Content and news by Rob Williams

Apple has been experimenting with x86 processors for some time, and in fact Steve Jobs revealed what has been rumored for years that a secret team inside Apple has had their OSes running on x86 for over five years. OS X was developed as much on x86 hardware as it was on PowerPC. SO if Apple wanted to, they could have offered OS X to the x86 world a year ago. However, Leopard the new x86 version of OS X will not come out until 2006 – about the same time Longhorn comes out.

Check out the full article at Hexus.

Stratics is pleased to announce a House of Commons with the developers of Planetside on today, Monday, June 6th . It will be at 5pm PST / 8pm EST in the #StraticsHoC channel on Stratics IRC. Alex “Samhayne” Von Minden and Lydia “Zatosia” Pope, the new Planetside Community Manager will be in…..

It has been a while since we last had a look at some memory. A couple of weeks ago, we spent a great deal of time looking at NVIDIA’s SLI, with five parts in all. We didn’t really cover memory in any great detail, because there are so many viable options for you to consider. Today, we are looking at some DDR memory from OCZ that is specifically tuned for DFI’s awesome LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR motherboard, which won bit-tech’s excellence award, being the best SLI motherboard that money can buy at the moment.

This is great looking memory, and seems to overclock quite well. Check out the full review at Bit-Tech.

Hello chaps, today we have another Thermaltake cooler on the testing bench. This time it’s their Beetle cooler. The design on it may scare away a few people but I think that most of them like the look. Anyway, it must be the craziest look I have ever seen on a cooler so far in my life. (20yr) :p

It certainly is a strange looking cooler, but how well does it do it’s job? Read the review here.

Today, we’ve been given the opportunity to review the Albatron K8SLI. As far as I know, this is the first AMD SLI motherboard Albatron has produced, and it appears to be in high demand because of its lower cost compared to competitors. Performance at a low cost is one important key to a successful product.

Check out the full review over at Overclockers Online.

SYDNEY, Australia — Lapping up the sunshine here outside a downtown cafe, Kevin Mitnick is apprehensive. He never asked to be the world’s most high-profile convicted computer criminal, he says, and he’s sick of media interviews dwelling on his criminal past.

“But … that’s how you make your money,” interjected Alexis Kasperavičius, Mitnick’s longtime friend, business partner and one-time co-conspirator.

It’s a strange read, but a good one. Check it out at Wired.com.

Computerworld Today Australia story incorrectly reported that the Intel Pentium D processor and Intel 945 Express Chipset includes unannounced embedded DRM technology. The Intel Pentium D Processor and the Intel 945 Express Chipset family do not have unannounced embedded DRM technologies.

Check out the story at the Inquirer.

Last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the creation of .xxx, a kind of virtual red-light district that’s scheduled to go live by the end of the year.

Permitting sexually explicit material online is, of course, only objectionable among advocacy groups that would love to outlaw anything as daring as “Heather Has Two Mommies.” (Nobody is forced to click on links pointing to raunch and ribaldry, after all.)

I personally think that there should be .xxx domains, however I strongly believe that adult sites would have to use .xxx, and could no longer use .com. That way kids could not type in a wrong .com and get an adult site, which is too common today. Read more here.

The No. 1 PC maker said the as-of-yet unnamed brand, which is slated to debut this fall, would include both desktop and notebooks priced between $1,200 and $3,500 and positioned just above the company’s Dimension and Inspiron product families.

It’s unknown exactly what components will make the computers, however I can imagine a hefty amount of the price will be due to the design. Read more about it here.

A somewhat outlandish idea a few years ago, the eight-hour notebook is moving closer to reality as promising trends in battery materials and power consumption converge. If all goes well, within three to four years, portable PCs could see battery life double from today’s four-hour stretch.

8 hours is quite a while, but it would be nice. I would expect a very dull computing experience for it to last that long, but we’ll see. You can read more about it here.

Another thing I said, I was skeptical about was the size and being able to keep the mouse on the pad. Using this pad, your movements track very well so your not rolling over a huge surface, movement is well contained to the pad. I played a few different games (Warhammer40k: Dawn of War, Unreal Tournament 2004 to name some) and also some applications, I had no problems keeping my mouse on the pad at all.

Check out the full review at Think Computers.

Unfortunately, due to some conflicts in our schedule we were unable to attend the XGI Technology booth during Computex Taipei 2005. However, thanks to the generosity of the folks over at XGI we have some pictures of their items that were on display. Items include the XGI Volari 8300 and even some motherboards!

Check out the full info over at Phoronix.

The design of the fan is like a turbine (but lets hope without the noise) but forces the air over the block and out of the rear. This of coarse means this cooler takes up 2 pci slots, the backing plate is included in the packaging and is just screwed into the backplate on its own without having to attach it to the cooler. Another feature that was nice to see was the fan connector cable, this is were the Arctic cooling silencer scores another plus point buy having the OEM fan plug rather than a traditional 3 pin with a four pin adaptor.

Check out the review of this classic cooler at Extreme Computing.

We were fortunate enough to attend Computex this year and we bring you many product highlights from various companies.

They have many, many pictures to check out, and you can see them here!

While the ATI Radeon X700 chipset is a bit slower in performance than Nvidia’s 6600GT counterpart, PowerColor does include a nice heatpipe cooler to make silent enthusiasts happy.

Check out the full review at InsaneTek.

It’s InsaneTek’s 1 year anniversary and we’ll be having many contests for the month of June. Here’s some OCZ Platinum PC3700 to start it off. The memory features new TCCD replacements called TCC5. These chips are great and are not considered to be lower quality. The contest only lasts one week so hurry and join!

Get all the details on how to win on the InsaneTek Forums.

The new Mushkin High Performance series offers high capacity, high performance and affordable prices. If you are looking for new memory modules with the best price-performance ratio, the Mushkin HP series is definitely something to consider.

Today, Chai puts the Mushkin 2GB HP3200 dual-channel memory kit under close scrutiny to see what this new large-capacity memory kit is capable of doing. Let’s see how these Infineon-based modules perform in our tests!

Check out the full review at Rojak Pot.

In addition to OpenGL 2.0 and additional Xinerama support, the CoolBits feature has finally been added to NVIDIA’s Linux Display Drivers. For those unfamiliar, CoolBits is an overclocking utility for NVIDIA based cards. Support for CoolBits has been built into the Windows NVIDIA drivers for quite some time, only requiring a small registry tweak in order to enable the control window. However, CoolBits has finally made its way to Linux! In this short guide we’ll share with you how to enable CoolBits in the latest NVIDIA 1.0-7664 drivers along with our successes and failures we experienced using this new feature on a few of our machines.

I didn’t know this program existed, but after reading the guide, I’m getting it! Check it out at Phoronix.

What’s up for day 4 at Computex Taipei 2005? Well today we primarily have coverage of the latest products from Foxconn, MSI, AOpen, DFI, Powercolor/Tul, Triplex, Vantec, XGE, and Apacer.

A ton of pictures to be found once again. Check out the heatsink on the DFI Intel board while you’re there. Insane! Check it out at Phoronix.

The Tyan Tomcat K8E (S2865) Motherboard is based on the nForce4 chipset & supports the AMD Athlon 64/FX 939 CPU. It also accepts up to 4GB of dual channel DDR unbuffered ECC/Non-ECC memory. Onboard features include; USB, Firewire, Dual LAN, NVRAID, SATA-II, 5.1 Audio, & Video. An exceptional product for a server/desktop environment. Watch the Video to find out more…

Check out the full review at 3D Gameman.