Content and news by Rob Williams

The mouse is a term that requires no introduction in today’s world of computing. For the professional where absolute precision and accuracy is needed, a mouse alone won’t cut it; it also requires a surface just as advanced for it to work hand-in-hand, and due to this demand there are a few firms that specialise in manufacturing mousepads and mousepads alone. One such company that does this is the US-based high-performance mousing surface manufacturer XTracPads, and despite their relatively new entry into the high-end PC accessory industry, their mousing surfaces and accessories have won many awards around the globe. The Ripper XL is one such example that we look into today.

You can check out the full review over at Cyber Wizard Pit.

Today i took the Spire “DiamondCool” for a test run in my girlfriends computer, she’s constantly bugging me to make here system quieter because she is getting annoyed with the standard Intel stock cooler which sounds like a airplane taking of when ever she want’s to play a game. Well Spire offered to let me test their new “DiamondCool” cpu cooler for the socket 775. Guess what, she’s not bugging me any more ;-)

Head over to HardwareXL for the full review!

Thermaltake is quickly expanding their watercooling accessories with a water level indicator (reservoir) and a water
temperature indicator. The temperature indicator seems to be a good investment.

Check out the full review at InsaneTek.

Another power supply review is coming up, tonight we will look at the Rs-550 PSU from Coolermaster. We know that there are many good power supplies out there and it’s hard to compete with Antec, OCZ etc but I know for a fact after that we reviewed Coolermasters 450w PSU that it did perform very well so I beleive this will be a better version even than the last one. We will compare it to OCZ Powerstream and the older 450W Coolermaster PSU.

Check out the full review at R&B Mods!

Greetings from the Central Wastelands! Big news for us this week! Play Magazine listed Auto Assault as one of the Top 10 Persistent Online Games of E3 2005! Read more about it in their July issue, now available at your favorite newsstand. In other Auto Assault coverage along the Information Superhighway this…..

Ultra Products is most notably known by computer enthusiasts for their X-Connect power supply series, which were some of the first modular PSUs on the consumer market. Today however, we’ll be checking out one of Ultra Products newer endeavors, and that is the CPU cooling market. In this review, we have the Ultra Products Copper Core CPU Cooling Fan for LGA775 processors.

Check out the review at Phoronix!

Sunbeam Tech cut its teeth on making accessories for computers at least up till the time they introduced their line of computer cases, but now they have added another category to their arsenal. Sunbeam Tech’s first power supply aptly named Nuuo for “New” is following the current trend of companies by using a modular cable system on their supply. So come on along as we check out the Sunbeam Tech Nuuo and see if it offers anything new or just the same old thing.

Check out the review at Hi-Tech Reviews.

Will Microsoft’s Incorporation of RSS into its next Windows version (code-name Longhorn) due out in 2006, finally give RSS the respect it deserves? What does it really mean for RSS? More importantly, what will it mean to You as a Computer and Internet User?

If you want to know what RSS could mean for the future, check out the review at Bona Fide Reviews.

Interested in trying out the increasingly popular VoIP technology? A VoIP beginner named Rene, jumps in with both feet and shares with us the good, the bad, and the ugly of his trek from sales to installation.

Check out the article over at VoipTower.

OCZ has memory that’s not made for overclocking?! For the first time, OCZ designed memory modules that are dedicated to
servers and high end mission critical systems.

Check out the full review at InsaneTek!

Getting a sneak peak at a new, unreleased SKU in the midst of production completion, especially one like the Chameleon where it’s more than just performance that defines it, is a rare privilege. The chance to see something take shape and not only that, but to offer suggestions and opinions that might even shape the final product Scan bring to market, was a treat. I hope you can appreciate the work that goes into production of products like that.

This is an amazing looking case.. but wow the pricetag! Check out the first view at Hexus.

BitTorrent programmer Bram Cohen may be in legal jeopardy after the discovery on Wednesday of an old agenda buried on his website saying he creates programs to “commit digital piracy.”

The polemic would have been of little interest a week ago. But on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the intent behind a file-sharing program can be a decisive factor in determining whether the creator can be sued for its users’ copyright infringement.

Ouch, that seems pretty careless. He claims it was more of a joke that he wrote a long time ago.. chances are if it were otherwise it would not have been there. You can get more info over at Wired.

Today, we take a look at OCZ’s Titanium series of DDR2 modules that are made from hand picked chips for the best in performance and stability and before we get into the benchmarks, lets briefly talk about why you would want to consider the Platinum series from OCZ. Imagine you’re playing your favorite game- say Battlefield 2 which is not only intensive on your graphics card, but also requires muchos system memory. Suddenly, you feel a disturbance in force and before you know it, your system is down and out.

Check out the full review over at T-Break.

The first thing that immediately stands out is the massive cooling solution on HighTech’s Radeon X850 XT iTurbo. The cooler is a familiar design, in that we’ve seen it many times before on previous HighTech cards. It is based on Arctic Cooling’s Arctic Silencer series of coolers, and it is in fact the ATI Silencer 5 cooler with slightly different aesthetics, in the form of a blue UV reactive fan and a UV reactive duct, allowing it to glow a nice ice blue under UV light.

Head over to Bit-Tech for the full review.

SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors fan speeds, temperatures and voltages in computers with hardware monitoring chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hards disks that support this feature (almost all :-)) and show hard disk temperatures too, if supported.

You can download the latest version over at Major Geeks.

A new Forceware set has been released, dated the 13th.

• nv4_disp lists – DriverVer = 06/13/2005 ; Changelist 1300631
• Adds H.264 hardware decode support for the 7800 series
• Drivers come with a setup.exe for easy installing
• GeForce 2 and up are supported in this release
• Files are dated: June 13th, 2005

I can’t help but notice a mention of a G72 in the nv4_disp.inf file. Download it over at NGOHQ.

There’s little doubt the medium has its appeal. Apple has announced its iTunes Music Store has more than one million subscriptions for the 3,000 podcasts it has made freely available there.

“With the release of iTunes 4.9, listeners are voting with their ears,” said Adam Curry, co-founder of the PodShow Podcast Network. “Subscriptions have dramatically increased across our entire PodShow Podcast Network, and I predict over the coming months that iTunes will introduce tens of millions of new listeners to the world of Podcasting.”

Wow, one million subscribers sure didn’t take long. Smart move by Apple. Check out more info here.

Norwegian web browser firm Opera Software completed a highly successful week with a three-year deal with Motorola mobile phones.

The contract is an expansion of an existing deal Opera has with the American mobile giant and entails the Norwegian web browser being available on all operating systems used on Motorola phones.

This is a great win for Opera! Check out the news posting here.

Speaking about ‘the pipes’; as many of you say, the “Eehw it only has 12 pixel pipes” factor, the standard GeForce 6800 offers an excellent gaming experience and it should since it is still in that high-end class, but for a far better price. This little gem here will cost you just 250 EUR which is an awesome price, versus performance versus original cooling versus what not. The one bummer has to be is the software-bundle though, but hey. Less games included in the end will save you money. On the other side, you do receive the component HDTV connector and a plethora of other cables.

Now this card has a very unique cooler. I’ve never seen one quite like it actually. How well does the card itself perform? Check out the review over at Guru3D.

Today 3DXtreme has the pleasure of having a look at two motherboards based on competing chipsets for the AMD64 platform. The Chaintech VNF4 Ultra being based on the Nvidia nForce4 Ultra chipset and the Albatron K8X890 ProII based on the VIA K8T890 chipset. They both sport PCI-Express and a number of features. But the real question is whether they perform equally and if they will let us overclock. Let’s take a closer look…

Check out the full article at 3D Xtreme.