This driver is intended for Sound Blaster Audigy-, Sound Blaster Audigy 2-, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS- and Sound Blaster Audigy 4-geluidskaarten. New is Vista support for Dolby Digital and DTS-decoding.

Added Features:

• Dolby
  

It is rumored that the Core 2 Duo E8600 will come out on August 10 with a $266 price tag. The CPU will run at 3.33GHz, or about 170MHz faster than the Core 2 Duo E8500 Intel recently pulled down from $266 to $183.

This may be the last high-end Core 2 Duo, and recently leaked roadmaps would seem to corroborate that claim. Supposedly, Intel will replace the E8600 and other current-gen chips in the same price range with dual- and quad-core Nehalem derivatives in the third quarter of 2009.

According to the front Malaysia's premier gaming mag PC Gamer, Grand Theft Auto IV is coming to the PC. Since I have no clue as to what is exactly coming with the package, it's time for gross speculation.

My guess is that it will just be a direct port of the Xbox 360 version, with the same stipulations that Rockstar has with Microsoft in tow. That means, probably, no downloadable content until the exclusive agreement ends with Microsoft. Regardless of content, I wonder if Rockstar will open up some development tools this time around? Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has quite the community still surrounding it.

GPU Caps Viewer has been updated with new demo (OpenGL HW geometry instancing - shader model 4.0 required), detection of GeForce GTX 280/260 and Radeon HD 4850/4870/4870X2. Detection of PhysX driver has been added as well as support for S3 Chrome 400 series (430 GT and 440 GTX).

GPU Caps Viewer is an OpenGL graphics card utility for Windows XP and Vista (32/64-bit). This utility is useful for all 3D enthusiasts and graphics developers and is a must-to-have in you graphics-geek-toolbox. GPU Caps Viewer offers the following features:

• quickly overview of the features of your graphics card and GPU
• OpenGL capabilities as well as the complete extensions list
• GPU temperature (GeForce abd Radeon)
• GPU burner (based on the FurMark engine)
• tech-demos to validate graphics drivers (vertex displacement mapping, hardware geometry instancing, soft shadows, point sprite particles, HDR)
• online validation facility
• complete report in xml format

Download - click here

We spotted this one at Computex already, yet ECS is finally ready to release it. And btw we will be testing it next month. ECS reveals the latest GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Pack to meet the requirement from performance-hungry gamers. With two N9800GTX+-512MX-W graphics cards, ECS Hydra Cooling System, and plenty of accessories bundled in a package, unprecedented gaming performance is now available via the power of multi-GPUs.

Delivering better cooling efficiency up to 18.7%, ECS Hydra Cooling System proves that a graphics card with amazing performance doesn

HWiNFO32 is a professional hardware information and diagnostic tools supporting latest components, industry technologies and standards. Both tools are targeted to recognize and extract the most possible amount of information about computer's hardware which makes them suitable for users searching for driver updates, computer manufactures, system integrators and technical experts too.

Retrieved
information's are presented in a logical and easily understandable form and can be exported into various types of reports.

Comprehensive hardware information
System health monitoring
Basic benchmarks
Text, CSV and XML report formats
Periodical updates
For Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003; Windows 9X/Me (limited)

Download - Click here

NZXT, a company built on realizing the dreams of gamers worldwide, is proud to announce the Guardian 921, a gaming chassis in the NZXT Crafted Series.  Building off of the original Guardian

BFG Technologies, Inc., the leading North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, announced today the BFG NVIDIA

Western Digital on Thursday announced its enterprise-class 10,000RPM 2.5-inch drive designed for rack-mounted servers. The 10K VelociRaptor is designed for blade servers and 1U and 2U rack servers, and offers up to 300GB of capacity, while consuming 35 percent less power than the previous-generation WD Raptor drive, the company claims. WD said that the drive will be manufactured for high reliability in high duty cycle environments, resulting in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF. It features a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and 16MB for maximum performance.

"WD is bringing to enterprise customers what PC enthusiasts already appreciate about the WD VelociRaptor: a combination of high performance and high capacity for hard drive storage," said John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives. "WD's new WD VelociRaptor, designed specifically for the enterprise in an energy efficient 2.5-inch form factor, gives system OEMs and end users a new storage option to consider to meet growing storage requirements."

The drive features Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology that optimizes performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis and NoTouch ramp load technology so the recording head never touches the disk media, ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

The WD VelociRaptor 2.5-inch hard drives (model WD3000BLFS) are currently under evaluation with OEM customers and will be available through select commercial distributors by the end of the month.

Thermaltake announces the new release of the silver shining V1 AX, a ultra-high performance next generation CPU cooler with friendly price tag but supporting most mainstream processors (Intel Socket LGA775 and AMD Socket AM2+ / AM2 / K8).

On the cooling front, V1 AX utilizes the newly developed 4 Channel

Dirk Meyer, the new chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, said in an interview with a news-paper that the company would spin off its manufacturing operations in months time as a part of its asset smart strategy. This is the first confirmation of the expected action by AMD

You know, I predicted that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ model is going to be a pretty popular product. Honestly, it's really good value and performance for just over 200 USD. A price that is attractive but most of all acceptable to a lot of you. The minute that review was posted I started receiving email, emails asking us to test this product in SLI and then compare it with AMDs Radeon 4850 HD in Crossfire. And sure, that's a very interesting perspective to look at, so I'll happily dedicate some time for such an article, which you just landed at.

Read article here.

RSA has apologised for a domain name registration glitch, which left clients of its securesuite.co.uk payment processing service unable to process payment as normal last Thursday.

Pizza purveyor Domino's, Dabs and others were hit by the snafu, which meant transactions either timed out or failed. In response to the problems, some online retailers disabled Verified by Visa on transactions that would normally be run through securesuite.co.uk.

RSA, which runs securesuite.co.uk through Cyota (a 2005 acquisition), at first denied knowledge of the glitch, insisting everything was fine with the domain. Initial checks suggested that the domain had expired after someone forgot to renew it. But a web-based system diagnostic tool that RSA uses gave the domain the all-clear.

"RSA is in the middle of updating all of its relevant domain names," the security vendor initially said. "In this particular case presented by The Register, the public WHOIS was not for some reason reflecting RSA's renewal, which has in fact already been processed.

"RSA is unaware of any service outages for our customers and have not received any complaints from card issuers, and all our diagnostics have passed."

However, further investigation, prompted by a request by El Reg to explain multiple independent reports of glitches, yielded the following response:

On 17 July, RSA 3D Secure within the United Kingdom was partially unavailable to certain customers and some transactions were delayed or blocked due to a domain name registration issue. The issue was identified and remedial action was taken. At the time, all Payment Card Issuers were immediately notified of a service interruption and they received continuous updates throughout until resolution.

The securesuite.co.uk is used to add 3D Secure protocol checks as an added layer of security to credit or debit card purchases and offered to consumers through such as the Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode services. The online security and anti-fraud service has been mistaken for a phishing site in the past, but is (though it might appear otherwise) legitimate.

Each month we here at Guru3D.com we choose a rig of the month. The July 2008 winner is Marko Tadros with his amazing Pyramid rig, yet we also see some Luxor - Las vegas inspiration. Click on the link to see many photo's of this customized PC and the questionnaire covering his PC:

Click here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/guru3d-rig-of-the-month--july-2008/

Contrary to many reviews on the web it's Windows Vista's fault that solid-state storage isn't performing as well as its proponents predicted. So said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, but at least he didn't go as far as saying it's Microsoft's problem to fix.

SSDs are viewed as the heir apparent to the hard disk, particularly for laptops and other mobile computers. SSDs are way more shock-resistant and consume less power. Theoretically, they should deliver better performance.

Alas, many tests reveal that they don't.

SSD "performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs", admitted Harari at the company's earnings conference this week.

Why not? According to Harari, it's because "Vista is not optimised for Flash memory solid-state disks".

But isn't that the disk makers' problem? Despite pointing the finger at Vista, Harari tacitly admitted it was by signalling that what's needed are new Flash memory controllers that can be built into the SSDs and "compensate for Vista shortfalls".

We'd say they're the SSD's shortfalls. Vista works the way it does because of its long hard disk heritage. If SSD makers want their products to replace HDDs, it's up to them to develop drives that can be slotted into existing systems and deliver real benefits. Grumbling that it's Microsoft's fault isn't going to help. The problem surely stems from Windows' use of hard disk space for memory caching, something all modern and not-so-modern operating systems do. So it's not like the SSD manufacturers didn't have any warning this could be an issue.

Small, Cheap Computer will continue to benefit from Flash storage, Harari said, because they have "relatively unsophisticated and demanding requirements" - they're either running very basic Linux apps or, when they come with Windows XP, have virtual memory disabled.

SCCs will provide a role of SanDisk's current SSDs while the company works on next-gen controllers better suited to Vista. They won't appear, however, until late 2008 or early 2009, and then only in sample quantities, Harari said.

In Seattle the Gamefest is hosted. On the Gamefest Microsoft shared some abstract details on DirectX 11. DX11 will be supported fully by Windows Vista and arrives in the year 2010. Some new features:

• Compute shaders - the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor -- e.g. Physics.
• Multi-threaded resource handling -- this will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines 
• Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close. A feature that ATI already supports at hardware level.

In movies and TV series they sometimes show bloopers, in games .. they are there as well: