And lo! Prescott was unleashed

INTEL IS QUIET TODAY. You'll notice from its press release site** that nothing has happened at all. Yet around the wibblesome web, much blathering and spouting of inanities heralds the arrival of a new processor, or two.

One such processor, it seems, has been struggling under the label Prescott. Yet, now unleashed, it will be known to most ordinary mortals as Pentium 4. Just to make life easy on the punters, there's another new Pentium 4 too. To indicate there's a difference between the two, we'll call this one Northwood, shall we? A third Pentium 4 is more easily identified as it is extremely expensive. Intel has helpfully drawn attention to this fact by adding the suffix EE to the nomenclature, allowing you to spot this sucker a mile off.

Intel, despite being extremely rich itself, has chosen not to advertise these facts. Rather it has hired an army of young spods to do so on its behalf. These pimply young fellows run what are known as hardware sites. Intel gives them chips to play with and in return they all publish their findings on their wee sites on exactly the same day.

Here in no particular order, is a list of these sites' findings:

Anandtech
Hexus
X Bit Labs
Tom's Hardware
Hot Hardware
x86-Secret (in French)
Lost Circuits
Tech Report
HardOCP
Hard Tecs 4U (in German)

Life goes on elsewhere, however. There's look at the upcoming BTX mobo that may wish to slip some sort of Pentium 4 into, dahn in Tweaktown here.

The Spodelings tweak and twiddle with a Shuttle system, here.

The EliteBastards have been file-sharing with Shareaza here.

The Madshrimps have a gander at Chaintech's Springdale motherboard here.

There's a perusal of HIS Excalibur Radeon 9600XT grapihcs card at Myworldhardware here.

Funnily enough, there's some cooling going on at Cooltechzone, courtesy of Evercool ECS here.

And finally, hotter under the collar and offering some light, um, relief, are some of the guys in the Tech Lounge who stumbled across the same AVN 2004 Adult Entertainment Expo that our Charlie came across in Las Vegas here and here. Their impressions are here. µ

*FANCY A CIGAR while you're playing with your PC? There's more on that PC Humidor thing Charlie covered from CES, here.

** THERE WAS nothing there for February, when we posted this story. There is now.