General Motors, the automotive manufacturing giant attended the largest US Consumer Electronics Show for the first time ever in CES 41 year history. The keynote speaker, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner was holding no punches and delivered a somewhat atypical promotion of greener pastures where man and machine combine to improve the world we live in. The GM thrust was as a result of several key technologies that enable their new series of luxury cars to guzzle absolutely no petroleum. The line between what is and isn't a consumer electronics gadget is getting thinner and thinner, as in this instance, car technology incorporates many of the conveniences that we consumers love.

The new range of Vue Green line cars work off a lithium ion battery which can plug into a wall socket for a charge, furthermore the electronic motors are amplified with hydrogen fuel cell technology creating water vapor as the only emission. The new technology is said to be affordable too, since GM plans to introduce 16 new hybrid models over the next four years. The cheapest of which is only about $2K more than similar luxury sedans.

A new set of "GigaWorks" series speakers has entered Creative's lineup this week, which at first may seem a little underwhelming and perhaps unworthy of being a part of the GigaWorks range due to the fact that they're just a stereo setup comprising two rather small satellites.

However, not unlike the usual approach Bose takes, the HD50's are all about quality and power packed into a small unit; though that's not to say these would be in any way shape or form comparable given the market and price point they're set at.

The tweeter Creative has chosen to use on these speakers is a 'Titanium Super Tweeter' which promises a complete audio experience whilst the system also sports BasXPort™ which is designed to produce a more powerful bass output without the use of a subwoofer.

Deliberately timed with CES, AMD has revealed details of their new Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series graphics chipset for notebooks. In similar fashion to the HD 3000 line for desktops, this new mobile series of GPU brings a similar array of new features never seen before in the portable market.

AMD says it is already shipping a low-end HD 3400 chipset with 40 stream (shader) processors and a mid-range HD 3600 sibling (120 stream processors) in notebooks as of today, beginning with ASUS' M50 gaming notebook [link to be active soon]. Future versions, such as a likely HD 3800 version, are also expected in the first half of 2008. Operating system support is not mentioned but may include Mac OS X as well as Windows XP and Vista.

You can find out more details about the latest Mobility series at electronista and also at AMD's website.

Hitachi have pushed the barrier of mechanical notebook storage today with the introduction of the world's first 500GB 2.5" HDD, this raising the capacity limit by a whopping 180GB over previous drives.

Dubbed the Travelstar 5K500, this HDD operates at 5400RPM with a seek time of 12ms. Hitachi were able to squeeze 500GB into the drive by using three platters with a 260Gb/in² areal density.

There is a downside however; the drive's thickness has been increased from the standard 9.5mm to 12.5mm to fit all three platters inside the casing, this making the unit too large to fit inside the majority of notebooks currently on the market, not to mention external enclosures too.

CoolIT Systems have lined up a new range of products to be showcased during CES next week; these comprise the new "Freezone Elite" liquid/TEC cooler which include's the firm's MTEC Control Center, a dual TEC graphics card cooler which they simply call the "Dual Drive Bay VGA Cooler", a sealed/closed loop radiator and pump module dubbed "PURE" for efficient CPU cooling, and also the Boreas MTEC Chassis which combines a powerful liquid cooling solution implemented into Silverston'e TJ-07 full-size aluminum tower chassis.

The lads over at Techpowerup have some more images and details on the new products, as does Engadget and also this section of CoolIT's website.

Some supposed exclusive screenshots have surfaced on the web which are apparently a taste of what's to come from FutureMark with their next installment of the 3DMark series, 3DMark08.

Well well, can't say we weren't expecting this to happen. Not long after NVIDIA's announcement regarding their new 3-way SLI technology someone's smashed the 3DMark03 ORB with a world record score of 103,888 points using an EVGA, MSI & Leadtek GeForce 8800 Ultra @ 720/1760/1180MHz, this with a Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 @ 4706MHz.

I'm sure it's just a (short) matter of time before we see scores topping the 3DMark05/06 charts using similar setups as well.

Chaintech has just pushed their DDR3 memory lineup to the 2GHz barrier with some new APOGEE GT "Blazer" series modules, these primarily suited to the upcoming X48 Intel chipset.

The modules use Micron D9G chips and can handle their rated 2000MHz speed with timings of 9-8-8-24. They are to become available as a 2GB dual-channel kit and will include Chaintech's Cool It Smart memory heatsink block.

With NVIDIA's official unveiling of the 780i chipset a short while ago, a slew of manufacturers are coming out with boards based on this new flagship nForce chipset for Intel users. Below are three 780i boards we've spotted so far.

We begin with an offering from EVGA :-

Just in time for Christmas, Transcend made an announcement about their T.photo 710 which is a 7" digital photo frame with a generous 1GB of internal memory.

The Taiwanese company claims that most of their competitor products only have a few megabytes of storage included and costs and ease of use is improved with the 710 model by not requiring external storage through memory cards.