On Half Life 3 and GDDR the third

HARDWAREZOOM puts a 2.8E Prescott up against a 2.8C Northwood. With double the cache, is the Prescott superior? They wonder. Nope. They discover. Perhaps its the benchmarks, they suggest, over here.

XBit Labs ponders AMD's transition to Socket 939 processors in a pretty thorough piece over here.

Valve Presidnet Gabe Newell has been talking about Half Life 3, apparently. A French site here says he said that some chick called Alyx who appears in Half Life 2 will be "playable" in Half Life 3. And that's about it. The site doesn't mention the who, when and whyfores concerning this earth-shattering utterance. They say no launch date has yet been fixed. Maybe around 2030, we suggest.

The Techreporters assess what GDDR3 does for the 5700 Ultra, and what the new memory type could do for next-gen graphics products, they say, over here.

And a reference GeForce FX 5700 Ultra equipped with Samsung GDDR3 RAM. pops up on HotHardware for a spot of stretching and bending over here.

BigBruin takes a a look at a Crucial 7-in-1 Card Reader and 512MB CompactFlash card over here.

A 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 gets RAIDED over on ClubOC over here. Seagate still thinks there's life left in the IDE format, they say.

The Neoseeker takes a look at AOpen's EZ65 Cube, a wee SFF based on the i865G chipset, over here.

And Tweaknews has a go at an ATI All in Wonder Radeon 9600 Multimedia graphics card around about here. µ