Blue, blue, electric blue... Sounds with vision

Audigy 2 delivers, they say, 106dB SNR with THX certification, 6.1 surround sound for movies and gaming, 24-bit/96kHz recording, and Creative's new MediaSource player. Audigy 2 and Audigy 2 Platinum are both slated for worldwide shipment in October and has an estimated street price of US$130 and US$200 respectively, they say. Wibble ye hither.

Or hither for Heise.de's German version.

Graphics card overclockers might like to witness Ocworkbench cast an eye over ABIT's Siluro GeForce 4Ti4200 O.T.E.S over here. This overclocker's toy is one of the first to use heatsink pipe technology on a graphics card, they say.

While this lot at muropaketti.com tried out some graphics overclocking of their own, this time using liquid nitrogen on a new Club3D Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card. Are they bonkers? "We were able to push the the GPU to 455MHz and memory to 365MHz, they say, over here.

But do we actually need 128MB of graphics memory, or is it all just a lot of hype and bluster? That, indeed, is the question posed by the Tech Reporters over here.

2CPU.com put AMD's 2000+ Athlon MPs against Intel's 2GHz Xeons charged up Rambo-stylee over here.

"While the name RAMBUS has left a bad taste in the mouth of every geek from here to Silicon Valley in the last couple of years, it's still true that RDRAM is an excellent performer in conjunction with Intel's bandwidth friendly Pentium IV and Xeon," they say. The test puts Tyan's Thunder i860 under the microscope.

Some friendly Germans over at computerbase.de put Thoroughbred models 2400+ and 2600+ up against some Pentium 4s. "To make things fair," they say "we equipped the Intel processors with DDR333 memory instead of Rambus. The fine fellows offer an Altavista translation here. Here's the German original.

Hexus.net adds to the sum of GeForce knowledge over here with a look at ABIT's Siluro OTES GeForce4 Ti 4200 If you don't mind a little extra noise in your system, perhaps the ABIT OTES Ti 4200 can offer you overclocking potential you require, they suggest.

They are also pleasantly surprised by Shuttle's AS45GTR SiS648 motherboard over here.

There's a look at a USB 2.0 combo drive, the Plextor PleXCombo 8/8/24-8U over here here at HotHardware.com.

Lazy the Phluxer gets off his arris to tinker with a Titan TTC-D5TB(TC) heatsink here.

X-Bit Labs casts an eye over 13 (thirteen!) hard disks over here.

They also investigate claims that Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV wouldn't work in RAID0. Find out more, they say in their detailed investigation over here.

We can't take any responsibility for this. Just pointing you at it, just in case it floats your boat. It starts like this: "After the interactive SocketA painting guide and the interactive AMD XP painting guide, the series goes on with the third SocketA painting guide for AMD Thoroughbred processors". Ok? Wibble this way for OCInside's brand new interactive AMD T-Bred painting guide. Sheesh!

And here's another of those magically disappearing websites that our clever readers invariably spot before they disappear. The page in question was here. It's not any more, we just shoved that in for completeness. What was there as Powercolor's spex of its upcoming Radeon 9500 product.

Is that the faint whiff of a rat? Maybe. Anyhow, according to the disappearing page, and just in case you're interested, Powercolor's 9500 will boast complete DirectX 9.0 support, SMOOTHVISION 2.0 technology, VIDEOSHADER and FULLSTREAM technologies, a 128-bit memory interface utilising the latest HYPER Z III bandwidth-conserving technology, 64MB of high speed double data rate (DDR) memory @550Mhz clock speed, AGP 8X, the first 8-pixel pipeline architecture providing top 3D performance for both Direct3D and OpenGL games and applications and, some other stuff. Coo!

You can nail the Warbler here.