"Given the trend towards powerful, HD ready multimedia systems and HTPCs in compact desktop cases, the demand for quiet high-end CPU coolers with lower height is growing and growing", explains Mag. Roland Mossig, Noctua CEO. "Our new NH-C12P is a premium class quiet cooler that offers the same excellent level of performance as our much acclaimed NH-U12P at a height of only 114mm."

This is made possible by the use of 6 heat pipes as well as a relatively wide fin spacing that guarantees optimal heat dissipation even at low fan speeds. Thanks to its two large Airflow-Gaps that provide additional cooling for near-socket motherboard components, the NH-C12P is perfectly suited for use in poorly ventilated desktop cases.

Just like the successful NH-U12P, the NH-C12P is equipped with Noctua's NF-P12 premium fan that ensures outstanding cooling performance at minimal noise levels and has received more than 50 recommendations from leading international websites and magazines since its introduction in November. The premium bundle is topped off by Noctua's award-winning NT-H1 high-end thermal compound, making the NH-C12P a total quality package for the highest demands.

Price and availability:
The NH-C12P is available immediately at a recommended price of EUR 59.90 / USD 69.90.

For those of you that are interested, it just went on pre-order. EVGA is proud to announce the first ever EVGA designed GeForce 9800 GX2 water block - the EVGA 9800GX2 Hydro Copper 18 waterblock (part number: 200-CU-HC18-B1) with a 100% copper design and SLI compatibility. Being a full cover block, the Hydro Copper 18 is compatible with all reference 9800 GX2 cards and can be used in both 3/8" ID and 1/2" ID water cooling systems. Available now for pre-order, you'll have to hurry up if you want to buy one, because the block is said to be produced in a limited quantities.

The price is very steep though, $249.99.

SteelSeries on Monday introduced its latest gaming product to the US market, the 7G keyboard. The company claims the mechanical 7G is 90 percent more responsive and 10 times more durable that regular keyboards, and eliminates anti-ghosting by supporting a key press command for every key. For low latency communication, the 7G features 18K gold-plated connectors. The 7G utilizes iron-infused plastic and gold-plated no-click switches, among other features, to endow it with a guarantee for 50 million keystrokes by its maker.

For convenience, the keyboard features headphone and microphone connections, in addition to two USB ports. SteelSeries' Media Controls allow users to control volume levels. Computer connections are accomplished via either the PS/2 or USB ports.

The 7G can be purchased from SteelSeries' website as well as four other more common webstores for $150, which quite frankly seems a 100 bucks too much, but that's just silly ol' me.

Dailytech today reproted that E3 Games Event is losing support of Major Publishers. I think that might be a correct assumption. Perhaps Gaming Expo's like in Leipzig (Europe) will grow to become the new 'E3'.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly called E3, was once the biggest gaming event and conference in the world. Times have changed though, as E3 decided to downsize by cutting the glitter and glamour, turning it into a smaller event aimed at the press.

One would expect that games publishers would welcome the cost savings of bringing things down to a smaller scale, the upcoming E3 is steadily losing support from the biggest forces in gaming.

Activision Blizzard said that it will not participate at the E3 event this year, issuing a statement that read,

A new NVIDIA ForceWare driver appeared on the web which is being served on-line by one of NVIDIA's partners. This driver set is commonly distributed and it is receiving okay feedback.

Bare in mind this to be considered a beta driver, use it at your own risk.

There are several discussion open on these drivers in the Guru3D NVIDIA driver forums, check them here.

 ForceWare 175.63 Vista (32-bit)
 ForceWare 175.63 Vista (64-bit)
 ForceWare 175.63 XP (64-bit)
 ForceWare 175.63 XP (32-bit)

NVIDIA's partners silently have been announcing the GeForce 9600 GSO. Basically this is the GeForce 8800 GS. The 9600 GSO is still based on the same G92 core with 96 stream processors but NVIDIA will give board makers a bit more freedom in their designs in terms of own PCB design to and determine their own clocks. This 'old' card will still have 384 MB of GDDR3 memory.

We can expect many variants of cards with different types of cooling coming up to be branded as Overclocked Editions. Point of View's version is clocked at a 550 Mhz core clock, 1600 MHz memory clock(effective) and 1350 Mhz shader domain clock frequency with is 96 shader cores.

As some DRAM makers allot more capacity for commodity DRAM production, the squeezed capacity will prompt a possible price hike for GDDR, according to sources at Taiwan IC distributors.

Some DRAM makers have started allotting more capacity for commodity DRAM, especially SO-DIMMs for notebooks, the sources said. Capacity for GDDR has started to strain amid the strategic capacity allocation, they noted. As DRAM makers are expected to reserve capacity priority for commodity DRAM for 1-2 quarters, a price revision for GDDR is thus likely, they said. The sources indicated that a price hike is likely to be seen from the second half of May, as some system makers are expected to completely digest their inventory by then.

I really can't help thinking that 3Dmark Vantage was rushed to the market somehow. Anyway, Futuremark announced that a Hotfix is in the works and scheduled for a release soon.

3DMark Vantage launch was a definite success, but there were some bumps on the way. Both ATI and NVIDIA scrambled to mend some outstanding driver issues at the last moment with beta drivers, and some minor bugs managed to burrow into the final build. Known and reproduced issues include such minor bits as having to enter the product key twice, and having to ponder about an error popup on the first run. Jaakko Haapasalo, project manager of 3DMark Vantage, confirmed on the Futuremark/YouGamers forums that a hotfix to repair these (and other) outstanding minor bugs is on the way.

The community has also voiced their rather strong opinions about some bits of the Advanced version - the advertising banner and the inability to view and save benchmark scores offline. Neither of these is an issue with the $495 Professional version, but understandably that is not really an option for the vast majority of the benchmarking community. Besides, Pro is really meant exclusively for commercial use and is priced as such.

In response to the polls and comments, Jaakko Haapasalo also hinted that the community feedback is being heard loud and clear, and strongly indicated that there may be announcements from Futuremark on the subject next week.

Some PlayStation 3 owners are having difficulties starting the game or loading saved games. The fix? Deactivating the PS3's online connection.

I started having problems with the PlayStation 3 version of Grand Theft Auto IV this weekend. The game started just fine, the music and art kicked in, and the game would begin to load my save file.

Then...nothing.

The game would simply hang on the load screen (sometimes with chugging noises coming from the Blu-ray drive). This happened five times in a row before I caught word of a simple fix: unplugging the PS3's internet connection.

UPDATE: Simply signing out of PSN before playing also works fine.

And guess what? The fix worked perfectly on the first try. After unplugging my ethernet port and restarting the PS3, Grand Theft Auto IV started right up with no difficulties. This obviously means that I can't play the game's online mode, but given that the PS3 servers are overwhelmed at the moment, this isn't a real sacrifice.

Given the apparent simplicity of the problem, I'm hoping Rockstar will come up with a quick and dirty patch next week, but we'll have to wait and see. For the moment, disconnecting the PS3's online capabilities seems to work just fine.

Other readers have also suggested disabling your PS3's wallpaper or, in desperate cases, deleting the game's save files and stored game content from your PS3's hard drive. Which obviously means you'll have to re-start your progress with a fresh install.

If you've got any workarounds for the technical issues plaguing the PS3 (or Xbox 360) versions of GTA IV, share your fixes in the comments below.

Eurogamer: Talking of Unreal, it's, what, more than five years since Unreal 2. Are you ever going to make a follow-up to that? Is there any possibility?

Mark Rein: I'm sure that at some point in our future we will make another Unreal, single-player, story-driven game. I'm sure at some point there will be one. There are no plans to do one today.

Eurogamer: Why haven't you chosen to do a follow-up to Unreal 2 to date?

Mark Rein: I think we've been really happy with the multiplayer-oriented Unreal Tournament. Despite what people feel, people get this crazy idea that if you don't sell five million units it isn't a success, but we heard today that we've shipped over 1.2 million units of UT3, not even including the Xbox 360 yet. We make good money on Unreal Tournament, and it's a good game that we love to make, and it's not a five-year-long production and it's a great test-bed for lots of cool things that we want to do. We like making this type of game, and we have Gears of War as our kind of vanguard, single-player graphic showcase type of game.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I think as a company when you put 2GB memory on a mid-range card .. you acknowledge you've hit rock bottom. What an utter waste of money. GeCube has just released its single GPU HD3870 graphics accelerator featuring the Unified Shader architecture and 2GB of high-speed GDDR3 memory. The new graphics accelerator aims at delivering a high-definition video experience for both gamers and HD multimedia enthusiasts.

GeCube has come up with its own cooling solution to keep temperatures down. The card features a new X-Turbo III silent fan with a turbine design that efficiently cools the graphics core and the high-speed memory at extremely low noise levels. Additionally, the turbine design lets enthusiasts overclock the HD3870 graphics processor at up to 825MHz and 870MHZ frequencies for the core and memory, respectively.

The card also comes with improved support for new application technologies, 320 Unified Stream Processors, physics processing support and the ATI PowerPlay technology, a combination that delivers increased graphics computing power for the same power consumption as a stock design.

Our colleague W1zzard has released version 2.0 of the GPU-Z utlity. GPU-Z is a simple lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your video card and GPU.

Changes in version 2.0:

• Added support for S3 graphics cards
• Added screenshot upload feature (press F5 or click the camera icon)
• Added NVIDIA GT200 detection
• Updated RV770 detection
• Vista64 is now listed as "Vista64" in the driver version readout
• On Vista64, CrossFire status will be marked as "Unknown" until fix is found
• Added dump to XML. Use command line parameter -dump gpuz.xml
• More robust NVIDIA clock detection
• Fixed G73 fillrate calculation
• Added die size for RV350
• Fixed R680 clock readings
• Fixed R600 ROM reading code
• Fixed sensors not refreshing properly sometimes
• When unknown architecture detected, NVIDIA logo won't be shown anymore
• Fixed random UNICODE characters on some architectures in upload progress

Download - click here

Core Temp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature. Intel and AMD recently published detailed, public information about the "DTS" (Digital Thermal Sensor), which provides much higher accuracy and more relevant temperature reading than the standard thermal diode sensors do. (How it works).

This feature is supported on all Intel Core and Core 2 based processors as well as the whole AMD's Athlon64 line of CPUs. For a full list of supported CPUs see the CPU Support List.

Core Temp also has a logging feature, allowing a user to easily record the temperature of his processor(s) over any period of time, then the data can be easily transferred into an excel datasheet for easy graphing.

Download - click here

A report earlier this week showed that Blu-ray disc player sales are falling, despite Toshiba dropping its HD DVD format players back in February.

Obviously Sony was hoping and axpecting sales of Blu-ray disc players to boost but a NPD Group study found that to be contradictory. US sales of standalone Blu-ray players fell 40 percent from January to February, still in the midst of the HD DVD fall, before increasing by just two percent in March. This leads many to believe the price of Blu-ray players and media still isn't low enough for mainstream adoption.

The NPD concludes consumers aren't willing to spend the extra money on what they perceive to be a minimal increase in quality over standard DVDs, a claim it backs up with the 5 percent rise in sales of upconverting DVD players in the first quarter of 2008. Other reasons could include the HD players' high prices and the poor economy, as well as HD downloads offered from the likes of Microsoft.

Standard DVD players sales are also down, to the tune of 39 percent in Q1, but surprisingly, HD DVD player sales fell 13 and 65 percent month-to-month from January and February, respectively. Despite the format's demise, HD DVD discs are still on sale and at a discount, while the players themselves can play and upconvert standard DVDs, which helps extend their longevity.

Dude .. who knew that there would be an arms race in multiple monitors? First there was the six-screen "MasterPlex," then the eight from the Humanscale's hydra-headed display set-up. But all have been dwarfed by the 30 screens of 9X Media's top-end model.

The massive apparatus is customizable for as few as two monitors at a time, though that would hardly be any fun. Perhaps the most curious thing about this set-up--other than why anyone would need it, for personal use anyway--is the claim that it's an "ergonomic solution," as mentioned by BornRich. Because as far as we can tell, there's no way any one person could use this without eventually suffering some kind of arthritic condition.

Just wondering

Basically what happend was that Creative Labs mislead their customers with the interpretation of MP3 player storage capacity, a trick used often in this industry. Evidently they calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB).

• 1GB=1000MB
• 1GiB=1024MB

The representative plaintiff is entitled to $5,000, and everyone else who bought one of the HDD MP3 players in the past several years gets a 50% discount on a new 1GB player. They can also opt for a 20% discount on anything ordered from Creative's online store. Creative has made available all of the necessary legal forms. Seagate lost a similar lawsuit late last year. It seems that Creative labs is acknowledging and settling a pending class-action law suit inflicting a lot of customers.

Creative reached an agreement settled in the class action suit filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California. In a nut-shell, all of you who have purchased a Creative MP3 player in the US from May 5th 2001 to April 30th 2008, are eligible to either a freebie or a discount on a future purchase.

If you purchased in the United States between May 5, 2001 and April 30, 2008 from a retail store in the United States (including Creative's and others' on-line retail stores) a new Creative brand hard disc drive MP3 player (

According to gamespot it seems that Grand Theft Auto IV went on sale in stores around the world at 12:01 a.m. yesterday, and already reports of criminal midnight launch madness are starting to filter in.

BBC News is reporting on a pair of incidents, with news of a stabbing outside a Gamestation in Croydon and a mugging by another game store in Lancashire.

According to the news service, a 23-year-old man was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant as he passed a line outside the Gamestation. The victim was treated for several stab wounds and has since been released. The attacker, who police said appeared to be waiting in the line of about 50 to 100 people, was not apprehended.

In the mugging, an 18-year-old was robbed of his copy of the game and beaten as he walked home from the store with a friend. The victim was taken to the hospital with a broken jaw and a broken nose. Police are asking for witnesses in both cases to step forward.

Up to 100 people witnessed the knife attack outside the Gamestation store in Croydon, ahead of Monday's midnight release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Police said the 23-year-old victim was walking past the queue when he was stabbed several times by a hooded man who appeared to be waiting in line. The victim was treated in hospital and has since been allowed home.

After the attack at about 2300 BST in George Street the victim did not call the emergency services but police were informed by a member of the public. He was found not far from the store and taken to hospital where he was treated for several stab wounds.

'Many' witnesses

Det Insp Liz Baker urged anyone who was in the queue to contact them. She said: "We are looking at CCTV from the area and believe there were in the region of 50 to 100 people in the queue.

"We are sure many of them will have seen what happened." The suspect is described as being a light skinned black man aged about 21, 6ft 5ins tall, of medium build wearing a light grey hooded top.

Grand Theft Auto IV went on sale at midnight at selected shops in the UK. It was expected to break records for the fastest-selling game of all time .

Round Rock, Texas, May 1, 2008

* Play Crysis at full 1920x1200 resolution and 30+ FPS with Quad Graphics
* Enhanced optional patent-pending H2C cooling solution keeps gamers in the red zone, CPUs out
* Choice of Painted Anodized Aluminum H2C chassis or Silver Brushed Aluminum air-cooled chassis with optional X-View clear panel for under-the-hood ogling

Dell has raised the performance bar yet again with the launch of the XPSTM 730 H2C edition, a premier gaming desktop that is one of the most advanced gaming platforms on the planet.

With support for optional quad-core processors, quad GPU graphics solutions and up to four hard drives, the XPS 730 is more than ready to deliver an immersive experience and ensure gamers pwn their opponents in the most demanding PC games available today.

The air-cooled XPS 730 (starting at $3,999) and XPS 730 H2C (starting at $4,999) bring together some of the top bleeding-edge performance technologies gamers crave, such as:

* The new NVIDIA

Hiper Type R Mk-II 680W power supply

One PSU that certainly will catch your attention as well is the one we'll be testing for Hiper (High Performance group) today. It's their beefy 680Watt Type RII 680 Watt PSU. A product that costs roughly 120-130 bucks. This PSU immediately will catch your attention die to it's original packaging, the extremely 'out there' paint job and then .. when you look at the front side of the PSU, you'll spot 8 USB connectors. And all that is it next to being an actual PSU.

Another advantage, despite the fact that the PSU is rated 680 Watts it can actually peak at 890 Watt, and actually is s more energy friendly product.

Have a read here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/hiper-typer-mkii-680w-power-supply/