We haven't done this in a while. But I found some pretty okay prices on the latest hardware. Clock in the prices to visit the respecitve stores directly.

• First off a GeForce GTX 280 is spotted for just $399.95
• How about a GeForce GTX 260 for $219.99

On the AMD side of things:

• A Radeon HD 4870 512Mb goes for $242.30
• And the Radeon HD 4850 is spotted at $153.90

Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe test - Meet Palit's Revolution 700 Deluxe. It's an (R700) Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 2048MB memory based graphics card that comes with custom cooling, slightly higher memory clock and some serious connectivity on the form of VGA, DVI, HDMI and even Display port. That's right all the aforementioned connectors are physically present on this graphics card.

The end result is the weirdest thing you've ever looked at really, I mean .. this thing is huge, it's literally the size of a brick as it's familiar sized at 27 CM in length and 3 PCI slots (6 CM) wide. But heck, it's rather impressive and something you won't forget easy.

Check out the review here.

Spire unveiled the SP676S1 TherMax and SP679S1 TherMax II, two new coolers with support for the Intel Core i7 processor.
The SP676S1 TherMax and SP679S1 TherMax II cpu coolers are ready to cool all processors built on the new Intel 1366 Core i7 platform in combination with the Intel LGA775 and AMD AM2 platforms giving the consumers huge scope to use these coolers. Another welcome feature to build a completely silent system are the Anti-vibe rubber fan corners, these will absorb any vibration from the fan motor. Availability is expected in early December.

The two models look similar but the specs in sizes of the fan and the materials used say it all:

SP676S1 TherMax
* Three 8mm all copper U-shaped heat-pipes
* All new direct-touch heat-pipe technology
* UV-reactant 90mm BlueStar fan design
* Amazingly silent high performance
* 45 stamped Aluminum Micro-Fin

Not hardware related. But oh, this has to be the best commercial ever released .... awesome!

Intel intends to release a broad family of chips with 35W thermal envelope designed for small form-factor, yet high-performance, desktop systems.

The processors will be the same as the company's mobile offerings in terms of specs, but will be compatible with desktop infrastructure. As reported earlier, the first breed of 35W chips for high-performance desktops made using 45nm process technology will be released already this month, whereas additional chips will be added into family on the 28th of December, according to certain documents. The family of ultra low-power chips for desktop computers will include both dual-core and quad-core central processing units, which are projected to be compatible with already available LGA775 infrastructure

Ben Basaric, Product Marketing Manager Windows, confirmed that Windows 7 will be delivered with DX11, contrary to the rather vague statement a few days ago. Furthermore DX11 will also come for Windows Vista although Microsoft wouldn't confirm, if this will coincide with the release of Service Pack 2 for Vista [via pcgh]

Watcher

EVGA has released a new budget ATX motherboard for the AMD platform, the nForce 730a. It supports Socket AM2+ processors and is available for $94.99.

Full specifications over here.

• PCI Express
  

1. Fallout 3 / Bethesda / $49 
2. Spore / EA Maxis / $48 
3. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 / EA LA / $48 
4. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest / Blizzard / $32 
5. Far Cry 2 / Ubisoft Montreal / $52 
6. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe / EA Maxis / $24 
7. The Sims 2 Apartment Life Expansion Pack / EA Maxis / $24 
8. Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy / Her Interactive / $20 
9. Crysis Warhead / Crytek (EA) / $21 
10. World Of Warcraft / Blizzard / $20

Powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 3, the over-the-shoulder action and detective game is being created by Rocksteady Studios, developers of Urban Chaos: Riot Response. The title is slated to hit PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009. Check out the brand new teaset trailer for Batman: Arkham Asylum. Sure the teaser gives absolutely nothing in ways of game play or anything.

It's just a fly through some parts of Arkham, but it looks stellar and a Batman game to live up to the Dark Knight movie would be apreciated.

Samsung

Early tests conducted with Intel's upcoming Nehalem-based Xeons show the processor running approximately twice as fast as its current equivalent. Based on the same basic design as Core i7 mainstream chips, a pair of 2.8GHz quad-core Xeon X5560 chips received a SPEC score of 160 in floating-point math tests versus 90 for two 3.4GHz Xeons from the current generation.

The performance is faster than AMD's already-improved Shanghai-era 2.7GHz Opterons, which score 105 in a dual-processor setup, and compares more closely to a quad-Opteron setup's 190 rating in the same SPEC test. Intel is expected to launch 2.93GHz and 3.2GHz Xeons and so should see faster-still results from those systems.

The Xeon X5560s are even faster in a Stars Euler3D fluid dynamics test and complete their calculations in less than half the time, taking just over 14.3 seconds versus the 2.7GHz Opteron duo's 30.3 seconds.

Much of the increase stems from the key change in memory architecture to the platform, which moves the memory controller on to the Xeon's chip die and establishes a point-to-point architecture that lets the processor cores communicate more directly with peripherals. This reduces lag time, eliminates the need for a traditional front side bus and substantially increases the memory bandwidth up to 35GB per second, mostly eliminating a number of memory bottlenecks for some calculations.

Extra assists also come from Hyperthreading, which sometimes allows two threads of programming to execute on a single core, and general optimizations that let the cores process more information per clock individually and in parallel.

The formal launch of Nehalem technology is due in early 2009 and should find its way into updated workstations almost immediately afterwards, including those from Apple, Dell and HP.

Auzentech recently announced its Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD sound card has been delayed to the last week of January 2009. This will be the first native PCI Express audio card with full HDMI 1.3a support, providing non-downsampled audio even during playback of 24p video. The original release schedule of this card was September/October 2008.
"I regret delaying the product release," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "The decision came suddenly due to strategic marketing changes by our partners. These partners have been instrumental in making the Auzen X-Fi

SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors fan speeds, temperatures and voltages in computers with hardware monitoring chips.

Changes in version 4.37:

• Fixed a bug where, after resuming from suspend, fan speeds were not really changed
• Added full support for AMD CD5536 SMBus
• Added identification of Fintek F75111R
• Fixed an Exotics tab Access Violation
• Fixed a bug that caused all of the EVENTS to be lost after entering CONFIGURE

Download - click here.