Windows XP "Second Edition" exposed

NEOWIN SAYS A BUILD of a new version of Windows has dribbled onto the Web. Though it doesn't say where the dribbling took place, Neowin does have some pix on its site. The site says the build is Longhorn 3683 and looks like being an update of Windows XP, maybe, they say a Windows XP Second Edition. The build is pre-alpha and is dated September 2002.

Anyhow, here's the beef.

Elsewhere, reviews of the bundles of Intel Xeon products the company introduced yesterday are also dribbling onto the web. Granite Bay is the new chipset with the sexiest name (cough!) and the Hexers have been twiddling with MSI's implementation of this chipset in their GNB MAX Granite Bay mobo.

With optional Gigabit LAN, Bluetooth and WLAN support, the GNB MAX can be specified to a disarmingly high standard, they say over here.

The Frenchmen over at Hardware.fr deliver their verdict of Asus' Granite Bay mobo, the ASUSTeK P4G8X, over here.

The E7505 chipset carried the codename 'Placer'. It's for a pair of Xeons, so, funnily enough, 2CPU.com got their hands on one, fiddled about with it and liked it. Their look at MSI's E7505 Master LS2 is here.

Sticking with the dribbling, opinions and analyses of Nvidia's brand spunking new Geforce FX chip are continuing to tip up. UK Gamer has a preview with pix and some slides of performance figures that include something called Doom3 over here.

The Germans at 3DCenter have their own opinions on the chip translated by Google over here. The original German piece is here.

And Spode at Spode's Abode chips in his two penn'orth over here.

Another lot of Frenchmen, those at VTR-Hardware have a new piece on how to identify AMD CPUs. Spot the difference between your Durons and Athlons? Wibble over here. Then run the lot through a translator for the gist, we say.

Monster Hardware fiddles with a fan controller named Fanstorm over here.

8ballshardware has a look at the Spire 5F271B1L3 FalconRock I Socket A/370 Cooler for both Intel socket 370 and AMD socket 462 configurations over here.

And Overclockersclubcanada has a look at Thermaltake Volcano 9 heatsink and fan over here.

You can nail the Wibbler here. µ