Late last week GIGABYTE invited us to the fancy Miramar Garden hotel in Taipei where they were setup to shoot their own promo videos of its forthcoming Intel Z68 based motherboards launch.

We went along to check them out and snap some photos for our preview of the Z68 UD3H and UD7. Inside the hotel suite GIGABYTE had two identical systems setup with the Z68 UD7 platform with the only difference being that one was configured with an SSD using Intel's new Smart Response caching technology and the other just with a standard hard drive configuration.

What is Intel Smart Response Technology? In short since we can't go into extensive detail here, it is in my opinion a way of gaining some of the benefits of an SSD without blowing your bank account or having to settle for limited storage space. The idea is that you can pick up an affordable 20GB SSD, put it in a RAID array with your large spinning hard drive and regular data that is most often accessed is cached on the SSD for quicker access.

We all know hacking is a fact of life, be it for good or bad. However, I don't think the topic of this news relates all that much to hacking.

Colin Brix is a manager at GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei and someone I have worked with as a contact for product samples and tech questions for many years. From the information we have seen so far, he seems to be the victim of a fairly serious prank today and one that the Taiwanese motherboard maker is taking very seriously.

A website by the name of Rumor Pedia claimed to be have sent a screenshot by someone named Kirllos who managed to 'infiltrate' GIGABYTE's internal work network using "mega-d botnet". Mind you, this bot was disabled by security company FireEye back on November 6, 2009, according to sources on Wikipedia. This screenshot is filled with a vast amount of inconsistencies relating to 'leaked' details about an upcoming processor from AMD. It also showed benchmarks using popular tests such as Super PI and others. This type of leak by a company employee tends to have very serious consequences, as you can imagine.

Diablo fan? Want Diablo 3 real, real bad? Well, just close your eyes a little bit longer and make that wish and it may come true as soon as July of this year! External beta testing of Diablo 3 is set to start in Q3 of this year. It was revealed in Activision's first quarter investor call where president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime, revealed the company-wide beta testing of Diablo 3.

Mike also gave some updates on the status of Diablo 3 saying:

GPU giant meets Baseband & RF superstar, and $367 Million later an acquisition is born. Everyone at both companies is clearly excited about the deal, but nothing will be set in stone until a conference call held between the two companies Thursday, May 12, at 2:00PM PDT. Anyone at all can listen in to the call to find out more details, just dial 706-679-2572- no password or meeting number required! NVIDIA and Icera will also webcast the call, and you can listen in here and here. More details below in the press release.

16:12 US PST:

UPDATE: Both of the LG Devices will offer Wireless content streaming!! That's right, no plug or HDMI out required (although it's available too).

Tony Curry, LG PR representative, just got up to tell everyone about how much LG loves the Tegra 2 processor. Shipping this week are both the LG G2x smartphone and the LG G Slate tablet, available exclusively on T-Mobile. Life is certainly good with these two devices, sporting 4G capability and optimized battery lives.

13:52 US PST:

Here at the lovely Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco, I'm listening to Bill Rehbok, General Manager of Mobile Games at NVIDIA tout just how awesome and how important their TegraZone platform is to Android mobile gaming. Android recently surpassed iOS as the most used OS for game developers with over 300 million users. TegraZone is what Rehbok describes as a content curator, ensuring that the best mobile games (those that run on NVIDIA Tegra) are available.

BioWare's first steps into the MMO world will come in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a new MMO that is in development between BioWare and LucasArts where it pits players in a world that takes place 300 years after the events of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and thousands of years before Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

Players will have the choice of character roles such as Jedi or Sith and give context to their personal story with the option to follow the light or the dark side of the Force. EA has now reported that its total investment in the new Star Wars-based MMO has reached $80 million, in development alone. Michael Pachter, Wedbush Security analyst says:

Google's over-the-air updates are amazing, I love updating my phone without having to use something like iTunes. For Apple users, they can hear about a new firmware being released for their iOS-based device, yet have to be at a computer - plug it in, open iTunes and let it update. Where Android-based users can just do it from their phone - magic, huh?

Apple are finally catching up and it seems with iOS 5 there are claims that Verizon users with iOS-based devices might have the opportunity to do updates over-the-air instead of the traditional way I explained above. Right now, theres no news on whether this will extend to other carriers as most iOS updates are pretty large in size - roughly 600MB. Obviously carriers won't want millions upon millions of people downloading massive upgrades every however often.

This is where Wi-Fi networks step in of course, but there is no news for whether the OTA updates can be done via Wi-Fi yet or not.

For current iOS-based devices such as the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, Apple use Samsung for their processors, this is set to change with Apple changing to Intel for their processing needs. At the moment Apple obviously are loving Intel as their Mac-based range of products are Intel powered, but now Apple is looking to have Intel power the iOS-based devices.

Analyst Gus Richard says:

We all knew this was coming but waiting for 100-percent confirmation is hard and now we're seeing a leak from a voice actor for the current two Modern Warfare titles, Craig Fairbrass. He did an interview with a UK radio station talkSPORT. Craig does the voice of Ghost and Gaz and has let slip that he's currently working on a big game that is costing $200 million to make.

That rounds it down to, well, just one title. Craig said during his interview: