Content and news by Rob Williams

This is part 4 of InsaneTek’s 1 year anniversary contest. The prize is an AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939 Winchester. This
contest is available to everyone in the world. Shipping is cheap so here’s your chance. The contest will only last for 1 week so
hurry and get in!

Check out the contest info at InsaneTek!

EPoX, with its EP-9NPA+ SLI, has taken onboard the chipset’s attributes and added in discrete SATA (PCI-Express, which is nice) and FireWire400. What’s also appealing is the voltage manipulation available in BIOS. Enthusiasts will be happy to see 3v+ DDR and up to 1.85v available for the CPU. The chipset, BIOS, and features implementation combine to make the 9NPA+ SLI a reasonably attractive proposition. Priced at around £105, the 9NPA+ SLI matches other manufacturers’ similarly priced efforts in both features and performance, making it worthy of consideration if you want a fast, stable board that should overclock to 300MHz HTT and beyond.

Head over to Hexus for the full review!

NVIDIA is on the dock again to unveil their next generation GPU architecture codenamed G70 this time round, delivering their promise to release a new GPU architecture every year. NVIDIA has gained an edge over ATI by delivering not just a new GPU architecture into the market but also delivering the its partners products into the retail front on the day of launch. It is one of the fastest time to market that NVIDIA has ever executed where time to market and market availability is the key to generating sales and profits. NVIDIA has been reaping good sales and profits from their desktop GeForce 6 series based on NV4x architecture ever since the launch last year and is hoping to set a winning streak yet again.

Check out the very in-depth review at VR-Zone.

With the 120mm fan removed, you can see the top of the densely packed aluminum fins. Something that makes the design of the Big Typhoon unique is that it is large enough to be designed as two heatsinks in one! The aluminum fins are actually arranged into two separate groups, which allows for maximum heat dispersal from the six heatpipes.

Head over to Big Bruin for the full review.

More wildly depressing news from America today, as a man is convicted for murdering a seven year-old girl following a dispute over his missing copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Ronald Kirk Brown received life in prison without the possibility of parole for firing indiscriminately into the child victim’s house. The girl, Deva White, was sitting with her grandmother and brother when she was hit in the chest by a bullet.

I don’t know why this always comes off as shocking.. it’s retarded that this continues to happen, and due to a video game. I think he deserves worse than life in prison, but that’s me. Read about it at Spong.

SAN JOSE, Calif.–eBay sellers sounded off about rising fees and Chinese counterfeits at the auction site’s annual user conference on Friday while rival Overstock.com sent an ad-slathered car to the event to lure disgruntled eBay sellers.

Looks like eBay has to do something, or people will be leaving to give Overstock.com a try. Read about it at News.com.

Always innovating, Mushkin has added a new Redline Series to their XP (Xtreme Performance) lineup of memory. The Redline modules are rated for PC3500 or PC4000 speeds with 2-2-2 timings. In order to achieve these speeds however, voltages in excess of 3.1V are needed! Essentially, Mushkin’s Redline memory is their answer to OCZ’s VX (Voltage eXtreme) memory (and others).

This memory is great, and proved even greater results, while keeping 2-2-2 timings! Check it out at Extreme Overclocking.

It’s been a little while since SilverStone made an appearance at Overclockers Online. In the past, we’ve looked at their cases and our most recent featuring was with the NT01 rev 1 in Tony’s cooler shootout. While the NT01 was not perfect, it had a lot of potential. SilverStone capitalized on these flaws and released the NT01 2.0 and the NT02.

This is a great looking cooler and performs exceptionally! Read all about it at Overclockers Online.

Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) is a security technology that helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially unwanted software. Known spyware on your PC can be detected and removed. This helps reduce negative effects caused by spyware including slow PC performance, annoying pop-up ads, unwanted changes to Internet settings, and unauthorized use of your private information. Continuous protection improves Internet browsing safety by guarding over fifty (50) ways spyware can enter your PC.

This is beta remember, but you can still give it a shot to see if it tickles your fancy. I have yet to try it, but I may just to see if it catches anything my other programs don’t. Download it here.

It has been revealed that Longhorn (the next version of Windows or the next wave of Windows technologies, no one seems to really know, even Microsoft!) will include features enabling users to easily subscribe to sites that use the Really Simple Syndication protocol. Microsoft sees RSS is a key technology in the development of the Internet, and as such wants it integrated into Longhorn in a big way. IE 7, the new browser from Microsoft, will also work well with this technology, and will include an orange button on the toolbar, which will light up whenever a RSS feed is posted on a site being viewed with the browser.

They also want to figure out other uses for RSS, not just for use in a browser. Source: Tech Spot.

Gaming headsets are all the rage these days, integrating good drivers for excellent audio reproduction with a microphone for team discussions during heated battles.

Today, we take a close look at the new eDimensional AudioFX Force Feedback Gaming Headset, with its unique amplified bass vibrations. Let’s see if they really make a difference!

Force Feedback in a headset? I would think that’s a recipe for a great headache, but I could be wrong. Check out the review at Rojak Pot.

Scythe has been at the game of cooling computer processors for quite a while, over time these coolers have evolved from petite aluminum heatsinks to enormous heatsink fans, which generally use a mixture of copper and aluminum. The Scythe CPU cooler have our hands on now is the Shogun CPU radiator with 120mm fan.

If you are in the market for a new cooler, check out the review at Phoronix.

The final production testing is done by skilled technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem. They’ve got some test hardware that I’m jealous of (fast-removal memory modules, CPU heatsinks that don’t need full attachment, PCI and PCI Express logic testers, etc.) and can have a mainboard fully functionally tested in a matter of minutes.

I believed that building a motherboard was done all by machines, but was I wrong. This is a fantastic article if you care at all to see how your motherboards are made. Check it out at Hexus.

In the beginning, when the Internet Protocol was first designed, no one was thinking about the possibilities of sending audio and video. Real time communication was not an issue. Perhaps the greatest single problem is that the Internet Protocol (the IP part of VoIP – Voice over Internet Protocol) wasn’t designed to ensure that the packets are delivered in the correct order.

Check out the full article at Bona Fide Reviews.

In association with Funcom and it’s 4th year anniversary of it’s award winning Anarchy Online, AO stratics is pleased to announce it will be giving away 10 Full Expansion accounts. Included in the accounts are: Anarchy Online Notum Wars Shadowlands Alien Invasion This also includes: Luxury Jobe Apartment Keys Leet Keys (ever…..

ACVault has posted a preview of Asheron’s Call: Throne of Destiny! The review includes 14 new screenshots and 6 different game play movies, including a collage of new and updated landscape areas (46.3 MB.)

We always look forward to receiving memory from Corsair because they are always almost certainly guaranteed to be cutting edge performance modules. Corsair also tend to be quite radical recently with design such as their Cool water-cooling kit or their Xpert DDR with LED displays. However today’s review product is focused purely for the performance user, that being their new DDR2-667 PC5400UL memory.

Wow, what overclockable memory. They managed to get it to reach DDR1066! Check out the full review at DriverHeaven.

We’re getting much closer to having Lost Coast ready to release. Originally planned as a section of the Highway 17 chapter of Half-Life 2, Lost Coast is a playable technology showcase that introduces High Dynamic Range lighting to the Source engine.

Once Lost Coast is released, we will include HDR in our future product releases. For instance, Day of Defeat: Source will feature HDR lighting for all of its levels the day it is released.

In the update news, you can download a 12MB featuring the HDR in the level. Very, very impressive. Too bad that the primary people to take advantage of this are the ones with a 7800GTX. It may run well on the 6×00 though too.. we’ll have to see.

Greetings from the Central Wastelands! Our beta test for Auto Assault is proceeding very well; we’ve introduced a new online process for NDAs that makes it as simple as a few mouse clicks to get approved and into the beta. We hit a new high for server population this week and we Comment (0) -->

There are many entries in the Gamer/Professional Mouse pad
segment out there. Today we will look at an entry by Xraypad, the
Thunder 8. Gamer pads range from $15-$75, but sometimes I wonder if it
is really worth spending that amount of money on a mouse pad. After
all, it’s just a mouse pad right? A square or rectangular piece of
plastic or cloth that your mouse sits on, what’s the big deal? Well the
Thunder 8 is available for $20 most places online and can easily sell
for a lot more, I was extremely surprised at the quality/cost ratio
with this pad. When I got this pad and checked the price online I was
shocked, I honestly thought it was one of those $75 pads. Today we are
going to take a closer look at it, and you will see what I mean.

Check out the full review at Think Computers.