Nvidia's remainder GeForce 9 series graphics cards have had their fair share of rumors around the forums lately.

DigiTimes goes a step further and confirms most of it. We believe what they are saying as it matches most of what we have heard from our company contacts.

As you know, the mainstream performance 9600 GT was just released and will be followed by the 9800 GX2 (two G92 GTS 512MB cores) on March 11. The GX2 will be followed by the GeForce 9800 GTX and 9800 GT between the end of March and beginning of April.

Gainward are quick to jump on the 9600GT bandwagon today with the launch of two 9600GT cards; a reference based plain jane version, and more interestingly a "Golden Sample OC" edition.

The reference model promises to come in at €157, but for just €20 more you can go for the superior Golden Sample variant with higher than stock clockspeeds of 700MHz on the GPU and 2000 MHz on the GDDR3 memory. The shader clock also takes a bump up to 1750 MHz on this card as well; this all thanks to the beefy dual-heatpipe cooler used for the job.

Palit's continuing trend to flourish the graphics card market with quality products at lower prices has allowed them to grow rapidly over the past few years in particular; as such they have swallowed up a multitude of smaller companies along the way, including none other than Gainward.

Now it looks like they're shifting their attention toward Galaxy which was established in Hong Kong in 1994, then went on to become add-in board partner for NVIDIA in 1999.

The first steps of an acquisition have apparently been made by Palit, this to help offload excess stock to the new subsidiary due to an over-ordering issue under the Palit branding.

BIOSTAR Microtech Int'l Corp. announced today their rendition of the NVIDIA 9600GT chipset called the V9603GT52. The company claims that the compact size and the extraordinary performance (90% performance gains over the comparable 8 series chipset) will make you buy their offering.

Using the phrase "Turn Your PC Into An Immersive Entertainment System", it is clear their ploy is to capture end-users hearts and minds by bringing high-end performance to the mainstream crowds.

A recent event held in Taiwan which ASUS attended allowed an onlooker of the Xfastest forum to take a few shots of ASUS' upcoming P5N64 WS Pro motherboard, this based on NVIDIA's latest flagship desktop chipset; the 790i.

The board demo'd at the event is a workstation oriented version, so there will inevitably be a few subtle changes to the mainstream consumer variants I would imagine.

10:52 - Still waiting out in the lobby outside the board room. The door is closed. They aren't ready for us yet.

Still waiting on confirmation that I will be interviewing someone from Toshiba, post conference.

So very, very tired. That McDonalds was good though.

Toshiba has just announced that they have decided to pull the pin on HD-DVD at a press conference in Japan.

The immediate plan is to slow down production and to have all stock off the shelves as soon as March of this year. There is no denying that a lot of the enthusiasts expected the announcement with the news that has been getting around the interweb over the past week.

Not surprisingly as we edge closer to the release of NVIDIA's next big bad boy; the dual-GPU based 9800 GX2, details have leaked out about the specifications of the card, most interestingly in the way of clock speeds.

Thanks to the crew at Expreview, we see that the GX2 will come in stock form with clockspeeds of 600 MHz, 1500 MHz and 1000 MHz on the GPU, shader, and memory clocks respectively. Not quite as fast as many of us were hoping the card to be, with the memory clockspeed the only somewhat impressive of the three. Though this may have been a counteraction of NVIDIA's to help better manage the immense heat generated by the card.

1GB (512MB per GPU) of memory on a 512-bit (256-bit per GPU) memory interface will reside on the PCB with said memory bandwidth of 128 GB/sec. The card will also sport 256 (128 per GPU) stream processors.

Good news if you're looking to pick up a quad from Intel in the near future; as many of you know a new breed of quad-core processors will enter Intel's Core 2 lineup very soon which comprise 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, and 2.83GHz models priced at $266, $316, and $530 respectively.

So what's happening with the current crop of 65nm quad core chips such as the popular entry level Q6600? Fudzilla report that some very nice price cuts are on the way for these; come April 20 the Core 2 Quad Q6700 will take a huge drop from its current $527 RRP down to just $270.

And what about the Q6600? Well, it's drop isn't quite as dramatic, moving down from $270 to $229. But hey, it's a nice shaving nonetheless, and a great opportunity to go the way of quad-core on a budget.

Curtsey of some folks from China and a digital camera, we get an early look at a pre-release version of 3DMark Vantage - the upcoming Vista and DX10 only 3D gaming benchmark software by Futuremark.

This is only a very early release look at the upcoming benchmark which is said to be released at GDC on Wednesday 20th February 2008 in the USA.

It is still spitting out random errors due to its early nature but for reference, an undisclosed test system with GeForce 8800 GTX scored around 4200 - not that this score means much at this stage of the game.