Van's Hardware shuts up shop

A NOTICE AT Van's Hardware web site posted late yesterday said that the site is being closed. A combination of "expenses, threats, attacks, conflicts of interest and intimidating phone calls" are the reason for the site's demise, according to Van Smith. Yesterday he posted a response to an article at the Pabster which must surely have had some bearing on the decision to cease publication. Here.

The cause of the conflagration between Van and The Pabster was Mr Bapco, and Overclockers has an interesting piece about the benchmarketing of it all.

And strike us pink and knock us down with an old Pearly Queen, but even the New York Times has entered into the spirit of Bapcogate.

Taiwanese mobo firm Abit has introduced its KT-400 A7-MAX2 and KD-7 RAID boards with support for a 333MHz front side bus, says OC Workbench.

There's a review of The Sum of All Fears over at SL Central.

TweakTown posts a review of the Ahanix Ice Berg 1 Water Cooling kit for fervent overclockers. That's here.

Scott Wasson wonders whether Xabre is rattling dubious swords with its graphics chip over at The Tech Report.

VR Zone examines a Hercules Gamesurround MUSE 5.1 DVD very carefully, just here.

There's a review of an Albatron GF4 TI 4200 graphics card over at Beyond 3D. Albatron was formed by the co-founder of Gigabyte who split from the company earlier on this year. Gigabyte is a big ATI partner. Go figure.

Dan Rutter he don't care about the Pentium 4 2.80GHz chip. No. He cares about a gun that flings bugs with super catapult action and here's the story.

Anandtech has a piece about new memory module technologies and that's right here.

HardOCP looks at the curious yellow mobos we saw at Computex from Chaintech - that's here.

AMD Zone has a huge list of BIOSes up on its site, which you can find here. µ