Sparkle have just kicked off a budget oriented GeForce 8500 GT graphics card with a clearly noticable difference. The new Calibre P850LV has a neatly positioned daughter card attached to it which displays real-time GPU and PCB temperatures via its 3bit digital tube display. You can switch between the two temperatures manually.

Sparkle knew not to stop there though, they also made the card stand out some more with its overclocked 650MHz core, 1300MHz shader and 1600MHz mem clock speeds, along with a unique looking cooling solution to boot.

I guess it just comes down to the price now (not yet known), being an entry-level card I cant imagine many people forking out much more for it over a standard 85GT, otherwise the more tempting option would be to simply move to a bigger/faster card no doubt.

The latest Walkman phones from SonyEricsson are some seriously feature packed handsets. The two new models are the W910 and W960i and they're both 3G handsets. Apart from this and the Walkman functionality, the two aren't exactly close relatives, as they have quite distinct features.

Let's start with the W910i, of which some spy shots leaked out last month. The good news is that it won't be available in orange, instead it will come in red or black. It's a slider and it has a Sony M2 memory card slot and comes with a 1GB memory card in the box. It has a 2.4-inch 320x240 display and you can change tracks in the music player application by pressing the Walkman button and flicking the phone. It does quad-band GSM with GPRS and EDGE and it also adds HSDPA. Around the back is a 2Mega pixel camera and there's a front mounted camera for video calls.

As you might have noticed, AMD has moved to a new naming scheme with the latest Athlon X2 BE-2xxx processors. So what does the new letters and numbers mean? Well, it's not as hard as you think and AMD has given it some thought.

The first letter will be G, B or L, G being a premium product, B an intermediate product and finally L is for entry level value processors. The second letter is related to power consumption. P is for processors over 65W, S for parts around 65W and finally E for those under 65W. It wouldn't have hurt to have a few more categories, but it seems like AMD is trying to keep it simple.

AMD will have four families once the Phenom launches, although the Athlon and Sempron brands will be kept for a little while longer. This means that a 1000-series CPU will be a single core Athlon or Sempron, the 2000-series is a dual core Athlon, then there's a jump to the 6000-series which is the dual-core Phenom and this is followed by the 7000-series which is the quad-core Phenom.

According to the Inquirer, AMD has four new desktop chipsets coming out this year. The top of the range model here being the RD790 which we reported about from Computex last week. As you probably already know, this is the next CrossFire chipset and it supports PCI Express 2.0 which allows for 150 Watts of power per PCI Express slot. This chipset will come out for socket AM2+ and 1207+.

The next version down is the RX780 which is the mainstream version of the RD790, but without CrossFire support. What's missing here is the RD780, which is a cut down version of the RD790 with support for CrossFire but it is limited to x8 bandwidth per card. The Inquirer should double check their roadmaps before missing out a key chipset like this one. So the total is actually five, not four, so if you thought our headline was a type, then we're sorry to dissapoint you.

Next up we have two integrated graphics models, the RS740 which is a DX9 part and the RS780, which is a DX10 part with support for UVD. All the above chipsets will be paired with the current SB600 or the upcoming SB700 depending on AMD getting the new southbridge done on time. Remember the delays of the SB600?

As first discussed here at TweakTown, Diamond Multimedia today announced they are first out with their Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT, which comes with 1GB of GDDR-4 memory.

We are unsure on clock speeds at this stage but we have emailed the folks at Diamond and are awaiting a response - we will update this post shortly.

UPDATE: Diamond got back to us and let us know there will be two versions of the 1GB card. One with 745MHz core / 2000MHz DDR memory and the souped up version with 825MHz core and 2100MHz DDR memory.

Remember the original Razer Boomslang mouse? If you don't, then you might not be all that excited about the 2007 collector's edition of the Boomslang, but Razer will have it out in time for DreamHack Summer this year. The Boomslang was the first real gaming mouse for FPS games, but it wasn't to everyones taste. It used a ball and was higly sensitive compared to other mice back then.

The 2007 collectors edition will be a limited run of 10,000 units and will feature a titanium finish and it will have a green under glow as well as a green scroll wheel. There's no mention if the collectors edition will use a ball or if it has been given an upgrade to a laser sensor. Nor has Razer released any price information.

Up until this week, DivX Inc. specialised soley in software with its excellent mpeg4 compression algorithm. But a posting on the DivX Labs website today reveals information relating to beta tester signups for a (now not so) secret project.

So far whats known is that they are working on producing a dedicated hardware device for streaming media, this dubbed the "GejBox;-)". Engadget have posted up some pictures and info on it here, but they also comment that it's most probable this device wont actually hit the market (at least in its current form).

The Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCI-e has finally arrived, although it's only an OEM card so far as it doesn't come in a retail box. It looks rather basic with support for 7.1-channel analogue outputs and optical S/PDIF in and out. This card doesn't seem to have support for any of the upgrade options that the current X-Fi cards have and the audio processor looks like it comes from the newer entry level cards.

The blue PCB also makes it look more like he entry level products, as the higher end cards are using a black PCB. It also seems to lack support for some of the more advanced audio features, again akin with the lower end models. Interestingly it seems to have a standard connector for case mounted audio connectors, so it would be easy to use this card with the front audio connectors on your case. At US$65, it is priced quite reasonable and it ships with Windows Vista drivers.

Toshiba is first out with a notebook based on the new 8700M GT GPU from Nvidia and it looks like a real stunner. Apart from the new GPU which Toshiba has paired with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, the Dynabook Satellite WXW also features a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor clocked at 2GHz as well as either 1 or 2GB of DDR2 RAM. It's based on the Intel PM965 chipset and comes with a 120GB SATA hard drive. It has a 17-inch widescreen display with a native resolution of 1,680x1,050.

There's also a built in TV-tuner, a Super Multi DVD drive, HDMI and a 1.3Mega pixel web camera. Other features include an Express Card 54 slot, a multi format card reader for SD, SDHC, MMC, xD and MemoryStick, S/PDIF out, and a four pin FireWire port. It has no less than six USB 2.0 ports and it does of course have support for 802.11 a/b/g wireless networking and Gigabit Ethernet. A finger print reader is also part of the package.

Nvidia has launched its latest mobile GPU, the 8700M GT, which is its top of the range GPU in the GeForce 8M series, for now. It has 32 stream processors, just as the 8600M GT, but the core clock is up from 475MHz of the 8600M GT to 625MHz. The shader clock has been increased from 950MHz to 1,250MHz and the memory has also been given a boost from 700MHz to 800MHz. Nvidia is also using something it calls dual-rank 128-bit memory, although we're not quite sure what this does at the time of writing this, but it sounds like some kind of dual channel memory interface. It can be paired with up to 512MB of GDDR3 memory.

The memory bandwidth is up from 22.4GB/s to 25.6GB/s and the texture fill rate has been improved from 7.6 billion instructions per second to 10 billion instructions per second. The 8700M GT is between 27 and 70 per cent faster than the older 7950 GS mobile part. It is manufactured at an 80nm processor and has a TDP of 35W. It features PureVideo HD and Nvidia's PowerMizer technology.