Content and news by Rob Williams

The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching.

Link prefetching is a mechanism that uses browser idle time to download Web pages that the user might visit in the near future. This feature is enabled by default in Firefox 1.0. Google added support for link prefetching to its search engine earlier this year, which means that Firefox will pre-load the top search results into its cache.

While it could be Opera that’s ‘jealous’ that Firefox is more popular, it is a valid case. Personally, I don’t use Opera because I don’t want to pay for it, and I don’t want an ad-based version. Firefox is clean free of anything like that, and works just as well. You can check out the full read over at ZDNet.

If you are interested in winning a brand new MX518 gamers mouse, you can check out all the details over in the NGOHQ forums.

…the game logs in with an entirely different feel from what you’re used to and kick starts Asheron’s Call: Throne of Destiny, where a new race, new graphics, new items, levels, and monsters will change all that you thought you knew about Dereth.” Check out the preview over at AC Stratics!

This display has a 20×2 character readout, a 160 degree viewing angle, an amazing response time & great contrast. Additionally, it has excellent build quality, is reliable & most importantly, it’s affordable. The amount of information that this unit can display is only limited to your preferences. Whether you want a couple of screens or hundreds, this unit in combination with the LCDC software will easily satisfy. Watch the Video to find out more…

This is a great looking panel that has tons of functionality. Check it out at 3D Gameman!

Today is yet another magical day for NVIDIA as they unleashed their new GeForce 7800 GTX VPU. We will be bringing numerous reviews on the different 7800 GTX cards shortly, but today, we are having a look at NVIDIA’s newest Linux driver set: 1.0-7667. These Linux drivers do support the GeForce 7800 GTX and offer several other fixes for Linux users.

They test out performance with UT2004 and Doom III, so check it out at Phoronix.

As expected, the NVIDIA 7800GTX cards were released today, and there are reviews up everywhere. If you’ve been living under a rock, the 7800GTX is NVIDIA’s next gen card. Or now, current gen! Equipped with 24 Pixel Pipelines, and running with a 430MHz Core and 1.2GHz Mem, it’s one ultra-powerful card.

The card supports a slew of new features, including the anticipated HDR, which makes lighting much more realistic. This is currently also available on current gen 6×00 cards, but these cards are much more capable of handling it. The cards are not far different than the current gen, but are much more powerful. You can find out a lot more general info about the GPU on the NVIDIA site.

As mentioned, there are many reviews of this card out today. You can find large reviews at Guru3D, Tech Report, Hexus, Hard|OCP, T-Break, nV News, PC Perspective, Beyond 3D and nForcers HQ.

If you are already looking to buy one, you can check out NewEgg, Tiger Direct and ZipZoomFly. For Canucks, you can get yourself an eVGA at NCIX, or an XFX or BFG at Tiger Direct.

Now we wait for the ATI Crossfire and 7800 Ultra!

LaCie sent us details of their new mobile USB hard drive with biometric security. The SAFE Mobile Hard Drive can be locked or unlocked by swiping a finger over an embedded sensor in the recessed area of the hard drive.

According to the manual, LaCie is going to ship the SAFE Mobile Hard Drive with dual-platform software for both Windows XP and Jaguar/Panther/Tiger. This probably marks the first biometric device that didn’t leave out Mac user group.

Check out all the details at EverythingUSB.

Sunbeam Tech is known for their computer modding supplies and accessories. Recently, they have entered the computer hardware arena. How so, you ask? Sunbeam Tech has released their new active PFC power supply line called the Nuuo. Today we look at the 550 Watt model.

Check out the review at A True Review.

To go along with our Socket 754 processor, we chose the cheapest compatible nForce3 250 motherboard we could find. NVIDIA’s nForce3 250 chipset is the best Socket 754 solution out there, so our choice was simple. Biostar is known for their reliable motherboards and the NF325-A7 features 2x DIMM slots for up to 2GB of memory, 8x/4x AGP, 2x IDE channels, 2x SATA channels with RAID (0 and 1 configurations), 8x USB2.0 ports (4 in the rear), 5x PCI slots, integrated LAN, and Realtek ALC655 6-channel audio. All in all a very feature-rich board.

Check out the article at MikhailTech.

We are pleased to announce we will soon release our next generation application-based benchmark – PCMark®05. PCMark05 is Futuremark’s third installment of the popular PCMark series, and it’s a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance.

They note that if you order PC Mark 2004 30 days before the release of the new one, you will get it for free. They don’t give any definite date of a release, but hopefully within 30 days. With this release, is a new naming scheme as well. You can read all about it at Futuremark.

For those unaware, the first card from the next gen Nvidia series, the 7800GTX, will be launched by different companies today, and more tomorrow. You can be on the lookout for reviews all around the web, as they will likely be plenty tomorrow.

Chinese hardware site, HardSpell.com, has released a massive 41 page review today. There may be more reviews from other Countries as well later today. You can check out their review here. You will want a translater, but there is enough English to get to the graphs.

It’s going to be an interesting week. eVGA, BFG, Chaintech, Gainward and others will be releasing 7800GTX cards tomorrow, so if you are in the market to buy a killer video card, wait until these are out!

Contois Music Technology last week asked a Federal Court to stop the iPod maker from distributing its iTunes jukebox software and is seeking damages over an alleged patent violation by the iTunes software.

The suit, filed on June 13th in Vermont District Court, alleges that Apple’s iTunes software design infringes on Contois’ six-year old design patent (US Patent No. 5,864,868) entitled “Computer Control System and User Interface for Media Playing Devices.”

Here’s another retarded lawsuit in the pile. I’m interested to see how it plays out though. Check out the story at Apple Insider.

eBay has launched an open source developer website to encourage the creation of new applications for its auction site and PayPal online payment service.

The eBay Community Codebase site gives developers the source code for existing eBay applications and tools and allows them to collaborate on projects with others.

They are obviously trying to keep on top of things in competition to Google. They are supposed to release a similar service to PayPal later in the year. It wouldn’t surprise me if a Google auction service was in the works either. Read the story at Computer Weekly.

The Hyper 6 is probably considered Cooler Master’s first high performance cooler. To this day, enthusiasts are still using
the cooler. Well now, Cooler Master gives you something else to play with, the Hyper 6+.

Very unique design, it looks great! Check it out at Insane Tek.

Microsoft Latest News about Microsoft has officially jumped on the local-search bandwagon with the launch of a new service aimed at helping customers find results from local business and other local services.

At the same time, the MSN Latest News about MSN Web portal has plans to add Virtual Earth technology to MSN Search, providing geo-location capabilities in an attempt to match the latest offerings from competitors Google Latest News about Google, Yahoo Latest News about Yahoo and Amazon.com Latest News about Amazon.com.

For a lot more info, check out the story at Top Tech News.

Measuring in at 64 x 21 x 10mm while having a storage capacity of 1GB, the Transcend JetFlash 110 is one of the smallest flash drives we have yet to see. Although this unit may be small, is it fast? You’ll need to read the review to find out for yourself as we pair it against four other top-of-the-line thumb drives for our usual read and write testing.

Head over to Phoronix for the full review.

Until now, I have been accustomed to using onboard sound for everything. I’m not an audiophile, and growing up with actual phonographs and cassette tapes, I’ve always been used to the analog hiss present in everything. With my MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard (Realtek ALC850 audio chipset), there has always been a slight hiss with every pair of headphones I have ever tried when the volume is set to max. This was not present in the Logitech Premium USB Headset 350.

Check it out at EverythingUSB. For a comparitive view, you can check out our review of the headset here.

For a very long time now I have tried to find an alternative for the Sound Blaster series but unfortunately I couldnt find a real competitor. Few weeks ago I read at NvNews about a new sound card named HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Gold with Dolby encoding support and many cool features. I pulled out a few strings and managed to get a sample of this card. The one million-dollar question now is does the HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Gold offer a real competition to the Sound Blaster series? Read this review to find out.

Looks like a solid card. The amount of capacitors on it is crazy! Check it out at NGOHQ.

For those of you looking for a fanless cooler heatsink for you VGA graphics cards this PrimeCooler one certainly seems to fit the bill and also gives you the oppertunity to install a fan should you need one in your situation. What more can you ask for. And it only weights 306 grams.

Perfect for the quiet PC. Check it out at A1 Electronics.

Attack of the card readers! We bring you yet another card reader, this one also has a usb hub in it as well. This card reader and usb hub combo is made by I-Rocks. It’s a 12 in 1 usb 2.0 hub reader. I’ve seen their products here and there but had never bought one or seen first hand, so I decided to read up a little about them on their website. They have been making computer peripherals for over 13 years now and are located in China.

If you are in the market for a card reader, check out this one at Think Computers.