Content and news by Rob Williams

“In terms of design only minor changes have been made compared to the iDEQ 200 series with the most notable being to the fascia. Whether you like the change or not is down to personal taste but I preferred the older design. However, the build quality of the fascia has definitely improved with the brushed aluminium panels giving it a much more sophisticated look and feel.”

Head over to Trusted Reviews for the full read.

“Gamers want more. The standard keyboard just aint’ cutting it. They seek rapid response times and immediate action as well as pin-point precision. Keyboards are often over looked, especially when they can immediately boost your skills onto a new level. So let’s take a fine look at the most popular gaming keyboard. The Z-Board.”

Check out the full review at Mistix.

BRANDON, Man. — A Manitoba judge is holding a teen’s PlayStation video game machine “hostage” to entice the 14-year-old to do well in counselling.

“If you want the PlayStation back, you’ll work on the counselling,” Judge Krystyna Tarwid said in Brandon provincial court.

That’s certainly a new way of doing things. Judges always try to be creative.. check it out here.

So what did I do this weekend? I played Guild Wars. If you have not heard of Guild Wars, then I would like to personally welcome you to civilization. This game is posed to knock the MMORPG gaming world onto its backside. Now, before you insist that many other games have, or Comment (0) -->

MMORPG.com: The first thing I noticed when I looked at Gods & Heroes was the realistic looking combat. Can you tell us a bit about the technology that supports this? In addition, how scalable will this be? It looks great one-on-one, but what about three-on-one, etc.? Steig: It will be very scalable. Comment (0) -->

“With the RADEON X850 XT-PE, ATI has expanded its product lineup offering up their fastest video card for the AGP platform. In this evaluation we put it up against the fastest GeForce 6800 Ultra-based video card in DOOM 3, FarCry, Half Life 2, Need for Speed 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick, and EverQuest II to see which one games best.”

A lot of benchmarks and information can be found here. It’s great to see that they are going to release an AGP version.

“THE SOFTWARE MAKER that makes a proprietary program used to manage Linux kernel development has had a bit of a tiff with the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds.

Torvalds has used BitMover’s BitKeeper to manage the development of Linux for nearly three years, thanks to a free deal brokered with the software maker.”

Read more about this craziness here.

“Comcast and Time Warner, the top U.S. cable operators, said Thursday that they would jointly buy the assets of Adelphia Communications for $12.7 billion.”

This must be the week of large purchases. Read about it here.

“MICROPROCESSORS ARE GETTING too hot, requiring too much power, and not delivering enough additional performance for it. That’s the basic problem. The engine that’s driven the microcomputer’s incredible rise in capability over the past 30 years, Moore’s Law, isn’t quite out of steam yet, but some of its offshoots are on the ropes. CPU designers have nearly exhausted their collective bag of tricks to get more performance out of additional transistors on a chip by increasing parallelism at the instruction level. Speculative execution and deep pipelining are by now very standard features, and CPU designs are getting increasingly complex and hard to manage. When Gordon Moore’s goose lays a golden egg and the number of transistors possible on a chip doubles, as it is supposed to do every 18 months, taking advantage of the windfall has proven increasingly difficult.”

Definitely an informative view on the CPU’s, so check it out at Tech Report.

“In this review we go over the properties of the Nvidia GeForce 6600 & 6600 GT graphics video card which is a really great value performance graphics card that gives outstanding in all but the most high resolution settings where it cannot compete with the GeForce 5950 with its 256-bit memory bus which gives it higher memory bandwidth. But then since the price is a lot cheaper who cares.”

Check out the full review at A1 Electronics.

“What can I say? Albatron managed a fine score at the stock speed, as expected with its reference design, and achieved an unprecedented overclocking of 597MHz core and 1200MHz memory, thanks to the use of copper HSF.”

Check out the full review at Overclockers NZ.

“For the price this pad is excellent, especially if you compare it to other pads available for twice as much. But if you are limited to desk space, then you may want to re-think purchasing this pad, as it is very large, and will take up quite a bit of room on your desk.”

Check out the full review over at Think Computers.

“The Armband itself made from a stretchy elastic material so it fit’s all sizes with a Velcro strip on the end to secure in place. Rio have put a lot of effort into this design to get it right and in my opinion they have hands down, you can almost forget that the player is strapped to your arm while working out, but you are always aware as the music is playing hard in your ears.”

Check out the full review at XtremeComputing.

“Anyone who has ever used a wireless mouse knows just how cool they are – until they run out of power. Until you recharge or replace the batteries, the mouse is unusable. For mobile users, unless you carry along spare batteries or a spare mouse, you will have to go mouse-less for a while. With this in mind, Bluetake has released their latest mouse, BT510 Bluetooth Mini Mouse. Just how can the BT510 stay useful when its batteries run out? What else can it do? Read on and find out.”

Check out the full review at A True Review.

“The MSI NX6800GT-T2D256E is a very solid offering for those looking to upgrade themselves from a DirectX 8 video card. While it’s not based on NVIDIA’s flagship 6800 Ultra, the 6800GT offers everything feature-wise that the Ultra does at a much lower cost.”

Check out the review at Viper Lair.

“The PX-716UF external burner offers a slew of features and technologies but the two which stand out are 16x DVD+R and 6x DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) write speeds. Dual Layer allows hours of DVD quality video or up to 8.5GB of data on one disc. It also supports all the CD formats. This is truly a fantastic all in one product with the advantage of portability! Watch the Video to find out more…”

Check it out at 3D Gameman!

GameBanshee has launched a new subsite dedicated to Atari and Liquid Entertainment’s upcoming RTS/RPG hybrid, Dragonshard, and they’ve kicked it off with a three-page interview with designer Charley Price. A snip: “Q: Other than Dragons, Beholders, and Minotaurs, what other fantastical creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons world will we see? Will Comment (0) -->

“The Thunder 8 ships in its own tin carrying case. Inside there are molded foam pieces which fit the pad perfectly. This not only protects and prolongs the pristine condition of the pad, but also looks nice and will no doubt get attention at a LAN party. It gives the Thunder 8 an overall “gamer” feel and any company that sells performance mouse pads should consider at least some form of viable transportation. Several colors choices are also available: black, blue, green, orange, and yellow. The mouse pad remains black, but the trim is different.”

Check out the review at MikhailTech.

I never thought I would see this day. Most game companies shun this like the plague.. but maybe it makes sense.

“Sony Online Entertainment, the developer of massively multiplayer online games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, is the first major U.S. publisher to facilitate the buying and selling of virtual goods.”

At Station Exchange, you will be able to buy and sell ingame items for real cash, and it’s secure. While I don’t necessarily agree with this, I would rather the actual game company do this rather than seeing other companies thrive on it. Going to be fun to see how this plays out..

Over at the Official B&W2 site, the mailbag has been updated. If at the moment you can specify what NEW miracles will there be and what will they do, and what sorts of creatures will you be able to have, and also how big the creatures can get like on the first Comment (0) -->