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n7ytd writes "Announced today and running on an 800 MHz VIA core, the 170 x 85mm 'APC' is expected to ship this July. It has 2GB of flash storage and 512MB of DDR3 memory. 'A modified version of Google Android 2.3 uses up most of that 2GB of flash storage, but there are external storage options. On the back I/O is a microSD slot, and of course you could hook in an external USB 2.0 drive. VIA spent a lot of time customizing Android to enable keyboard and mouse support which natively it does not support. ... On the I/O panel you get VGA output, HDMI output (up to 720p playback with hardware acceleration), four USB 2.0 ports, gigabit LAN and audio out and microphone in.' With a 'Neo ITX' form factor, VIA touts the single-board computer as a 'bicycle for your mind.'"

I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD officially introduces their newest flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 6990. Targeted to counter Nvidia's current generation flagship GTX580, for AMD this is a followup to their previous generation 2xGPU on a single PCB design, the Radeon HD 5970. It represents the strongest entry AMD will release within their 6000 series graphics lineup. Initial testing and overclocking results are publishing at first tier review sites now. As eloquently stated by Tweaktown's Anthony Garreffa, the 6990 'punches all other GPUs in the nuts.'"

I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD officially introduces their newest flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 6970, hot on the heels of the Radeon HD 6870 released at the end of October, then the NVIDIA GTX 580 in early November, which is Nvidia's current flagship card. Initial testing and overclocking results are publishing at first tier review sites now. While the HD 6970 is a strong performer and the price point is outstanding for consumers, the GTX 580 retains the flagship crown while the AMD 5970 keeps the single card performance crown with its dual GPUs on a single card."

V!NCENT tips us to a write-up about an addition to MSI's Ecolution motherboard which harvests heat from the chipset to power a fan. The device is based on a Stirling engine. The heat from the chipset expands a trapped gas, which pushes against a piston to generate power. The article contains a YouTube video of how the device works. According to MSI, the device has 70% efficiency.

mrneutron2004 writes "Tweaktown seems to have the first review out of the gate on AMD's flagship R600 core. 'Our focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card – it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what does this mean for performance? ... After taking a look at the GPU and the card from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX."

Tweaktown recently had a chance to look at the ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard - designed to take on the Digital Home on the K8 front with AMD Live! platform. The motherboard is paired with nVidia's GeForce 6150 chipset, creating a feature packed setup. The test system consisted of an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2) and nVidia GeForce 7800GT chipset. They ran the system through a battery of scenarios, including Doom, Quake, and F.E.A.R. The final thoughts? "The ASUS M2NPV-VM satisfied all our basic requirements for a solid Digital Home/HTPC based motherboard."

Mr.Tweak writes to tell us that they have a review posted of a new wireless router from ASUS. What sets this router apart from others is that in addition to being a wireless router/gateway is that it also functions as a thin client system with a pre-installed 160 GB IDE drive (no SATA support sorry) and three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals. If you happen to use one of those USB ports for another drive the router will also support RAID 0 and 1, quite a bit more than the average router.

Mr.Tweak writes to tell us that they have a review posted of a new wireless router from ASUS. What sets this router apart from others is that in addition to being a wireless router/gateway is that it also functions as a thin client system with a pre-installed 160 GB IDE drive (no SATA support sorry) and three USB 2.0 ports for peripherals. If you happen to use one of those USB ports for another drive the router will also support RAID 0 and 1, quite a bit more than the average router.

NerdMaster writes "NDA for Intel Core 2 CPUs was lifted on the night from yesterday to today and all major hardware reviewing websites are posting Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Xtreme X6800 reviews. Here is a collection of several reviews so you can check for yourself whether Core 2 Duo is faster or not than Athlon 64 X2. Reviews posted at Tom's Hardware Guide, AnandTech, HEXUS, Hardware Secrets, OCAU, TweakTown, HotHardware, The Tech Report, Trusted Reviews, Legion Hardware, bit-tech, ExtremeTech, Legit Reviews, Sharky Extreme, HardOCP, PC Perspective, GotFrag Hardware, Gamepyre, X-bit Labs - Part 1, tbreak, neoseeker and Byte Sector." We've already touched on this technology, but there has been (obviously) a lot of discussion about it since it was announced.

Mr.Tweak writes "Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. We'll present some benchmark numbers of five different sound solutions as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done to improve things using nVidia's SoundStorm APU as an example."

Mr.Tweak writes "Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. We'll present some benchmark numbers of five different sound solutions as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done to improve things using nVidia's SoundStorm APU as an example."

Giant_Panda writes "NVIDIA just announced a new mobile graphics interface for PCI Express based notebooks (PR here). NVIDIA is calling the interface MXM (Mobile PCI eXpress Module), and they seem to have the support of the Taiwanese notebook ODMs on this one. HotHardware has a few pictures and details on the technology - it looks like MXM is a royalty-free standard too, so other mobile GPU manufactures like ATi may even make MXM modules. (More MXM Info - HardOCP, Tweaktown)"

Anonymous Coward writes "The folks over at TweakTown have just posted an article which talks about Balance Technology Extended (BTX) - Intel's upcoming new form factor which will replace the aging ATX form factor standard we've grown used to. BTX is meant to offer better cooling and quiet computing through its smart design."

Zack Young writes "I just read an article over at TweakTown Gamer that has an interesting comparison between the movie industry and the gaming industry. It mentions many of the similarities between the relatively young gaming industry and the film industry of the 1920's, including the introduction of new technologies and how they shaped and are shaping the artistic direction the formats take." The article also suggests: "The overall structure of gaming companies... resembles the studio system of the 'Golden Age of Hollywood' rather than the fragmented independent layout of today. The movie studios such as MGM, Paramount or Warner Brothers had their own stock of actors, writers and directors from which the crew of a particular movie was comprised."

Zack Young writes "I just read an article over at TweakTown Gamer that has an interesting comparison between the movie industry and the gaming industry. It mentions many of the similarities between the relatively young gaming industry and the film industry of the 1920's, including the introduction of new technologies and how they shaped and are shaping the artistic direction the formats take." The article also suggests: "The overall structure of gaming companies... resembles the studio system of the 'Golden Age of Hollywood' rather than the fragmented independent layout of today. The movie studios such as MGM, Paramount or Warner Brothers had their own stock of actors, writers and directors from which the crew of a particular movie was comprised."

Mr.Tweak writes "It has been a long time coming but we are finally reaching the beginning stages of 64-bit mainstream computing. AMD has been the first to bring a 64-bit processor to the market with any true support in the Opteron. VIA is one of the key chipset companies supporting AMD64 and today TweakTown takes a preview look at their new K8T800 chipset with AMD Opteron 242 and 244 processors. 64-bit computing is boarding - don't miss the train!"

Mr.Tweak writes "It has been a long time coming but we are finally reaching the beginning stages of 64-bit mainstream computing. AMD has been the first to bring a 64-bit processor to the market with any true support in the Opteron. VIA is one of the key chipset companies supporting AMD64 and today TweakTown takes a preview look at their new K8T800 chipset with AMD Opteron 242 and 244 processors. 64-bit computing is boarding - don't miss the train!"

Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.

Mr.Tweak writes "We have posted some coverage from the Australian Game Developers Conference which was held over this past weekend at the Melbourne Convention Center. There you will find information on Sony's PS2 online gaming plans, Sony's PS2 Linux Development Kits, and videos and pictures of nVidia's GeForce FX in action as well as shots of the graphics card and other juicy details."

Mr.Tweak writes "We have posted some coverage from the Australian Game Developers Conference which was held over this past weekend at the Melbourne Convention Center. There you will find information on Sony's PS2 online gaming plans, Sony's PS2 Linux Development Kits, and videos and pictures of nVidia's GeForce FX in action as well as shots of the graphics card and other juicy details."

Mr.Tweak writes "We have written a comprehensive System Optimization Guide targeted toward Gamers looking to get the most out of their systems for all of today's latest highly demanding PC games. Take a few minutes of your life and read this System Optimization Guide for Gamers where TweakTown promises you will find something of use which will have you gaming at full speed in no time."

Mr.Tweak writes "We have written a comprehensive System Optimization Guide targeted toward Gamers looking to get the most out of their systems for all of today's latest highly demanding PC games. Take a few minutes of your life and read this System Optimization Guide for Gamers where TweakTown promises you will find something of use which will have you gaming at full speed in no time."

Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has just posted an article investigating Mobile vs. Desktop gaming in their latest article entitled "New Age Computer Gaming - Mobile vs. Desktop Investigation". The article compares a Dell Inspiron 8200 with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics to a standard desktop system with nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics. Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!"

Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has just posted an article investigating Mobile vs. Desktop gaming in their latest article entitled "New Age Computer Gaming - Mobile vs. Desktop Investigation". The article compares a Dell Inspiron 8200 with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics to a standard desktop system with nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics. Can notebook gaming really be taken seriously? We think so, and so should you!"

Graphics Guru writes "Last week TweakTown posted an exclusive picture of the ATi Radeon 8500 MAXX with believable accompanying information also regarding the highly anticipated ATi R300. 3DChipset is today reporting that they have confirmation that the 8500 MAXX is indeed real and is due to be shipped fairly soon. Here's what someone from ATi told them: "The ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx is for real and the card is already in full production and about to be shipped soon. ATi has finally nailed certain issues with the dual chip. Final testings have been done and you should here noise from ATi regarding this offering." You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"

homerj79 writes: "Intel has launched an upgrade 850 chipset and faster Pentium 4's today. The new chipset, dubbed the 850E, supports a 533MHz (133MHz x 4) front side bus, as do the processors. Supporting processors come in speeds of 2.53, 2.4 and 2.26GHz. The 2.4GHz part is denoted as supporting the new FSB by a 'B' tagged to the end of it. And it appears as if the new chipset gives the P4 a performance boost in most apps over the previous 400MHz FSB chips and the Athlon XP." Meanwhile, back at the other processor ranch, firemoth writes: "Today OCAU has something special - They've gotten their hands on 3 AthlonXP CPU's based on AMD's new "Thoroughbred" core. This is the .13 micron process, of course, with lower voltage. This article compares them to the older Palomino core in both speed and temperature.. and they throw one into a Vapochill supercooling case and see just how fast it can go."

Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has posted an article entitled "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". An article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on bandwidth and please viewers at the same time with quicker loading webpages. They also talk briefly at JPEG2000."

Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has posted an article entitled "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". An article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on bandwidth and please viewers at the same time with quicker loading webpages. They also talk briefly at JPEG2000."

Starting the show off with some cool do-it-yourselfer sorta projects: Diederik Meijer submitted the The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge). Next up, mdaughtrey built a Mechanical Hit Counter jrbx1 sent us a link to an in-dash Atari 2600. Even coolor is that the dash its in is attached to a 1978 volkswagon ;) rednax sent us a review of a kit for adding neon to your PC. If you're not skilled enough to hack how it works, at least you can pretend you're cool and hack how it looks! I Nothing is more dangerous then glewtion's link to a story about a sculpture in england that that worries people since the heat it generates cook fry a bird mid-air. Oh, and I lied: even more dangerous then art is amasci's link to making pet ball-lightning. In your microwave, duh. If you've got some spare time, MxTxL submitted something that we've been seeing more of, email games. This one is battlemail, which apparently is glorified addictive paper rock scissors. f you were an Anime character, here's some helpful hints to keep in mind. Hieronymus Coward sent us a bit about The Drew Carrey Show featuring a 2 minute segment based on the sims. I wonder if they will use the vibromatic bed, actually the next expansion comes out soon (today?) so I probably am gonna have to resurrect my neighborhood sometime soon. Thirsty? Dipfan sent in a story about Coke wanting to put soda fountain style coke in every house right next to the water dispenser. Got Carbonated Milk? Finally for a little random product plugging, Rustin H. Wright found a place selling penguin crossing signs. Finally, anotherone noted that you can use Google in full swedish bork bork chef glory.

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown have posted an 11-page article concerning "value" Integrated Intel chipsets, included chipsets in the lineup is the SiS 630E, VIA PM133 and the Intel 815E. The article includes information about how integration works, with lots of benchmarks testing FPU, ALU, Memory bandwidth, D3D, OpenGL and so on. They used the following motherboards for testing each chipset Jetway 630CF (SiS 630E), VIA VT5278F PM133 Reference Board (VIA PM133) and EPOX 3S25A (Intel 815E)."

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown have posted an 11-page article concerning "value" Integrated Intel chipsets, included chipsets in the lineup is the SiS 630E, VIA PM133 and the Intel 815E. The article includes information about how integration works, with lots of benchmarks testing FPU, ALU, Memory bandwidth, D3D, OpenGL and so on. They used the following motherboards for testing each chipset Jetway 630CF (SiS 630E), VIA VT5278F PM133 Reference Board (VIA PM133) and EPOX 3S25A (Intel 815E)."

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown have posted an 11-page article concerning "value" Integrated Intel chipsets, included chipsets in the lineup is the SiS 630E, VIA PM133 and the Intel 815E. The article includes information about how integration works, with lots of benchmarks testing FPU, ALU, Memory bandwidth, D3D, OpenGL and so on. They used the following motherboards for testing each chipset Jetway 630CF (SiS 630E), VIA VT5278F PM133 Reference Board (VIA PM133) and EPOX 3S25A (Intel 815E)."

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown has some "exclusive" pictures of 3DFX's new Motion Blur effects on a 3DFX Voodoo5 in Quake 3 Arena @ 1280x980, 4X FSAA and oh boy - it looks absolutely sensational and so futuristic! According to 3DFX, together the Voodoo5 5000's support of the FXT1(tm) and DXTC(TM) texture compression and textures as large as 2048 texels x 2048 texels, the T-Buffer(TM) can render 3d landscapes with unparalleled realism and with an impressive cinematic style which is Motion Blur. Their article quickly explains Motion Blur and has lots of pictures of the new feature which is currently unreleased by 3DFX, or should we now say nVidiaFX?"

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown has some "exclusive" pictures of 3DFX's new Motion Blur effects on a 3DFX Voodoo5 in Quake 3 Arena @ 1280x980, 4X FSAA and oh boy - it looks absolutely sensational and so futuristic! According to 3DFX, together the Voodoo5 5000's support of the FXT1(tm) and DXTC(TM) texture compression and textures as large as 2048 texels x 2048 texels, the T-Buffer(TM) can render 3d landscapes with unparalleled realism and with an impressive cinematic style which is Motion Blur. Their article quickly explains Motion Blur and has lots of pictures of the new feature which is currently unreleased by 3DFX, or should we now say nVidiaFX?"

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown has some "exclusive" pictures of 3DFX's new Motion Blur effects on a 3DFX Voodoo5 in Quake 3 Arena @ 1280x980, 4X FSAA and oh boy - it looks absolutely sensational and so futuristic! According to 3DFX, together the Voodoo5 5000's support of the FXT1(tm) and DXTC(TM) texture compression and textures as large as 2048 texels x 2048 texels, the T-Buffer(TM) can render 3d landscapes with unparalleled realism and with an impressive cinematic style which is Motion Blur. Their article quickly explains Motion Blur and has lots of pictures of the new feature which is currently unreleased by 3DFX, or should we now say nVidiaFX?"

Mr-Tweak writes: "TweakTown have just put up their Socket A Cooler guide entitled "Socket A Coolers - That Don't Kill". In the guide they review and test out the Global Win FNP50, Global Win FOP32-7K, ATTech CM25 and the ThermalTake Chrome Orb."

Mr-Tweak writes: "TweakTown have just put up their Socket A Cooler guide entitled "Socket A Coolers - That Don't Kill". In the guide they review and test out the Global Win FNP50, Global Win FOP32-7K, ATTech CM25 and the ThermalTake Chrome Orb."

Mr-Tweak writes: "TweakTown have just put up their Socket A Cooler guide entitled "Socket A Coolers - That Don't Kill". In the guide they review and test out the Global Win FNP50, Global Win FOP32-7K, ATTech CM25 and the ThermalTake Chrome Orb."

NoWhere Man writes: "It seems that a few Asus A7V Socket A motherboards have reached the market despite AMD destroying the hopes and dreams of overclockers everywhere. A&I Computer has a few boards and has been able to reach 857Mhz. Buyoverclocked.com also got a few, and overclocked to 900Mhz, a picture of the switches is here. For those interested in overclocking the Thunderbird, Tweak Town seems to have found a way to remove the cpu mulitiplier lock"