This should be voted "Coolest News of the Week" by far. SwiftShader 2.0 was recently released by Transgaming Technologies which is a 3D software renderer. In the simplest of terms, it allows the CPU to render 3D applications aka games!

PC Games and Hardware in Germany spent some time with the new 3D software renderer over the past weekend and showed some very interesting details. The results are less than impressive for the CPU vs. GPU with a single GeForce 8500GT graphics card being able to provide seven times better performance than an Intel Core 2 Quad processor clocked at 3.8GHz.

Following recent rumour that AMD are planning to release a lower spec'd version of the popular HD 3870 X2 graphics card, ASUS has become the first partner to confirm this with an official announcement showing off the world's first HD 3850 X2 offering.

Dubbed the "EAH3850X2/HTDI/1G", the card is designed near identically to its bigger brother, but with lower clockrates of 668MHz on the core and 1658MHz on the 1GB of GDDR3 memory. Pricing isn't yet known, but given where the 3870 X2 currently sits it should be an attractive alternative for those looking to go Crossfire on a budget.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has been floating around the big bad Internet for some time now but has really only just been released officially by Microsoft and hit mainstream users in the past week or two. SP1 includes a lot of bug fixes, updates and performance increases from the RTM release of Vista.

We all know that we should be running SP1 even if just for its stability fixes but what about performance? Cyril Kowaliski from The Tech Report got on the job and found out what the big deal is all about when it comes to performance numbers over the non-patched Vista operating system.

Today NVIDIA is launching its newest chipset for the AMD AM2+ platform, the nForce 780a SLI.

It is the latest chipset to the market supporting the latest tri-core and quad-core AMD Phenom processors using HyperTransport 3.0 interface system bus. It is also the first high-end based chipset from NVIDIA which has onboard graphics - which as we reported early, will be a regular feature on all NVIDIA chipsets from now on.

It includes Hybrid SLI technology which includes HybridPower and GeForce Boost and three-way SLI support is also thrown in to sweeten the deal.

During IDF in Shanghai this week Intel was demonstrating its upcoming G45 Express chipset (aka Eaglelake-G) which includes onboard DX10 hardware graphics processing from the Intel GMA X4500HD.

G45 3D performance has already been reported to be three times faster than that of the previous Intel G33 Express chipset which is DX9 only. G45 will also have hardware accelerated MPEG2, VC1 and AVC decoding for playback of HD movie content and Blu-ray discs along with built-in HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. It also gets OpenGL 2.0 support along with Windows Vista Premium certification.

OCZ's PC Power & Cooling business unit has just launched a new range of affordable and mainstream power supplies under the Silencer line of products.

Today four new power supplies are being launched including the Silencer 370 ATX, Silencer 420 ATX, Silencer 500 Dell and Silencer 500EPS12V. All the new Silencer models are certified under the 80+ efficiency program so they run cool and save on utility power.

Futuremark has just launched another interactive web based benchmark application called VirtualMark, that allows users to determine their 3DMark score, without actually running the 3D benchmark software on their system.

Once you allow the web application to run in your browser and analyse your system, it checks the ORB database for submitted results which match your system specifications as closely as possible.

Now that the 9800GX2 has been out for a few weeks, superior aftermarket cooling solutions are beginning to show up that are directly suited to the dual-GPU giant.

German cooling specialist aqua-computer has come forward with details and images of their upcoming aquagrafx 9800 GX2 GPU block, said to begin shipping as early as next week.

We just got back from visiting CyberLink HQ here in Taiwan for an interview about HD on HTPC concerns and issues and one of the things we discussed was its new movie social networking website called MoovieLive.com. They've just officially launched it to the world after our visit.

It works in conjunction with the new PowerDVD 8 to offer a whole new experience out of what we have traditionally known as just a software movie player. MoovieLive.com instantly reminds us of IMDB with its database of movies showing global user ratings, your rating and reviews as well as show movie info such as director, cast info, languages, rating, aspect ratio and which type of audio soundtrack mix it uses. It goes much deeper, though.

One of the more interesting products to show up at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai this week is clear sign that Intel are shooting for a big piece of the solid-state storage market with some pre-production SSD drives demonstrated.

A fellow by the name of Knut Grimsrud who leads an R&D group responsible for the development of innovative mainstream storage solutions has had some playtime with these upcoming drives in current form, and has kindly shared his thoughts about them with everyone at a blog page here.