• Nvidia Geforce FX cards will be in the shops in January
• SiS settles with UMC
• Lite-On IT and Quanta Storage fight for slim-type combo drive dominance
• Sendo accuses Microsoft of dirty tricks
• Intel faces further FTC probe in Taiwan
• Brief: Judge approves WorldCom/EDS settlement

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A few days ago we visited the VIA Representation Office in Moscow, which was a good chance to talk about VIA's new products and plans with Michal Liseszky, VIA's marketing manager for Europe. Of particular interest to us was the Hi-Fi PC built on the VIA Epia platform brought to Russia, with which we started.

[Zardon] How did you go about improving the drivers?

[Terry Makedon] First of all we decided that the first thing we needed to do was get on a consistent driver release schedule. Thus with CATALYST we made a commitment that we would publicly post 8-10 Microsoft certified unified driver sets a year. Our track record since CATALYST launched in June of this year speaks for itself. Secondly we implemented a feedback program called CATALYST CREW, which is a direct end user feedback program. What this means is that at any time we can get reports of incident reports and can thus easily prioritize what the biggest problems our customers are facing. This way we fix the most widespread bugs first and raise the quality of our products continually. Third we initiated some Quality Assurance programs which basically call for much more vigorous testing than ever before. Finally our Vice President of Software (Ben Bar-Haim) called on his troops to provide the world with the most stable drivers in the industry. This is actually not a marketing statement but a fact. We now have the most stable 3D accelerated graphics driver in the industry.

This I believe we covered before with past 40.xx drivers but I thought I'll jog your memory and let you know how to enable some options in latest 41.80 drivers that are not enabled by default. Click on Read More for more info.

Starting with the integration of nVidia's nForce2 chipset, the NF7-S builds off of a solid foundation. ABIT adds SATA support and SoftMenu III to round things out. A quick glance at the basics:

With the new Cordless Optical TrackMan, Logitech has completely redesigned the look and feel of what a trackball mouse should be like. The biggest change is that you no longer use your thumb to move the track ball. Instead the trackball has moved to the other side of the mouse and is operated by your fingers. The Cordless Optical TrackMan is almost like the anti-mouse. Everything about it is backwards.

Just in time for Christmas, Overclockers Club Canada has finished its last review of the year. In true OCC Canada sense, our review of the AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor will be short and sweet, showing the results of it versus the Intel P4 2.53GHz CPU.

One option we have to cool our hotter CPU's is a large heat sink and an even larger fan, but quite frankly I've had enough of ear damaging Delta's. Some may prefer the idea of a loud fan to the thought of pumping water around a PC, but each to their own and as they say, "Don’t knock till you’ve tried it".

Modern computers have revolutionised home video editing but for some reason it's still a bit of an elitist practice and while it's true that a powerful computer will certainly ease the process the fact is that just about anybody with a 200MHz or faster PC has a world of possibilities at their fingertips. Hopefully during the course of this article I can debunk some of the myths that video creation and editing is some kind of dark, mysterious art best left to the wealthy and the broadcast companies and inspire you to give it a go for yourself.