office for an interview. Of course, that special guest from the US was Fatal1ty. He is in town to introduce his new Fatal1ty P67 Professional gaming motherboard exclusively to us here at TweakTown.

The Fatal1ty product team decided to work with ASRock after discussions started back at CeBIT in Germany earlier this year. Development has been on-going for the past two or three months and both sides are finally ready to show-off the fruits of their labor and planning. According to Jonathan and his team, ASRock was selected since they consider the Taiwanese motherboard maker "craftsman of motherboards" after inspecting its engineers and products over time.

As I started this news report, I obviously have to choose a category but what do I choose? Video cards or Networking? After reassembling my head from it exploding at the thought of something never seen before (GPU + NIC combined) I thought it was a nifty idea.

Sure, it might not sell in the millions and Visiontek won't turn into Apple overnight - but when companies look at a box and think outside of the box, it is great. Visiontek and Bigfoot have co-developed a PCI-Express x16 expansion board that features both a GPU and NIC which is being touted as the "world's first online gaming upgrade card".

The product combines an AMD Radeon HD 5770 with Bigfoot's Killer E2100 network controller and is said to be the only PCIe expansion device that combines both high-quality graphics with low-latency networking.

Last week NVIDIA kicked off an IQ wave that has hit AMD and AMD are now finding themselves having to explain their situation. Hexus has sat down with Senior Manager of Software Engineering Andy Pomianowski and Technical Marketing Manager Dave Nalasco from AMD to talk about the situation.

Dave started off saying there were some changes in the Catalyst drivers to coincide with the HD6000-series release GPU's, in which image quality was a big part of. At the center of all of this is the Catalyst AI - which controls a large range of settings via a single slider.

Responding to the feedback, the above mentioned slider has been divided into a number of different settings in the latest release - giving users more control. One of the new additions was a slider to control texture filtering which has settings for "High Quality", "Quality" and "Performance".

Google Editions, Google's book store that's been a victim of delayed releases since last summer, looks like it finally may see the light of day soon. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google Editions will open its virtual doors by the end of 2010.

What sets Google Editions apart from competitors like the Kindle sstore and the iBookStore is that users can purchase books from either Google themselves or select independent retailers. Books purchased from retailers can be tied to the user's Google account, allowing them to be accessed across any desktop or mobile device.

Google product management director Scott Dougall stated in reference to the delays, "Because of the complexity of this project, we didn't want to come out with something that wasn't thorough." The independent bookstores working with Google and the revenue sharing information are not currently available.

Asus has unveiled a new laptop based on Intel's current Core 2010 platform. The chassis is built from aluminum-magnesium alloy lid and a "nanometer coating" on the palm rest that is meant to resist fingerprints and be easy to clean.

The U36 is just 0.75" thick and weighs in at 3.2 - 3.7 lbs depending on the choice between 6 and 8-cell batteries. The 8-cell is rated for 84 Wh which Asus are claiming will achieve around 10 hours of run time for the laptop.

It also uses a standard-voltage Core i3 and i5 CPU (again, depending on model) and has a GeForce 310M discrete GPU. nVidia's Optimus graphics-switching technology is offered - which is definitely not a bad thing. Keeping in mind how thin the laptop is and it has a standard-voltage CPU a more powerful GPU would have been hard to do.

Microsoft's next-generation XBox is obviously being worked on and while the externals (the look and packaging) might be nowhere near finalised, hardware is having to be done right now and locked in with various companies with AMD looking like Microsoft's BFF for the new XBox.

The original XBox launched in 2001 with an Intel CPU and nVidia GPU. At the time it was more or less a PC in a new shell. At the time Intel complained that no money was being made from the CPU's being sold to Microsoft so they were scrubbing the entire project off as a marketing and brand awareness exercise (but we all know Intel is now the king of the CPU market, so maybe it worked?).

Microsoft not only had issues with Intel it also butted heads with nVidia - near the end of the project Microsoft asked nVidia for a list of issues raised and fixed with the hardware. nVidia refused - reportedly saying it was 'nVidia's intellectual property and not to be shared with outsiders'.

No real surprises came from Verizon's press event today. Their 4G LTE network is officially starting up in 38 cities and 60 airports across the U.S. starting December 5th. Verizon states it will cover "one third of Americans." $50 will get you 5GB of data a month while $80 a month will get you 10GB.

According to Verizon, customers can expect 5-12Mbps downstream and 2-5Mbps upstream in "real-world, loaded network environments." Current phones are not currently compatible with LTE; Verizon is making the LG VL600 USB adapter available at launch to take advantage of LTE with the Pantech UML290 coming later. More "consumer oriented" devices are expected to get some face time at CES next month. Check out the full list of covered areas after the break.

The full list of covered areas: (courtesy of Gizmodo)

When most of us want to listen to our favorite music or watch a movie, we want to hear the audio not the noise in the room around us. This is particularly true for the user that travels a lot in a car, plane, or train where things can be noisy. Noise cancelling headphones are also a great way to block out noisy spouses and kids so you can get some work done. Audio-Technica has unveiled two new sets of noise cancelling headphones.

The new offerings include the ATH-ANC27 and the ATH-ANC25. The ANC27 set claims to block up to 85% of the noise in the room around you and the ANC25 version will block up to 80% of the noise. Both headphones use active noise cancellation and use high-efficiency drivers inside. Both of the headphone models are compatible with the iPhone and iPods as well as computers and in-flight entertainment systems.

You can also turn off the noise-cancellation feature and the headphones will still work. They come with a ¼" adapter, airline adapter and the AAA battery for the noise cancellation tech. The ANC27 headphones are $99.95 and the ANC25 are $79.95 making these some of the cheapest active noise cancellation headphones around.

One of the most compelling reasons for me to upgrade to the iPhone 4 from my iPhone 3GS (other than the cracked screen on my 3GS) was that the iPhone 4 has a much better screen. The quality of the screen is one of the biggest reasons that media consuming smartphone users will use to upgrade to a new device. That is assuming that a geek needs any reason at all to upgrade other than a new device is available.

One of the largest companies in the mobile display market is Samsung Mobile Display. SMD makes screens for all sorts of smartphones and other devices and the company has unveiled a new screen technology called Super LPS that will replace current generation IPS screens. You can see from the image here that the Super PLS screen is much clearer and brighter than other screens on the market. According to SMD, the new screen is 100% better in viewing angles and 10% brighter than other screens on the market.

The best news is that despite the improved performance of the screen, it's also cheaper to build. SMD says that the screen costs 15% less to produce than IPS and other LCDs. SMD also notes that it owns 30 patents that relate to the construction of the screens. It plans to start mass production on screens using the tech in Q1 2011 and will build screens sized for the smartphone and tablet markets.

I think that more patent applications surface from Apple than any other company. Maybe it's that we only hear about the Apple ones, either way a cool new app has surfaced today that comes from Apple and shows some cool tech that we may be seeing on future Mac computers and notebooks. The patent app shows off a new version of the MagSafe cable, which is one of the coolest things about the MacBook line of notebooks in my opinion.

The MagSafe cable is familiar to many of us with the design that pops free easily if it's pulled on to keep you from catching the cord and knocking the notebook off a desk. The patent app outlines a new version of the MagSafe connector that provides the juice the notebook needs along with servicing the function of a power cable as well.

The design has a single MagSafe connector that provides power and then runs to a box that has lots of connectivity like a docking station would offer. The line art shows the adapter having an Ethernet port, USB ports, optical ports, and DVI output. One image with the app also shows the MagSafe splitting into a fiber optic cable that would be perfect for Intel's Light Peak that Apple is thought to be launching first.