Late last week Digitimes broke a story stating that NVIDIA were on the verge of quitting its chipset business. Soon after that story broke, we had the chance to speak to several of our contacts here in Taipei and the story was confirmed over and over again.

We wanted to deliver an insider prospective as to why NVIDIA is quitting its chipset business. NVIDIA is denying rumors of closing up its chipset business and sending its chipset designer and engineer staff to the GPGPU team to speed and ramp up development in that area.

The lads at TechConnect have sighted some images of a fully decked out HD 4850 graphics card which comes equipped not only with a superior cooling solution but multiple connectivity options including DVI, HDMI and Displayport for future-proofing.

Featuring a red PCB and ZEROtherm's GX810 copper-happy cooler, the card is certainly quite the eye catcher, too. Whilst clock speeds and the amount of memory onboard isn't yet confirmed, it's likely that it sports the usual 512MB of RAM with a factory overclock thanks to the superior cooling on tap.

For those of you residing in the land of Oz who are really proud of their PC case build, Thermaltake Australia are firing up a competition tomorrow which gives you the chance to show off your system on the Thermaltake Australia forums in an effort to win a badass pre-built system housed in Thermaltake's Armor+ full tower with LCS.

We here at Thermaltake will decide on the final winner. The main factor influencing our decision is how well a system is received publicly by the enthusiast community. Things we will look out for is the amount of positive feedback from the community for particular rigs on their uniqueness, attention to detail, custom efforts and execution.

Since the launch of AMD's killer HD 48x0 series recently, the cards have done nothing but impress. However, it was quickly discovered that the 4850's stock cooler is a little underwhelming for the card and had a lot of trouble keeping its temps down once the card really got down and boogied.

This wouldn't matter too much if there were plenty of non-reference models on offer that use superior cooling solutions, but we haven't really seen many at all yet. However, HIS have returned with their long-standing ICEQ cooler which has always been known to offer far better cooling than the stock models. Expreview have caught a glimpse of two models coming soon; the HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Turbo and HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Turbo-X.

According to several sources both inside and outside Universal abit Motherboard Company; abit has laid off many staff from various departments within its HQ based in Taiwan. This follows a move from the previous HQ address in Nei-Hu to new premises in Nan-Gang to reduce expenses just last month.

The beleaguered company has been down on its luck ever since the then CEO fiddled with the public companies stock prospects according to allegations. The subsequent investigation and resulting court cases have not yet been finalized, however, the abit brand was sold to Universal Scientific Industrial and the proceeds were used to level off some of the debt the public company had incurred.

Tech Connect has learned from a slide shot posted over at Engadget in China that ASUS plan to keep their Eee PC lineup fresh and lively a good distance into the future. Where we have already seen the introduction of 700, 900 and 1000 series Eee PCs, the slide shot reveals no less than six more upcoming models split into two additional market segments; PRO Fashion and Ultimate.

While all current Eee PCs are going for the "Smart Casual" look, the upcoming portable PCs are included in the "PRO Fashion" and "Ultimate" categories. The 'fashionable' models are the 1000HV, 1002SA, 1002HA and T101 with a decent guess being that all will have 10-inch LCD screens with at least the 1000HV and 1002HA being equipped with hard drives.

By default ASUS' Eee PC 900/901 netbooks are limited to a maximum of 20GB flash storage with 4GB onboard. However, Buffalo comes to the rescue and today announces two solid state drives designed to replace the lower capacity flash drives in these units.

Available in sizes of 32 and 64GB, this offers quite a bump in storage space to allow for much more flexibility in the way users can operate their Eee PC 900/901 netbook.

Expreview have just given the heads up that NVIDIA has done the same thing with the 9600 GT as they did with the 9800 GTX; that is, shrink the die from 65 to 55nm. However, where the 55nm version of the 9800 GTX gets a '+' tacked onto the end of its name, the 55nm 9600 GT does not.

To find out if it's running a 55nm core, you need to read the markings on the die. The original 65nm one reads G94-300-A1 whilst the newer 55nm reads G94-300-B1. Clock speeds are left the same but it's inevitable overclocking headroom will be somewhat better for add-in partners and users.

As though their current lineup isn't inundated with confusion already, NVIDIA plans to unleash yet another model in its upper desktop segment tomorrow; the 9800 GT. The card is certainly nothing revolutionary either (as is the case across much of the 9 series lineup); it's for the most part a re-branded 8800 GT with its 512MB GDDR3 memory, 112 Stream Processors and identical core/memory clockspeeds.

ASUS has however decided to make their upcoming EN9800GT Ultimate stand out a little more by increasing clockspeeds out of the box to 725MHz on the core, 2000MHz memory and 1750MHz shader clocks. A picture of the card that was spotted by the lads at TechConnect shows a heatsink which looks very much like the one used on the G92 8800 GTS.

The lads over at chilehardware have managed to get a sneek peek into a spy shot of NVIDIA's 2008 driver roadmap. The shot is very difficult to see clearly, but what it appears to show is upcoming features such as Display Port connectivity, Quality improvements, Performance improvements and OpenGL 3.0.