Content and news by Rob Williams

The next 65nm’s Presler Pentium XE Processor doesn’t support i955X, so intel will launch a new chipset call i975X which suppport Presler Pentium XE and replace the market segment of i955X, also i975X will support X8 + X8 Dual Grpahics Solution, it can support ATi CrossFire, but cannot enable nVidia SLi.

As always, HKEPC have lots of info on this, so check it out here.

True to OCZ’s standard, these modules are protected by a lifetime warranty. Timings of 3-3-2-8 1T are pretty impressive considering the capacity and rated speed on these modules. EVP stands for Extended Voltage Protection which is OCZ’s commitment to enthusiasts, allowing for users to run their modules at voltage levels of 3.0V ± 5% without voiding the lifetime warranty. ULN (Ultra Low Noise) is a technology that uses various printed circuit board (PCB) techniques to reduce the amount of electrical noise that is present in all high-speed integrated circuits.

Check out the full review of this great kit, over at OCIA.

HEY, HEY… In Honor of our new design and layout we have decided to have a few contests all during the month of November. We are going to be doing 5 different contests, so everyone will have a chance to win. And we have lots of prizes, 26 total, and not just for first place either. All contests will run till the end of November, and top winners will be announced on or around the 5th of December. Except for the Random Contest, those prizes will be given away all during the month.

Wow, they have more than a few prizes to hand out! Definitely check out the new layout and the contest details here.

Overclocking with the ECS board and our Athlon64 3200+ (Venice core) yielded a result of an impressive 2.65GHz. We got here by dropping the HT to 4x, moving the DRAM timings to 3-4-4-8. We left the CPU at 10x and increased it’s Vcore by 125mv (resulting in a Vcore of 1.52). This is an impressive overclock to say the least. I was thinking that without the ability to apply more voltage to the chipset or FSB (HT) ECS would be hard pressed to catch up with the DFI’s overclock. It turns out, we passed it nicely.

Check out the full review over at Viper Lair.

ATI’s new All-In-Wonder (AIW) X800 XL picks up where the company’s X600 AIW card left off, which means a faster core processor, more multimedia capabilities and a heftier price. Surprisingly, the AIW X800 XL isn’t the company’s most expensive All-In-Wonder product though. Nestled in between the AIW X800 XT and the X600 PRO on the ATI product line, the AIW X800 XL offers impressive performance while still maintaining a somewhat modest price. But what is the main difference between the AIW X800 XL and the AIW 800 XT, and have multimedia capabilities really been improved over the previous year’s offerings?

Check out the full review over at Design Technica.

Irth Online’s virtual world is populated by three distinct PvP civilizations — The Arcadians in the snowy north, The Morbus in the southeastern swamps, and The Mezoteks in the tropical southwest – which have a thousand-year history of battling to capture the resources of the others to ensure survival. This persistent state of war inspired peace-loving pilgrims from all three civilizations to form their own civilization, and this fourth civilization in Irth Online is non-PvP, and survives via commerce in lieu of combat. Players join Irth’s history at a period when a fragile truce exists, and determine the course of history of each civilization.

I haven’t been paying much attention to this game up to now, but these screenshots are looking better and better. Maybe it will be a game that will come out of nowhere and impress us all? Check out the new shots at Stratics.

WALTHAM, Mass. – Nov. 1, 2005 – Novell, Inc. (NASD: NOVL) today announced that on Oct. 31, 2005, its board of directors promoted Ron Hovsepian, executive vice president and president, global field operations, to president and chief operating officer of Novell. This promotion will further focus Novell’s efforts on meeting the needs of customers on a global basis. Mr. Hovsepian will have direct worldwide responsibility for product development, marketing, and field operations, which includes sales, consulting and technical services.

Read the full press release here.

With an abundance of heatpipe-infused copper heatsinks up for sale these days, it’s easy to forget that there are other ways to make a slab of metal a great conductor of heat into the surrounding atmosphere. Designed properly, a skived aluminum heatsink can leave an extruded aluminum heatsink in the dust. If any company has perfected the skived heatsink it would have to be Dynatron. The latest example of the companies’ skived Socket 754/939 AMD Athlon64 heatsink line recently arrived at FrostyTech for testing, it’s called the Dynatron A41 heatsink.

This is far from being an outrageous heatsink, but how well does it perform? Check it out at FrostyTech.

If you are a long time computer user like me, you might have noticed the occasional hurts and discomforts that go hand in hand with spending long periods of time in front of the PC. Stare at a monitor for hours on end, year after year and most likely you’ll eventually start to notice the pains magnify in frequency and severity. Do this long enough, and the discomfort could become part of the daily routine when you sit down to work or game at a computer. This guide aims to provide a guideline for identifying and avoiding situations which could result in the development of a repetitive strain injury, and to recommend ergonomically sound computer setups and products.

Check it out at PC Stats.

Our guide will go through all the possible FireGL mods for the Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800 and X800 series of cards and teach you just how to mod your Radeon into a FireGL! Check it out!

If you are in need of a guide, check one out at Rojak Pot.

Giant fighting Mechas. Experimental laser weapons. Incredibly detailed, 3-D arenas. Lightning-fast, brutally harsh gameplay. Sounds familiar? These are all tradmarks of one of Sega’s fighting game franchise, the Virtual-On series. While one may have never heard of the name before, the Virtual-On series has become a household name among arcade-goers, especially during the late ’90s. Virtual-On has gone through many changes and versions throughout the years; from the arcade to the Sega Saturn and the ill-fated Dreamcast, the latest release, named Virtual-On: MARZ attempts to take the game to a whole new level to its fanbase via a release on the PlayStation 2. However, the question is, can it live up to the fame of its predecessors Operation Moongate and Oratorio Tangram? A veteran of arcade games, very well versed in the series, tries to make some sense to those unfamiliar with the franchise in this review put together by CyberwizardPit.

Check out the full look at this cool game over at Cyberwizard Pit.

The Golden Sample is clocked with a 450 MHz core which is 4 MHz faster than one of the overclocking sweet spots (18 x 27 – 40 = 446). Now, as our last 7800 GT review showed, the good thing about the 7800 series is that we see good performance boosts when they are overclocked. There were some instances of a 10 fps increase in some benchmarks with reasonable overclocks. What this suggests is that the Golden Sample at its stock clocks and under warranty will perform much better than the reference 7800 GT and just might be up the rear of the 7800 GTX.

Check out the full review at Pure Overclock.

Today, I was having my best day of the month, first I met a very fine lady and when I came online and one of our staff members sent me a link. At that moment, the best day of the month became the worst day of the month. I saw that AnandTech, yes, AnandTech, one of the more popular hardware websites on the web, took some material from one of our articles. It took me exactly five milliseconds to identify it.

Check out the full article at NGOHQ.

Mississauga, ON, November 1, 2005 – Nikon Canada Inc. today announced the AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED — a compact, lightweight 11.1x zoom lens that is ideal for everyday photography. Advanced features include Nikon ED glass (Extra-low Dispersion), SWM (Silent Wave Motor) and enhanced VR (Vibration Reduction). The new Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm delivers optical performance that is specially designed and optimized for use with Nikon digital SLRs.

Check out the full press release here.

Mississauga, ON, November 1, 2005 – Nikon Canada Inc. today announced the Wireless Remote Speedlight SB-R200, a portable wireless remote flash unit for Nikon’s Advanced Wireless Lighting system, and the Wireless Speedlight Commander SU-800, a commander to control up to three groups of i-TTL compatible wireless flash units.

Check out the full press release here.

Mississauga, ON, November 1, 2005 – Nikon Canada Inc. today announced the latest in a line-up of exceptional digital SLRs, the Nikon D200. The D200 combines newly developed Nikon digital technologies with advanced features to create a precision-engineered, high-performance digital SLR designed for the ultimate digital SLR experience.

Check out the full press release here.

After covering several Deer Park ALPHA and BETA releases,
Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird have both made their way to the v1.5
release candidates. Today’s release, was delayed four days from its
original October 28 tentative date after a four day development freeze
and to ensure final testing mainly in the area of web-mail and banking
services along with extension compatibility. Overall, this release
encompasses a great deal of noticeable improvements that Mozilla users
around the world can now cherish. These advancements range from an
inline spell checker, podcasting, and a phising detector in Thunderbird
to security and improved CSS 2/3 support in Firefox.

Check out the full look at Phoronix.

Arctic cooling hit the cooling market hard with their Air Silencer VGA coolers. Providing the end user with a better cooling and quieter solution than the stock manufacturer OEM items. This in the end gave us more overclocking headroom. Now they are back with the same plan but for your processor. An alternative to those ugly and sometimes loud stock pieces. The Silencer 64 Ultra TC heatsink seems to be poised to do the same as the VGA coolers.

Check out the full review over at Pro-Clockers.

The cache choices for these Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 hard disk drives is 2, 8 or 16MB depending on your choice of drive size. There is also the choice to have NCQ or Native Command Queuing which is incorporated software that enables your Seagate drive to re-arranging the read/write commands so that it can read data off the drive intelligently for optimum speed and efficiency.

Check out the full review over at A1 Electronics.

Fans of the StarCraft franchise are greeted with a life-like replica of the newest edition to the storyline: Nova. Nova is a special forces operative in the Conferate Army and is the center of the single-player game for StarCraft: Ghost. Ghost features an intense single-player storyline, as well as multiplayer action for up to 16-players, spanning 3 races each with unique weapons and abilities…

Check out the full look at Legit Reviews.