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NVidia has announced Quadro DCC, a special solution for graphics and
digital content creation professional applications based on GeForce3.
ELSA will sell the Quadro DCC as the ELSA GLoria DCC exclusively
through Discreet's vast network of 3ds max resellers. The board will be
supplied with ELSA MAXtreme drivers, which improves 3ds max
performance and adds key enhancements to the 3ds max
scene–rendering window.

It is still very difficult to find any Pentium 4 enhanced software titles that would show the benefits of P4's architecture. That is why nobody really expected to find the first meaningful Pentium4-optimization in an actual graphics card driver. NVIDIA's recently leaked reference driver revision 12.10 shows what difference P4-enhancements can actually make. Check out the full article here.

Very few of us use S3 based videocards nowadays. There are almost no drivers or new produsts.
During the last year this company was in very critical condition: in spring they announced that
S3-Graphics will be bought by VIA Technologies and in summer`2000 both companies were dealing
with aquisition process. A bit earlier, in late 1999 a group of hardware developers left S3, leaving
the company without an R&D team.

We continue our journey around the globe searching for GeForce3 based cards. According to AKIBA, MSI Starforce 822 is on sale in Japanese shops. This card costs about $420 (¥51800), what is pretty cheap for the GeForce3 card with TV-Out and S-Video-In. As we see now, the final GeForce3 boards do not cost and arm and a leg even in Japan. A friend of mine said that he has had a Leadtek GeForce3 TD for nearly a week now.

The Soul MP3 CD Player by AVC technologies is one of the few on the market that can play burned CD-R's. Unlike regular memory module based CD players, the SOUL is relatively cheap at $150 and so is the choice of media at around a buck a CD-R. All you have to do is supply the CD Burner and the library of songs to burn to them. Here's a clip:

Digit-Life has published some information regarding ATI`s upcoming products. The information is not official, so do not take it too seriously.

R200 aka RADEON 2 chipset line looks as follows:

Our friends from x-bit labs have found some interesting info about the upcoming mainstream version of GeForce3.

Cards for testers should be available by June, but the launch is actually scheduled for autumn. The price is going to be about $150. As for perfomance, NV17 is expected to outperform GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 Pro based graphics cards, unfortunately, we do not know what type of memory will use NV17. Of course, GeForce2 MX successor should be compliant with DirectX 8. Traditionally, cost-effective card will support TwinView fuction.

NVidia has the best PR managers in the world. They have promoted the GeForce3 so well for those two months that have passed from the moment of the announcement that despite of high cost, cards are sold instantly. For example, guys from Bjorn3D phoned three stores and found out that all of them had ordered at total of 217 VisionTek GeForce 3 cards. The funny thing was the the cards did not last on the shelfs more than 15 minutes.

Eurocom in Canada has been making highly upgradeable notebooks for the last 10 years. Unlike companies like DELL, that will void your warranty the minute you try to upgrade an internal component, Eurocom encourages it! In fact, one of their selling points is that you can upgrade any of their notebooks at anytime. We had a chance to review their top of the line Eurocom, the 8500V, which sports a 1 GHz processor. Here's a clip:

I've seen a lot of weird coolers and heatsinks in my line of work, but the best looking one is definitely the one from Apacer RDRAM. Well, not anymore actually. This new kid in town from ThermalTake looks like it can kick ass, well not exactly but it has fins like the GlobalWin. Check it out over here