The Inquirer has a few pictures up of a pair of AMD's upcoming RV670 cards running in CrossFire. The pictures of the cards were snapped at the World Cyber Games in Seattle and it looks like AMD is keen to show off its new hardware. Normally you'd expect to see one card when something new like this is being shown off to the general public, but considering the perceived performance of these cards, it might not be a bad move by AMD.

The test system belonged to Sapphire and they'd got their hands on one of the brand new Thermaltake cases we wrote about last week. The motherboard is also brand new, although Theo mentions that it's Sapphire's own creation, we can tell you that it's not, it's been source from a well known performance motherboard manufacturer here in Taiwan. The RD790 board would've been an early sample as well, since the manufacturer is as far as we know not quite ready for mass production of these boards.

Leadtek has announced a new dinky graphics card for those that need something affordable with HDMI output. The good news is that the PX8500 GT TDH HDMI as Leadtek calls it, still has a DVI connector. As the model name suggests this card is based on the GeForce 8500 GT GPU and it's paired with 256MB of 128-bit DDR2 memory

The Core is clocked at 450MHz and has 16 stream engines while the memory is clocked at 800MHz. The GPU is cooled by a heatpipe and a passive heatsink which should keep the card nice and cool. It's a low profile card and this should make it a great option for home theatre PC machines.

Continue reading: Low profile HDMI 8500GT from Leadtek (full post)

Belkin has announced its new SpeedPad, the Nostromo n52te which has been co-designed with Razer, something that seems to be a popular thing to do these days. It seems like Razer has branched out from only working with Microsoft and the new SpeedPad truly looks like a gaming accessory now rather than some cheap piece of tat. The te bit in the model name stands for Tournament Edition, we're not quite sure what this reefers to, it might just be a marketing gimmick.

The features don't seem to have been updated to any larger degree, you still get the small 15-key programmable keypad with a wrist rest strapped on the end, but the thumb control looks to have been improved hugely. Gone is the ugly orange button and so is the four-way controller which looked like it was borrowed from a NES controller. In their place is a new shiny metal looking button and something that looks more like the analog stick from an Xbox 360 or a PS3.

Continue reading: Belkin & Razer team up for the new n52te (full post)

Razer has announced a new gaming keyboard and a new headset and both look really sweet. Let's start with the keyboard, which goes under the Razer Lycosa name and features some gamer specific features such as a non-slip rubber finish and backlit keys. More specifically, the W, A, S, D keys can be lit up on their own without the need of the rest of the keyboard being lit up.

The keyboard also has a set of touch sensitive media playback controls which Razer has christened the TouchPanel. So rather than having an array of extra keys above the function keys, there's a small touch sensitive pad around the keyboard LED's where these controls are located.

It seems like Asus has followed suite on Viewsonic by announcing a new 19-inch LCD with 1,680x1,050 resolution alongside a new 20 and two 22-inch model. This is as far as we know only the second 19-inch display on the market with this resolution. The three new models are the VW198S, the VW202S, the VW222S and the VW222U and they're not related to Volkswagen even though the VW moniker might suggest that.

Most 19-inch widescreen LCD's are stuck at 1,440x900 which is good enough for 720p HD video content, but it doesn't give you as much desktop real estate as a 1,680x1,050 display. The only downside here of course is that a 1,680x1,050 display still isn't quite good enough for 1080i/p video. The 20 and 22-inch models are using the same resolution and we're really wishing for someone to produce a 1,920x1,200 22-inch display.

Futuremark has revealed the first information on its next generation PCMark system benchmark and testing suite which goes under the name of Vantage. This is the first version of PCMark that has been designed for Windows Vista and it won't even run on XP. A range of new features have been added since the previous version and considering that it has been two years since the last version of PCMark. Vantage works with notebooks, desktops and even workstations and there is support for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.

The system requirements are quite high as well, beyond your PC being able to run Vista that is. First of all Vantage demands a 3GHz single core CPU, but Futuremark is recommending a multi-core processor, so we should see some nice quad core support here and hopefully even support for dual socket systems. You also need 1GB of system memory which will rule out some people, although if you're running Vista with less than 1GB of memory, then we're feeling sorry for you.

According to a news post on TechPowerUp, Nvidia is working on a new SKU of its 8800GTS GPU. The plain and simple reason for this is that the upcoming 8800GT is going to perform very similar to the current 320MB 8800GTS. The new version will be a 640MB card and Nvidia has gone from 96 to 112 stream processors to make sure that these new GPU's can hold their own against the 8800GT.

It will also make the new 8800GTS move closer to the 8800GTX which has 128 stream processors. The stream processors in the G80 series of GPU's are configured in eight banks of 16 and this means that the new 8800GTS only has one of those banks disabled. We don't know if this has been done on purpose or if Nvidia are using chips that are slightly defective.

Continue reading: Nvidia working on a new 8800GTS (full post)

Discovered via Techpowerup just a short time ago, Thermaltake have unveiled specs and images of their upcoming Xaser VI VG4000 and Armor+ VH6000 series of LCS (liquid cooled) chassis' which are due for release in early december.

These things look mighty impressive with a mass of features and bold characteristics. Though if you're not one to go for bling then you'll want to be looking elsewhere.

ECS has put up information about an upcoming motherboard based on the AMD RX780 chipset which is a graphics free budget model. The ECS A770M-A motherboard supports AM2+ processors, i.e. Phenom and its name seems to come from the fact that the RX780 together with the SB600 southbridge will be known as the AMD 770 chipset, or that's at least what ECS lists on its site.

The RX780/AMD 770 chipset supports PCI Express 2.0 and HypterTransport 3.0 for improved I/O performance. In case of the ECS board, we're looking at four memory slots and apparently the new CPU's support up to 32GB of DDR2 memory, although the board has only been tested with 8GB.

It also has a single x16 PCI Express slot, two x1 slots and three PCI slots. The RX780/AMD 770 doesn't support CrossFire, hence the lack of dual x16 slots. Furthermore the A770M-A comes with eSATA and onboard RAID, but apart from that it looks like a pretty average board in terms of specs.

It was some time ago that we wrote about Joost, the online video streaming service from the people behind Skype. Well, Joost has finally opened up to the general public and a lot more content have been added since we last had a look and there's now over 200 channels to choose from.

There's actually quite a lot of good content on there, although some of it might be a bit old, but if nothing else, it's a good place to catch up on old TV series where you might've missed and episode or two. Among the most popular channels are Fifth Gear shortcuts, which are clips from this popular UK car program. Others include the Alliance Atlantis Sci-Fi channel, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit on demand channel, Aardman animations, Guinness World Records TV, Aniboom and Onion News Network.

For those looking for slight more serious content there are channels like Reuters, The History Channel, Australian Food TV, DR (Danish news channel), TV5Monde Plus (French) and Travelistic. There's even a channel dedicated to Bollywood movies and things like the Audi Channel. The mind boggles at times, but there's at least something there for everyone.