Content and news by Rob Williams

Two different makes of drivers are available for the Realtek ALC onboard audio chips. Today we are putting them both inside the ring for a head to head battle. Are you ready to find out which one is suitable for you? If the answer is yes then read on.

Head over to Phoronix for the full article!

If eleven pages and over 130 pictures isn’t good enough for you, for the first day of Computex Taipei 2005 coverage, we’re back today with a bit of information regarding XGI’s upcoming PCI Express VPUs, the Volari 8300 and 8600 series.

Check out the full look at the new XGI here.

The first day of Computex has rolled to an end. What new products are coming out? What innovations have the manufacturers come up with this year? Read more to find out!

Phoronix has a very in-depth article all about Computex. Check it out Phoronix.

COMPUTEX — DFI and Asus are showing live demos of their ATI CrossFire motherboards here at the show, and the DFI demo revealed to us some interesting possibilities for running two regular Radeon cards in a “dual slave” configuration.

This is impressive. So you can use to regular 800XT or 850XT cards in dual mode.. but you lose minor performance. Still, two 850XT cards scored 10,666 in 3D Mark 05. Read all about it at Tech Report.

Well being around computers for a long time, I have seen many different types of heatsink/fan combinations (HSF). We have seen all sorts of HSFs and other CPU cooling devices. Today we will be looking at a hsf that looks totally different than any other hsfs we have looked at. It does resemble its namesake. So I am proud to present the Thermaltake beetle!

Check it out at Think Computers.

The OCZ EL DDR PC-3200 Dual Channel Gold gaming memory is all about speed. With a default speed of 400MHz DDR and a memory timing of 2-2-2-5 it has a clear performance advantage. While this is very impressive, it also has lots of overclocking headroom. Increasing the voltage to extreme levels will really unleash its true potential. Watch the Video to find out more…

Check out the full video review at 3D Gameman.

The MSI 661FM3-V Micro-ATX motherboard is based on the SIS 661FX chipset and SIS 964 Southbridge. This tiny board supports all 533/800MHz FSB Intel Socket 775 Pentium 4 processors and can hold up to 2GB of DDR memory in its two slots. Notably, The SIS 661FX chipset does not support dual-channel memory. The 661FM3-V features integrated graphics courtesy of the SIS ‘Mirage’ chip, sharing up to 128MB of main memory by default, but fortunately also implements a full AGP8X videocard slot. Two PCI slots are present for expansion cards, as PCI Express is not yet supported by the SIS chipset. up to 4 IDE and 2 SATA devices can be added to the motherboard.

Check out the full review at PC Stats.

LAVAL, CANADA (May 30, 2005) — Lavalys today announced the general availability of EVEREST Corporate Edition, EVEREST Ultimate Edition 2005 and EVEREST Home Edition Version 2.01. This is a minor service release that brings several fixes and feature enhancements to support the latest hardware and software technologies.

Major Fixes
• Database Manager re-opening
• Crash in CPU PhotoWorxx benchmark
• Intel Processor Number detection
• Memory clock detection for Intel i910/915/925 chipsets
• Chipset information for ATI RC300/RS300
• Windows logoff/restart/shutdown issues when EVEREST was running with /ACCEPT
• Installed programs list with control characters
• Detection of Corsair Xpert memory modules

You can download the updated Corperate Edition or Ultimate Edition.

Boards with 1GiB of RAM, 512MiB Radeon X700s and the X550 replacing the X600! Read about it here. Nick Haywood writes: “It’s long been known that Intel run a little hot, so Zalman have gone extreme with a cooling solution that finally does the biz.” Read about it here.

Powercolor seek to produce dual DVI capable cards across their range of Radeon products and also have a new passive cooling solution to show off. Read about that here.

So, does ATI bring anything to the table that we have not seen already from NVIDIA? In some ways, they work the same; two matching series of cards, and a supporting motherboard. Unlike NVIDIA, gaming profiles aren’t required for Crossfire. According to ATI, with the correct hardware, Crossfire is something that is enabled as soon as your PC is put together. Their approach is driver independent, so in theory, older games as well as newer games should work in Crossfire mode as soon as you fire them up.

By the looks of things, Crossfire is going to be HUGE. Read about it at Viper Lair.

With the NDA expiring for ATI Crossfire coverage around the web this morning, all the talk at Computex this morning is of partner solutions on display. I wandered by PowerColor’s stand to find it running in an unassuming box on the far wall of their stand. Using Radeon X850 XT CrossFire Edition and a regular X850 XT, the system is sat looping FutureMark’s 3DMark05 benchmark.

Check it out at Hexus.

Radeon’s screen tiling approach to rendering, accelerating almost everything after rasterisation if you add more GPUs, seemingly gives you compatibility with a large amount of games and can increase image quality for little to no performance cost. Screen tiles are processed by a particular GPU (or all, when anti-aliasing is being done after fragment processing) and the outputs from all are combined for display by dedicated hardware, accelerating performance and, optionally, increasing image quality.

Check it out at Hexus!

The Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Deluxe reviewed today is the company’s mid-level entry into webcams geared towards laptop users. Right off the bat the feature-list is compelling with intelligent face tracking, 640×480 VGA resolution, automatic gain control, and a built in microphone, but let’s see how these all hold up in the real world.

Head over to Everything USB.

The rear of the PSU has your basic layout with the extraction fan and the on/off switch in the usual places. Looking at the fan a bit closer you will notice its not an Akasa but the well known Sanyo Denki fan that has a claimed life of 40k hours at 60C. this fan is a auto thermal jobbie which means it will adjust the speed to the temps automatically.

Check out the full review at Xtreme Computing.

WE’VE WATCHED OVER the course of the past six months as NVIDIA has reaped enormous publicity benefits by resurrecting the SLI multi-GPU graphics capability that it inherited from 3dfx, and we’ve wondered when ATI would join the fray. The folks at ATI have been talking about their own multi-card graphics capability for what seems like ages, and today, they’re finally taking the wraps off of their solution: ATI CrossFire.

Check it out at Tech Report.

We have looked at a few DVD burners on our site. Depending on media, each
drive is a little bit different on performance. For most of us, a few
seconds here and there will not matter. If that is true, what makes a DVD
burner stand out from another one? How about a DVD burner that can etch
labels into the top of a CD or DVD? That’s right, LightScribe technology is
here, and BENQ’s new 16X DVD burner supports it. Let’s find out how this
exactly works.

Head over to A True Review for the full review.

The Albatron K8SLI motherboard being tested over the following pages is a compact nVidia nForce4 SLI board that packs in quite a bit into a small space. Albatron K8SLI comes with a basic set of features, such as Gigabit network ethernet, 5.1 channel audio controller (with SPDIF out), two free 32 bit PCI slots as well two PCI Express x1 & PCI Express x16 slots, and the standard assortment of SATA and IDE connectors supported by the nForce 4 SLI chipset.

Check out the full review at PC Stats.

Wanna win an exclusive NVIDIA 6600GT graphics card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory? Then come right up and take part in our latest giveaway contest!

There can be only ONE winner! Will it be you? Let’s find out!

Check out all the details over at the Rojak Pot.

Straight of the bat from our review graph this excellent Titan Vanessa L-Type heatsink here is cooling the best. Interesting to see that there is very little difference in cooling performance where we have tested it at different voltages or fan speeds.

Check out the full review at A1 Electronics.

Novell released an update to their SuSE OS late last month. The update included numerous system updates and new versions of all the included software. We’re going to take a look at SuSE Professional 9.3, to see if it’s worthy of a purchase or upgrade.