Too funny, definitely a parody. I just spotted this one over at techamok, a poor IT guy is forced to pause his Halo game in order to deal with a bunch of dumb employees who are absolute morons. Voices have been altered to protect identities, it's not a company of elves. Have a look, pretty hilarious stuff make sure your sound is on.

Santa Clara based NVIDIA confirmed that second quarter of fiscal year 2009 will not be as good as initially estimated and desired.

The company is saying that its Q2 revenue will be under $1 billion and hover around $875 million to $950 million due to worldwide end-market weakness, the delays of several chipsets and the competition from AMD which forced it to lower the prices of some of its GPUs.

Since problems seem to come at least in pairs Nvidia has also announced its plan to "take a one-time charge from $150 million to $200 million against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems." CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has stated that the company has learned from these higher than expected failure rates and that it will work more closely with OEMs to address such issues. The results for Q2 of the financial year 2009 will be revealed on August 12.

I just spotted this on on Digit-life, pretty interesting see, while personal computers built into monitors are not rare, they are, as a rule, expensive. Without a doubt Apple iMac is the most popular among such solutions, but PC market also offers similar machines, e.g. Dell XPS One.

Nevertheless, ASUS is going to boldly enter this market - to revolutionize it, naturally. For 500 USD its new Eee Monitor will offer the same level of integration and performance that should be enough for home users. While complete specifications are not known yet, the novelty is said to feature Intel Atom N270 CPU and integrated graphics. Users will be able to select between 40 GB SSD and 80 GB HDD.Other features are to include 6 USB ports, Ethernet adapter, modem, IEEE 1394 interface, usual audio connectivity and Denon speakers. All this will be integrated into a 19-inch LCD monitor with no external VGA or DVI.

Even something as simple as an approximate release dates of the Eee Monitor is not yet known.

GameTrailers posted a new trailer  from Legendary, showcasing the first person shooter in the works at Spark Unlimited and scheduled to hit the store shelves in Summer 2008, for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

For more than six months, a list ranking the top supercomputers in China has been floating around, but no one has managed to solve its riddle.

The list begins much like any other supercomputer ranking. IBM built the top system, which is a cluster of servers running on Xeon chips from Intel. An oil company - China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. - owns the machine. The next system, also built by IBM, belongs to the China Meteorological Administration. The third machine, a cluster made by Dawning, sits at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, and the fourth system again belongs to the China Meteorological Administration. So, that's oil and gas exploration, some weather modeling and serious science work. Very standard stuff in the so-called high performance computing market.

The systems ranked 5-10, however, prove more curious. These identical 1950-core clusters built by HP belong to "Gaming Company."

It's almost a sign of disrespect to have such a prominent position on a list of top supercomputers and remain shrouded in anonymity. No self-congratulating, red-blooded US company would dare turn down the marketing opportunity presented by owning six of the country's fastest computers. What, after all, is the point of even having lists if comparisons against rivals and bragging can't occur from time-to-time?

But try as it might to remain secret, the true identity of "Gaming Company" has been discovered. Our sources in China have revealed that the these six systems belong to The9 - a famous video game distributor and the Chinese proprietor of World of Warcraft.

The9 owns at least 12 of the Top 100 machines in China and may have up to 16 systems on the list. (We've not been able to confirm four of the anonymous machines, although they're all also made by HP and belong to an anonymous gaming company. And, despite repeated attempts, The9 has declined to return our requests for comment.)

Taking just the 12 machines, The9 has at least 18,032 cores of processing power - a mix of Xeons, Opterons and even Itaniums - dedicated to distributing games throughout mainland China.

It's true enough that China's supercomputer list reflects a nation that's still in the early stages of building out its computing infrastructure. Only 12 of the top Chinese systems rank among the 500 fastest machines on the planet, according to the most recent Top500 supercomputer list. Meanwhile, the US claims 257 of the top machines, the UK 53, Germany 46 and France 34.

In addition, the Chinese list is filled with systems from mainstream industries such as oil and gas, entertainment and telecommunications. By contrast, the top Western machines tend to reside inside of government-funded laboratories and universities. (Part of this discrepancy may result from the fact that many foreign government bodies like to boast about their computing giants, while the PRC appears to keep many government systems hidden. In addition, Western companies tend not to bother with benchmarking their business clusters, while the Chinese seem eager to do so.)

Regardless of how you examine the trends affecting the lists of supercomputing machines, The9's story stands out as something rather remarkable. This one company aims more than 10 per cent of China's top computers at the singular task of sending out video games to the millions of local players.

It seems that AMD is gearing up for the launch of a special Radeon HD 4800 card designed explicitly to push past the GeForce GTX 280 in sheer performance. The TBA hardware would use the extra energy headroom of the card along with a custom water cooling system to clock the card well above the company's best individual card, the 4870: the core would reach 950MHz or more, while the video memory would be pushed to a 1.2GHz actual speed (4800 MHz effecive).

The upgrade would give the RV770 chip, which sits at the heart of the AMD card, a 150GB per second transfer rate that would be just enough to edge out the NVIDIA-made GeForce card and eliminate one of the few weaknesses of the current Radeon platform.

Diamond is already said to have delivered a rough version of the technology with its Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition card, which underclocks AMD's official version slightly but is otherwise identical. The official release, however, would give PC builders a drop-in option either for their own stand-alone cards or for manufactuers designing complete systems. Release dates haven't been made official but are expected soon from card designers such as ASUS and Sapphire.

My question here would be .. considering the RV770 is all about price vs. performance ... how much would this cost ?

Related articles:

• Radeon HD 4870 review
• Radeon HD 4850 review
• GeForce GTX 280 review
• GeForce GTX 260 review

A while ago we already posted a bit on this guy who invest six million dollars on his own home theatre. This one will do just as well though. Norweigian resident Bjorn Kristensen has shown us that there are true A/V enthusiasts all around the world

Chili-hardware posted an interesting roadmap from AMD today. It includes an overview of official chipsets up-to 2009. It includes new RD890 and RS880 chipsets, both of which utilize DDR3 memory, as well as the new SB800 Southbridge.

The SB800 series southbridges for example, are more than nine months away yet the sliding slide below is detailing AMD's plans for them and the improvements they are set to contain.

The interconnect between the SB and NB will receive an upgrade towards PCI-Express 3.0, though the graphics card will have a 'dedicated' PCIe 2.0 connection. The SB800 chip will feature support for something called the Swift Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) which is part of the Fusion project, integrated Gigabit Ethernet, optional SATA 6.0 Gbps connection support, and improved hardware monitor. We can't wait.

Publisher Electronic Arts sent out the first official screenshots from Crysis Warhead, Crytek's upcoming sci-fi shooter sequel.

Realtek issued a new HD Audio driver. Realtek HD Audio Driver support all of Realtek HD Audio Codec in Vista/WinXP/Win2000/Win2003 .

1. Vista WHQL Supporting: ALC882, ALC883, ALC885, ALC888, ALC889, ALC861VD, ALC660, ALC662, ALC663, ALC260, ALC262,ALC267, ALC268, ALC269, ALC272
2. Windows 2000/XP WHQL Supporting: ALC880, ALC882, ALC883, ALC885, ALC888, ALC889, ALC861VC, ALC861VD, ALC660, ALC662, ALC663, ALC260, ALC262, ALC267,ALC268, ALC269, ALC272
3. HDMI Device WHQL Support: ATI HDMI Devices
4. OS Supporting: Microsoft WindowsXP, Widnows2000, Vista x86/x64
5. Pack with Microsoft High Definition Audio UAAV1.0a(5013)
6. Add/Fix
   1. Driver :
      1. Customizations.
      2. Add 24-bits recording feature.
      3. Fix EAX direct parameter issue under XP.
      4. Fix dummy noise issue under XP.

Realtek's download servers are excrutiating slow, therefore we mirror them on our servers.

Download - click here

Woohoo, I say bring it on ! OCZ has rolled out a new series of more affordable Core solid state disks. These 2.5" models are available in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB for $169, $259 and $479, respectively. The drives also feature a two-year warranty. OCZ is projecting read speeds of 120 to 143 MB/sec and write speeds of 80 to 93 MB/sec. All Core Series SSDs feature a mean time before failure (MTBF) of 1.5 million hours.