Nvidia produces dual Athlon chipset

Dual channel DDR has been billed as the way to beat Rambus if you want loads of memory bandwidth for your Pentium 4. DeviantPC has managed to get hold of an Asus P4G8X Granite Bay motherboard. The performance is barely faster than a single channel chipset.

Navid over at Hardware Accelerated takes an Athlon XP 3000+ out for a spin. It gets the upper hand against a Pentium 4 3.06, but only just.

Rifle bearings make an appearance over at DarkVision where they have managed to get hold of a Coolermaster Neon Led Fan. The rifle bearing is instead of the more usual sleeve or ball bearing design in a fan, it has the quietness of the former and the life span of the latter.

Every hardware site around seems to be using the Nforce 2 as the Athlon test platform of choice for graphics cards but what about the chipset's integrated graphics? Tech-PC benchmarks the IGP model and likes what they find, even if it doesn't break any speed records.

SilentPCReview puts a thermometer against the Thermalright SLK-900U Heatsink and likes the results. Combined with a decent fan, you can run a high powered processor at full speed with barely a whisper from inside the case.

For anyone stuck with several devices that use different types of Flash memory, Mikhailtech has the solution with a 7-in-1 card reader/writer. You might need to buy some double sided sticking tape to go with it though.

Fancy a portable DVD player with a 10" screen? Nathan over at TweakNews got lucky and managed to get a very nice little Samsung DVD-L100 player. OK, it's not the usual type of hardware we link to but it's fun!

Hexus spent some time at the Intel Developers Forum and has coverage of three keynote speeches. You can find them here, here and here.

The Pabster has an article up going over some of the details of Nvidia's dislike for 3DMark2003. Looks like the marchitecture war machine are only just starting to fire up.

Finally, AMD might need to reconsider its stance towards its adoring public. OverClockers.com has managed to wade its way through thousands of emails as part of its Socket A survey. The results make for interesting reading. It would appear that the public is less interested in AMD itself and more adoring of the lower prices. µ