To come with Intel's first batch of 45nm desktop CPUs early into the new year is the replacement chip for the very popular Q6600, Intel's entry-level quad core part.

Known as the Core 2 Quad Q9300, this processor will come clocked in at 2.5GHz (100MHz faster than the Q6600) but will carry only half the L2 cache (6MB).

On the upside, being a 45nm Penryn chip it's going to run a lot cooler and with a lot more overclocking headroom to boot; potentially making it the new chip of choice for many enthusiasts.

The folks from Hard Spell in China who call themselves a professional IT hardware product website managed to scoop up one of GIGABYTE's upcoming Intel X48 chipset based DQ6 motherboards for some early testing over in the mainland.

On an early production board from GIGABYTE which we believe is still being fine tuned according to our sources at the Taiwan motherboard company, they compared Intel QX9650 and QX9770 processors.

The folks over at Sapphire sent in a press release today announcing their passively cooled ULTIMATE Edition based on the ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPU.

They claim "to deliver the fastest performing passive cooled graphics card in the World - ever!". That might be the case for fastest passively cooled Radeon graphics card but not for graphics cards on the whole as surely the recently released passively cooled Sparkle 8800GT will beat it in most tests.

Following news of a passively cooled 8800GT to show up very soon from Sparkle, ECS are following suit with their new 8800GT Dual Turbo Version Graphics Card which sports Arctic Cooling's beefy S1 cooler.

This massive heatsink with large heatpipes does have a couple of fans sitting on it for really bringing down those temps to gain some more overclocking headroom, but the cooler is easily capable of managing the G92's heat levels passively as well.

A fresh Multi-GPU Performance Hotfix has become available for Windows Vista users which deals with a DMA latency issue of sorts between the two cards. Microsoft describe it in full detail below :-

In some scenarios, games and benchmarks perform more poorly than expected on a Windows Vista-based computer. This issue occurs when the games and the benchmarks use multiple display adapters in a Linked Display Adapter (LDA) configuration.

A graphics processing unit (GPU) or part of a GPU link may incur a small scheduling latency on a new Direct Memory Access (DMA) packet. This is true if the DMA packet is submitted to the GPU that has previously run out of work and if another GPU in the linked configuration is very busy. In some scenarios, significant starvation of one or more GPUs in the linked configuration reduces the expected performance of an application.

Information on Intel's upcoming lineup of Penryn based mobile processors has surfaced today thanks to the folks over at Dailytech.

It's expected we'll see these chips officially unveiled very early into the new year (possibly at CES 2008), and it would appear that five models will become available to cater towards notebooks ranging from the budget to high-end market. No doubt Apple will be sure to get in on the action with their MacBook Pro series as well. The lineup shapes up like so :-

If some images to recently surface on the big back Internet are to be believed, ASUS may soon launch an all-new GeForce 8800GT graphics card with a whooping 1GB of GDDR3 memory - this, of course, compared to the current 512MB model and the 256MB versions about to hit the market.

At least according to the source, clock speed would remain the same as the reference version at 600MHz core clock and 1800MHz DDR memory clock. There are also claims being thrown around which suggest it might be using a custom-made PCB.

LG has done its bit in helping bridge the HD format wars by releasing the Super Multi Blue GGCH20L ROM drive which is capable of reading both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks!

On top of that, it will also read regular CD's and DVD's and burn DVD+R at 16x. Being a new drive, naturally is utilizes the much more future-proofed Serial ATA interface and includes 4MB cache buffer.

Gamers around Asia can now rejoice! Well, at least ones who are heavy into World of Warcraft, which just happens to be a market of millions and obviously why we are even seeing the following product.

American notebook maker Dell has teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment to create a special edition World of Warcraft notebook based on a revised version of the XPS M1710 series of notebook computers.

Sparkle sparked our sparkling interest with their announcement of their sparkling (ed. note - you went too far) new passively cooled GeForce 8800GT with 256MB graphics card.

It should also spark a lot of interest in the consumer market as it is one of the few silent operating DX10 cards on the market with the insanely popular 65nm G92 GT GPU.