A heads up for buyers down under; Scorptec is feeling green this week. No, not sickly green; energy efficient green!

They have some good deals going on a range of products that get the green tick of approval, including GIGABYTE's new GA-EP45-DS3P Motherboard with DES Advanced energy saving at just $199, Western Digital's "GreenPower" Series 500 and 750GB HDDs at $99 and $159 respectively, and D-Link's 8-Port "Green Ethernet" gigabit switch at only $85.

Even though DirectX 10 is still quite fresh in developers minds, Microsoft are already making a push to bring more advancements in the form of DirectX 11. The company has today announced some initial details about it which Shacknews have shared out here.

One particular and expected highlight of DX11 is tessellation support which as far as I know is already being used in current-gen consoles such as the 360. It blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close.

An Israeli start-up company claim to have made a breakthrough in parallel graphics technology which allows for a mixture of any type of graphics card to be used in a system for improved scaling, which completely defies the boundaries of Crossfire and SLI which require two or more of the same model card in order to function.

The technology is called "Hydra"; the beast with many heads. It is essentially a system-on-a-chip (SoC) which uses exclusive software to detect and balance the workload of multiple GPUs/graphics cards found in the system; regardless of the CPU or motherboard chipset.

The lads at PCGamesHardware have become the first to lay eyes on PowerColor's HD 4870 PCS OC, with the interesting aspect of this card not so much being the superior Zerotherm cooling solution and higher clock speeds, but the choice to go with double the memory at 1GB GDDR5.

It will be interesting to see what the extra memory does for the card, though it's pretty much a given we should see some big increases from it at the higher resolutions. Hopefully we can get hold of a sample for review in the near future; we'll do our best!

Although not well known in the mainstream PC cooling and accessories market, a mob by the name of Danamics has suddenly attracted much attention with a new type of CPU cooler that is said to be the first in the world which uses "Liquid-metal" to assist with its cooling abilities.

Liquid-metal has a higher thermal conductivity than other forms of liquid and that alone brings promise, but the particularly interesting thing to note is that the pump sitting atop the cooler is electromagnetic by design; meaning it has no moving parts nor does it emit any noise/vibration whatsoever.

Danamics have made a bold statement on their website that the cooler exceeds most watercooling solutions, but high-end air cooling is often capable of this as well. As cool as the technology behind it sounds, it still raises an eyebrow as to how well this cooler will actually perform.

Expreview have acquired a fresh Intel roadmap which outlines the company's Nehalem launch schedule well into 2009.

The first wave will hit in Q4 of this year with the top-end 3.2GHz Bloomfield part sitting in the Extreme/top-end segment along with 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz models entering the performance and mainstream markets.

We mentioned yesterday about a killer Mini-ITX base from J&W Technology which would suddenly make the Mini-ITX form factor much more appealing for HTPC builders. We also weren't aware at the time that it had any form of competition on the horizon.

Turns out ZOTAC has a nice little ITX board readied for the market as well. The lads at Expreview have stacks of images and info outlaying the boards characteristics. Unlike the J&W offering with its 780G chipset for AM2+ processors, this model steers over to Intel with its nForce 610i chipset supporting up to 1333MHz FSB LGA775 processors (incl. 45nm Wolfdale).

Chinese website XFastest has been playing with a pre-release NVIDIA G96 based GeForce 9500GT graphics card, and they took the opportunity to not only take a bunch of quality photos showing off the card, but also to put it through its paces in some synthetic benchmarks including 3DMark'05/06 and Ozone3D FurMark.

The results hold much promise for the success of this little entry-level card. We're used to seeing absolute dismal performance in this market segment, but scores of 12331 in 3DMark'05 and 5894 in '06 are a massive leap forward and it should be a steal at around $50/$60 USD.

The Mini-ITX form factor is a great solution for the embedded market, with the obvious benefit of being extremely compact. This would have made it a terrific base for HTPCs as well, but unfortunately more often than not it just doesn't allow for the kind of power people want. VIA's ITX solutions have come a long way, but they still struggle to do much beyond fairly basic tasks.

A mob by the name of J&W Technology are about to come to the rescue here; details and images have surfaced on their upcoming "MINIX-780G-SP128MB" which holds much promise indeed.

We covered reports of a $549 launch price for AMD's flagship HD 4870 X2 2 GB GDDR5 SKU, last week, yet today brings some more information, courtesy of Fudzilla, pertaining to a launch price for the HD 4850 X2 2GB part.

Let's recap. The HD 4850 X2 2 GB model is expected to feature GDDR3 memory, versus the mightily impressive GDDR5 counterparts on its more costly sibling, whilst two RV770PRO GPUs will form the foundations of the offering. The duty of counteracting the hindrance in performance stakes, against its behemoth sibling, will be taken charge of by some attractive pricing.