Germans cast doubt on ATI Shader 3.0 support

AT THE GERMAN 3DCenter there's a look at Nvidia's PCI Express Bridge. This is the bridge Nvidia uses to supply a "virtual" AGPx16 mode to provide the same bandwith as PCI Express x16 (4 GB/sec). The piece, in fine German, is over here.

They also have a piece about ATI's upcoming graphic chips, the R420, R423, RV380 and RV370. The R420/R423 will have only Shader 2.x support, not Shader 3.0 support, they say. ATI, they reckon, says, Shader 3.0 would be useless for gamers, so they'll skip it. Shader 4.0 support will arrive with an R500 chip, is the story over here. The Babelfish may help.

Elsewhere, Nvidia's Nforce3 gets a French going-over over on Clubic, here. Gilles linked us to a Google translation here. Thanks Gilles.

Guru3d has a fiddle about with a PoV GeForce FX 5500 over this a-way.

The ungeekly at Iamnotageek have been delving into the matter of Prescott's Dynamic Voltage technology over here. They reckon, "The heat production of these processors is simply insane. If they were to keep the processor at 1.525v all of the time it would take way better cooling than any OEM would ever put in their systems."

Toms boys take a look at "Multimedia in the Living Room" over here, with a look at DVD players Xboxes and what have you.

The partisan Xboxmediaplayer cries foul, however. Tom's gorrit wrong, they say. "You can practically mod an Xbox for free via software, alternatively there are always cheap modchips what will do the trick for under $20," that they reckon makes Xbox king of the tree, As Tom says: "the scope of functions offered by a modified XBox has little or no competition". So there.

Down in Cooling Corner, BigBruin takes a look at the Evercool CUF-715 Socket A Heatsink here.

Vantec's NXP-205 fan controller gets a going-over at ExtensionTech here.

And Thermalright's SLK-948U Heatsink tips up on CoolTechZone here. µ