Vantec might not be your first port of call when it comes to watercooling, but the company has had some success with its StingRay kit, but this time the company has decided to go for an ever smaller setup with the compact StingRay Mini STG-110. We're talking an all-in-one solution here, something that has been done before and which rarely offers any advantage over a normal air cooler.

Hopefully Vantec can bring something new to the table with the StingRay Mini and at least the design looks pretty funky. It relies on a 92mm fan to cool the radiator and it has a rated air flow of 22.25-55.89 CFM depending on the fan speed which is adjustable between 1,200 and 2,800 rpm and produces 24 to 36dB.

Pictures of Foxconn's upcoming AMD 790FX based board, the A79A-S has made its way onto the web and Expreview scored them. The big news about this board is that it's the first motherboard that we've heard of that will feature the new SB700 southbridge from AMD. The SB700 bring support for six SATA ports, no less than 12 USB 2.0 ports and for some reason two USB 1.1 ports. It also supports RAID and good old fashioned IDE.

We have to say that we're not in love with the Foxconn A79A-S design, despite that fact that it has no less than four x16 PCI Express slots and there are several reasons for this. First of all Foxconn has only incorporated four SATA connectors on the board, as two of the six SATA connectors supported by the SB700 have been moved to the rear I/O as eSATA. We're not quite sure why you'd ever need more than one eSATA port, but if you've got an answer, let us know.

Dell has finally launched its XPS M1530 notebook which is the latest addition to its thin and light XPS models, which got popularized by the M1330. We're not sure if a 15.4-inch widescreen notebook can ever be classified as thin and light, but Dell has done its best to compact it together as much as possible. You're looking at a notebook measuring 357x263x35.1mm (WxDxH) although the height varies from 23.7 to 35.1mm. It weighs in at 2.62kg, which isn't too bad considering that many budget 14.1-inch models aren't far off this kind of weight.

There's a wide range of customizable options and the CPU range includes either a T5250 or a T5450 for the cost conscious buyer or anything from a T7250 to a T7800 for those looking for some extra performance. The XPS M1530 can be configured with up to 4GB of DDR2 667MHz memory and up to 320GB hard drive space depending on the kind of drive you want and SSD is also an option. It comes with a slim-line slot-loading DVD writer as standard and this can be traded in for a Blu-ray drive for an additional US$500.

Now, normally we wouldn't make a big fuss about something like a portable media player, but the Qingbar GP300 takes portable to a whole new level. YellowMosqiuto, the company behind the Qingbar GP300 has managed to incorporate everything into a pair of rather unsightly video glasses, so forget about needing a DVD player or something else to plug into them, as they're ready to go as they are. Apparently the Qingbar GP300 features two LCOS displays with QVGA resolution - that's 320x240 to you and me - which are meant to simulate the image of a50-inch display at 2 meters distance.

We've sadly had the pleasure of testing similar products in the past and they're far from great, although we haven't seen any using LCOS technology before. But the very low resolution on these glasses seems like a limiting factor, as even the poor quality modes we've tried has had 640x480 or 800x600 resolution LCD displays. The Qingbar GP300 accepts mini SD cards for media storage, as it incorporates all the hardware needed for video playback.

A Florida based performance testing company by the name of Devil Mountain Software has issued out a graph to the masses which shows benchmark results calculated by "OfficeBench" in both Windows XP (SP2) and Vista (RTM).

This alone seems a little pointless as we already know XP is still able to hold its own ground for the most part when soley focusing on performance. However, what makes the graph a bit more interesting is that the testing company also chose to throw in test results of both Vista and XP running pre-release builds of SP1 and SP3 respectively.

At Computex earlier this year Zalman was showing its upcoming 3D displays and they've finally launched them. We're looking at a 19 and a 22-incher and we're not sure if Zalman has come up with Trimon name as a play on Trinitron or Pokemon. Either which way, these new 3D display requires you to wear a pair of glasses for them to work and you need to use an Nvidia graphics card.

You might wonder about the latter requirement and the answer is simple, Zalman relies on Nvidia's 3D stereoscopic driver, which is flaky at best. At least the glasses you get with the Zalman displays look more like a pair of naff shades than something really nerdy as early types of stereoscopic glasses with LCD shutters used to be like.

If you saw our early shots of this card here then this is hardly news for you, but Gigabyte's in-house designed Radeon HD 3850 has finally appeared on their website. There's very little in terms of product information, the only thing that's really clear is that there's a 256MB and a 512MB version of the card. Gigabyte will ship Never Winter Nights 2 with these cards, just as they are with the earlier reference design cards.

The cards are using a Zalman cooler which means that they take up two slots instead of the single slot of the reference cooler, but the Zalman cooler is quieter and offers better cooling efficiency. We don't know exactly when the cards will be available, but it should be sometime next month from what we were told by Gigabyte when we saw the early engineering sample.

For those that thinks the AMD 790X boards are too expensive but still wants to have the option to run CrossFire, abit has come to the rescue with their new AX78 board which is based on the AMD 770 chipset. Normally this chipset doesn't support CrossFire but abit has done some clever engineering and managed to enable it, although it's more as in the way that you can run CrossFire on a P35 chipset than the real deal.

This still looks like a decent board even if you're not considering going CrossFire with it, as it has 3 PCI slots and one x1 PCI Express slot on top of the two x16 slots, although as with the P35 chipset, the second slot is limited to x4 bandwidth. The board is passively cooled and it's pretty well spec'd for an entry to mid-range board.

Continue reading: abit does CrossFire with AMD 770 chipset (full post)

We've just been provided with exclusive shots of a new 8800GT based card from ASUS dubbed the EN8800GT CRYSIS Edition.

As you can see above, the card itself sports a CRYSIS theme and of course it comes bundled with a Special Edition copy of the game as well.

Update: An official announcement has since been made over at A-DATA's website.

The folks over at ChileHardware have a bit of exclusive news for us in the way of some upcoming high-end DDR3 modules from A-DATA, these to further expand their existing "Vitesta" series.