We managed to get hold of exclusive pictures of the upcoming GIGABYTE P55A-UD7 motherboard. It's labeled as "EXTREME" at the moment, but that's because it's not the final shipping product.

From what we heard from our source, "UD7" is the new name to replace the "EXTREME Series" that GIGABYTE used with a couple of its recent products. Without knowing for sure, we would say that "UD7" is the new name because of the tremendous popularity of the new Windows 7 operating system. It's all about the number seven right now.

So, what's new here and why do we need yet another extreme high-end motherboard from GIGABYTE? Presently the P55A-UD6 is the top dog from the Taiwanese motherboard maker, but the UD7 will introduce some important features for those looking to get full performance out of their Intel P55 Express based Core i5 or i7 Lynnfield system.

MSI, together with HWBOT's support are hosting the Xtreme Speeder MSI P55 Online Overclocking Competition from November 15 through December 13 and MSI are being mighty generous with the prizes on offer.

MSI breaks the competition into three categories for overclockers to attempt domination in; these being CPU-Z, SuperPi 32M and Wprime 32M. The top three overall overclockers will walk away with USD 2000, 1500 and 1000 respectively, whilst the champion from each category will earn him/herself USD 1000 plus the chance to pick up another 500 if the world record is broken.

Further information about the competition and other prizes up for grabs can be found within the official PR here. The official competition page with further information and details on how to enter can be found here.

Just yesterday we told you that we felt the news of NVIDIA grabbing up ex-Transmeta employees was all about Tegra and not about an x86 CPU. Well today we hear some more interesting news about Tegra, well more to the point its successor Tegra 2.

With news flying around that NV has a major design win by getting the Tegra into the next Nintendo DS we now hear more about what will be under the hood of the Tegra 2. Of course we have been told a little about the new Tegra 2 and have talked about it before. So the news that there will be at least one ARM Cortex 9 under stuffed inside is nothing new. Where things get interesting is the information we have on the GPU side of things.

As NV pushes Cuda and PhysX we are hearing that Tegra 2 will have Dual GPUs (GeForce 9 based). This will either be for "SLI-Like" performance or as PPU to allow for a mobile PhysX library to be utilized. We feel that latter is more likely. Remember the GF9 series was the first to support Cuda and PhysX on the GPU. In fact at the last press briefing in back in August we were told that Tegra 2 would be capable of 4x the processing power at the same power draw! At the same time the Tegra 2 was listed as launching in 2010 so it looks like things are right on track there.

The Xbox 360's aging and overpriced 802.11g based wireless adapter is about to be widely replaced by a new 802.11n capable model, as discovered on Costco's online store in which it is currently at a slightly discounted price of $88.

The new model has two antennas for superior signal quality and transfer speeds. Also, the wireless N speeds should give users the ability to wirelessly stream 1080p content from the upgraded Zune movies collection without a hitch.

Costco has said the adapter is scheduled for shipment as of November 10.

You know, NVIDIA is a funny company. It was only a couple of days ago that they were complaining that Intel is being anti-competitive with their chipsets and are purposely holding out on putting USB 3.0 in them until 2011 and even claiming that Intel is preventing others from putting it in theirs (NVIDIA and AMD). Yet at the same time they are doing this they are blocking the use of AA by AMD based GPUs through the use of Vendor IDs and now we hear they are going to block the use of the Lucid Logic Hydra chip.

This new chip was set to set the world of multi-GPU technology on its ear. Lucid had developed a chip that would enable multi-GPU performance on any combination of GPUs; even different brands. MSI was going to be the first to have this out of the gate on their Big Bang board.

All of this is in the past now as we hear that NV will block the Hydra Chip at the driver level on their GPUs. They also appear to have exerted some pressure on MSI to delay the launch of the Hydra Sporting Big Bang boards. Considering that there are rumors that MSI has laid off a large number of employees they probably do not want to push NVIDIA too far on this. AMD has not commented on the Lucid and its use with their cards.

Ah the x86 rumor mill has begun to rumble again. It seems that people are talking of NVIDIA making an x86 CPU of their own. This time the rumor centers around the hiring of some of the staff from the now gone Transmeta . Now while this hiring of the brains capable of creating an x86 CPU from the makers of Crusoe might be true, there is one nagging problem.

NVIDIA has no x86 license. They could have all the x86 talent in the world and not be able to produce anything. So while the information about NVIDIA hiring Transmeta staff is very interesting we do not feel it is x86 related. More likely this staff would go into the Tegra SoC section. Remember that one of the biggest things about Crusoe was that it has amazing power management. The Crusoe was more power efficient than just about any other CPU available at the time. So it would be this talent and expertise that NVIDIA is probably after.

Remember NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has already made it clear they want Tegra to be 50% of NVIDIA's revenue in the coming years. This means they need to continually offer more performance with a lower power envelope to make Tegra more attractive than it already is. So far Tegra has a small market penetration with a grand total of two devices available for consumers (the US only Zune HD and an EU only MID) at the time of this writing. There are at least four more in the pipe and coming soon with more companies waiting until they see success with the current products before they sign on.

When it comes to ultraportables, GIGABYTE like to make sure they're offering something different to capture one's attention. Not unlike their Booktop M1022, the new 1305 also comes with a desktop docking station which gives the notebook a GeForce GT 220 GPU to play with and 1GB of DDR3 memory.

The netbook itself sports a 13.3-inch screen running a res of 1,366 x 768 and uses Intel's CULV processor. Up to 4GB of RAM can be added to the machine, a 500GB HDD and an optical drive. The full feature set is quite wholesome with a combo eSATA/USB port, two USB, HDMI, Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and WiFi b/g/n, vGA out, multi-format card reader, 1.3 megapixel webcam and fingerprint reader.

As for the included docking station, that gets six USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI and DVI video outputs, gigabit ethernet and audio in/out, along with that NVIDIA graphics card of course. The standard M1305 battery is a 6-cell 3,800mAh pack which Gigabyte claim is good for up to 6.5hrs of runtime; you can also swap out the optical drive for a secondary battery adding another 4hrs.

There is a new batch of information out on Intel and USB 3.0. Today it is an e-mail that was sent to TG Daily. Somehow the line "We [have also] learned that Intel is postponing USB 3 introduction until 2011" has become a confirmation of a delay of USB 3.0 by Intel.

We contacted Intel to ask them and were told they have not announced any delay and that the delay talked about on TGDaily was a rumor. Now that does not always cover the issue, just because a company has not announced a delay does not mean there is not going to be one.

There are a couple of issues behind this one. Intel was one of the authors behind the XHCI specification and need USB 3.0 for LightPeak. On the surface it would seem to show that there would be no reason to delay the release of USB 3.0 in a chipset. The other is that NVIDIA is currently in a legal battle with Intel over their manufacture of chipset for Nehalem, Lynnfield and future CPUs that do not use FSB.

There's a bit of a stir happening over at the Hexus forums at the moment between NVIDIA spokesperson Lars Weinand and AMD's Richard Huddy, responsible as Worldwide Developer Relations Manager for AMD's GPU Division.

The discussion relates to Eidos' game title Batman Arkham Asylum in which AA support using ATI based graphics cards is not possible. NVIDIA's Lars Weinand says :-

"Batman AA is not our property. It is owned by Eidos. It is up to Eidos to decide the fate of a feature that AMD refused to contribute too and QA for their customers, not NVIDIA.