Opteron Nforce 3 Pro system photographed

THE OPTERON Nforce 3 Pro chipset has loads of people drooling at the thought of getting hold of one. AMDZone was lucky enough to have a first public showing at its LAN party yesterday. You can see some pictures of the machine here.

GamePC has an article on how the new Hyperthreading Pentium 4C processors stand up. The results are impressive.

The results of the coding challenge are in at Real World Tech. They were trying to determine whether machine or human optimised code was the better performer.

If you want to keep your processor temperature to an absolute minimum, Benchtest.com might have found the solution. They've reviewed an alpha version of a program called VCool 2.0 which is designed to help.

AsusBoards is in the unexpected position of reviewing two Abit motherboards. Even more of a shock is that they really like them. The boards are the IC7 and IC7-G Canterwood designs.

There's some hard driving being done over at 3Dvelocity. They've been trying out a Western Digital WD2000BB. It's big and fast. It's also good enough to get an Editor's Choice award.

The inside of Brad's machine has gone all green. That's because he has put some FlexiGlow Bubble Light Cold Cathodes in there. They use tubes full of bubbles to scatter light around from an LED. SubZeroTech has the glow.

Hexus has got an Asetek WaterChill KT03-L20. They gave it to a novice who was worried about fitting water cooling. Now his 3GHz Pentium 4 can be clocked up to 3.6GHz.

With some higher speeds and lower CPU usage, the Seagate Barracuda V SATA gets the thumbs up. That's over at MyWorld.

AMD might say that it doesn't exist but Abit certainly seems to think that the Thorton processor is around. It has tweaked the BIOS on the NF7-S V2.0 Nforce 2 motherboard to cope with it as you can see in point 2 on the firm's BIOS page.

Sharky Extreme has done the right thing and blown $4000 each on AMD Barton 3000+ and Intel P4C 3GHz machines. It's all about finding out what the best 'extreme' system is for your money. Pop on over there and wallow in some excess. It's a sumptuous read.

There's more watercooling fun and games going on over at Viper's Lair. They got a pre-built Swiftech H20-8500. It's certainly not cheap but they really like it.

Overclockers Club has a new take on case lighting. They review a Thermaltake Xview. It's a strip which fits on the front of a 5.25" drive bay blanking plate so you can give your machine its own lit up logo.

With the constant fight between Via and Nvidia in the Athlon chipset game it's easy to forget that Sis is also a player. TechSeekers has a review of an ASRock K7S8X motherboard that's based on the Sis746FX.

Hardware Extreme has a digital camera showcase of 5megapixel beasties. It's heavy on the specifications and where to buy the cameras but light on whether they're any good or not. Guess the site is short of cash.

Here's a roundup in the roundup. Nordic Hardware has decided to pitch as many Nforce 2 motherboards as they could find against each other. If you're in the market for an Nforce 2, head over here.

There's more case lighting shenanigans going on at the Rojak Pot. They've got case fans that light up and case fans that glow under UV light.

There're some benchmarks over at Xbit Labs that show off what a 400MHz FSB Barton is likely to do on an Nforce 2 motherboard. The results are mostly what you'd expect but there are a few ringers in the article.

Well, AMD's K8 architecture is here at last so it was only a matter of time before the pooch jokes started and people got around to talking about the K9. Digit-Life has some "details" of the processor that is but a twinkle in Dirk Meyer's eye. Is it fact or is it just doggy do? You be the judge!

Last up, X-treme PC Tech has been given a Tocools Novasonic heat sink and fan to play with. They like it even though it's got an aluminium heat sink. µ