HighPoint has long been producing affordable and relatively well performing RAID controller cards for various markets. Up until recently though, its product portfolio was missing true hardware controlled products.

That all changes with the launch of the RocketRAID 3120 two port PCI-Express x1 RAID controller card. It has its own onboard I/O controller and memory, which is essentially what makes it hardware controlled, rather than relying on the system CPU to take care of the important controller duties.

OCZ are now offering DDR3 memory as part of their Special Ops Edition lineup, these comprising both PC3-8500 and PC3-10666 singular modules in 1 and 2GB sizes as well as dual channel 2 and 4GB kits.

The Special Ops Edition Series of modules is primarily aimed at the gamers crowd, featuring a unique camouflage motif heatspreader design. The PC3-8500 (1066MHz) modules operate with latencies of 7-7-7-24 at 1.6v whilst the PC3-10666 (1333MHz) modules are set with timings of 9-9-9-27 at 1.7v.

Last week MWg launched two new Windows Mobile 6 based phones in Hong Kong at its lavish launch event.

The two new models launched were the Atom V and Zinc II. From Expansys in the UK, the updated Zinc II will set you back a steep £449.95 (inc tax) but it looks to have the features to match the price tag.

Attempting to cash in on the success of the ASUS Eee PC, A-DATA has announced a range of new themed flash memory devices for the highly popular Taiwanese made low-cost notebook PC.

First up is the A-DATA class 6 SDHC memory card which offers a hefty 8GB of additional storage to the Eee. It's promoted as a permanent second hard drive for the Eee with its branded color coding scheme - however, it begs question - what good it is that if you never see it installed inside the card reader? Tsk tsk tsk...

Now that Windows XP SP3 has been released to the world, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet Hardware 2.0 blog has done a bunch of application and gaming benchmarks comparing XP SP3 to SP2 and RTM as well as Vista RTM and SP1 in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

Starting off with the application testing, Adrian uses PassMark PerformanceTest 6.1 and discovers that SP3 does produce a better result than SP2. Coming out on top is Vista 64-bit RTM which is slightly faster than SP1. You can get a closer look at those results over here.

AMD released a Vista 64-bit hotfix for the new 3DMark Vantage benchmark a few days ago and has recently released it to the general public.

AMD told us that certain Radeon graphics card configurations have some issues under the new 3D benchmark using Catalyst 8.4 drives. 3DMark Vantage Hotfix promises to fix the bugs and also improve performance. Some media are claiming an 800 - 1000 point increase in 3DMark score but we haven't been able to confirm that with our own testing yet.

Keep in mind while the drivers supposedly offer big improvements, AMD say that corruption may still be seen in GPU Game Test 1 when running 3DMark Vantage on "High Settings" on certain ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations under Windows Vista 32-bit edition. Everything should be back to normal by the Catalyst 8.5 as the Futuremark lineup of benchmarks aren't just a two-bit collection of 3D tests.

ASUS Eee PC, ASUS Eee PC, ASUS Eee PC... it's all we seem to hear these days.

That is all about to change and the consumer is about to get a lot more choice in this lower cost ultra mobile notebook segment. MSI is one of many companies (Acer, GIGABYTE, ECS and GeCube are the others who will have models out in around June - July) who are busily working on Eee competitors.

Last week we showed you the world exclusive pictures of Gigabyte's EP45 Extreme and this week we thought we'd follow up with some more P45 motherboards from Gigabyte. First up we got the EP45-DQ6 which will be Gigabyte's flagship P45 based motherboard and unlike the Extreme, this is a normal retail board targeting high-end users looking for something out of the ordinary. It can't compete with the Extreme when it comes to chipset cooling, but it has a fair few extra features that you won't get with the Extreme board.

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German website Hardware-Infos claims that AMD will release its upcoming Radeon HD 4000 series in May next month. While the information is nothing more than speculative at this stage, it does make sense.

Why? Well, Computex Taipei starts in early June and it would make sense for AMD to have a bunch of fresh new graphics cards on display at the big show. If it does turn out to be a May launch, it would probably be right at the end of the month we'd hesitate to guess.

Nevertheless, Hardware-Infos has a bunch of details (albeit in German) discussing the specifications of the HD 4870, HD 4850 and HD 4850 GDDR3. They are all based on a 55nm die manufacturing process, two out of three use GDDR5 memory, HD 4870 has a TDP of 150 watts while the other two are less power hungry at 110 watts. HD 4870 will get 1GB of onboard RAM (oh baby don't stop - HD 4870 X2 would likely have 2GB onboard in that case!) while the 4850 sees the now regular 512MB and the GDDR3 version will get either 512MB or 256MB depending on AIB partner decision making.

Getting in on solid state storage is still very much a costly affair, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.

The lads over at Engadget have spotted a Compact Flash to SATA adapter which allows the use of not one, not two, but three CompactFlash cards in tandem to be accessed using the SATA interface.