IF YOU WANT to learn about Nvidia's Tesla and GTX480 cards at GDC, don't ask Nvidia, it has problems with the truth. The real story is found with the users, and they have interesting things to say about the upcoming card's upward bound TDP.

AMD IS FINALLY doing what we have all been waiting for, promoting its developer relations program to the masses. With that in mind, it introduced three new logos to go along with the program.

RUMOURS HAVE BEEN circulating for a while now that Apple is getting ready to refresh its range of Mac Pro computers and it looks like we're getting close. However, it seems like this Apple refresh will happen at the same time Intel is making its new six-core CPU's ready. Coincidence? We think not.

SOLID STATE DRIVES or SSDs are one of the hottest topics and add-ons that you can get for your PC now, although there's still a lot of confusion going on with regards to what to get, as there are vast differences between the various models and the cost per GB is fairly high.

ONE QUESTION THAT a lot of the financial set are asking has to do with Nvidia and mobile. While the company is effectively out of mobile for 2010, there was at least one GTX480 based laptop at CeBIT.

CEBIT IS THE PLACE where Thermaltake tends to drop its bombs, and this year it had the launch of a new venture for the company, gaming. There were also some interesting coolers and cases, but the Esports line was getting all the attention.

CORSAIR HAS SOME new toys at CeBIT along the usual lines of flash, memory and power supplies. Nothing was revolutionary, but all were updated in some useful ways.

IF YOU WANTED to see AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours boards or 4 GPU compute platforms at CeBIT, SuperMicro was the place to be. That is only the short list though, there were a lot of other interesting bits all over its corner at Hannover.

ONE PART that Thermaltake has been getting a lot of press for is the new Fermi GTX480 certified case, a variant of its mainstream Element V case. Other than the day-glo green trim, how does it differ from the normal ElementV? Let's take a look.

THERE ARE A lot of 'green' devices that pop up every day, most of which are about as green as an old coal power plant built on an environmentally sensitive wetland. At CeBIT, a small Korean company called HiSaver showed off a green power strip that actually makes a lot of sense.

ALTHOUGH A BIT later than some of its competitors, Asus has announced its own AMD 890GX board, the M4A89GTD PRO. However, compared to just about everyone else, Asus claims to have one killer feature, CPU core unlocking.

IS THIS THE final blow for the good old hard drive? Western Digital has as of today launched two SSD models, the SiliconEdge Blue which is a consumer model and the SiliconDrive N1x which targets data centers and various vertical markets.

SUPERTALENT IS SHOWING a line of storage and memory products that range from consumer toys to serious enterprise level kit. The best one is the last missing piece of the storage puzzle, an affordable USB3 memory stick.

GIGABYTE HAS BEEN on a tear lately, releasing tons of USB3 based mobos around CES, so the new AMD 890 chipset had to hold the line. On the GPU front, things were a bit more interesting.

SAPPHIRE HAS STARTED to branch out from GPUs, but that doesn't mean it didn't have a large selection of high end GPUs to show off. New to the boys in blue this year are micro-projectors, netbooks and micro-ITX boards.

WHAT DO YOU do when there is a major international trade show, and you can't even supply all your partners with upcoming parts? You threaten them, which is exactly what Nvidia did for its upcoming GTX480 at CeBIT.

GRAPHICS CARDS HAVE quickly become the most power hungry device inside a PC and we haven’t seen a drop in the power demand of high-end graphics cards despite improved manufacturing capabilities. However, Fermi appears to be taking this to the next level, although this was sort of expected.

AMD'S LATEST IGP CHIPSET has been launched, and with CeBIT kicking off tomorrow we should be seeing a lot more announcements, but for now, ECS, Gigabyte and MSI have announced boards based on the 890GX chipset.

THE RUMORS AND bits about Intel's next generation core, Sandy Bridge, are starting to come out here and there, but several big chunks have still not been outed. Here are a few of them.

THERE ARE A lot of curious things coming out of TSMC lately, and they all seem to center around dodging real questions. The problem is yields on their 40nm process, but TSMC will not address half of the reported problems publicly.

SHUTTLE DIDN'T HAVE all too much to show at CES last month, but it seems like the company is getting ready to at least unleash something different at CeBIT next week where the company is set to unveil its new XS35 ultra-compact PC.

IN THE BUILD up to CeBIT which kicks off next week, MSI has announced that it will start supplying two of its H55 motherboards with a bundled USB Wi-Fi dongle. This is something of a blast from the past, as MSI used to offer a special upgrade card that added both WiFi and Bluetooth to some of its motherboards.

NVIDIA HAS BEEN hinting about the performance of its upcoming GTX480 cards, and several of our moles got a lot of hands on time with a few cards recently. If you are waiting for killer results from the 'puppy', prepare for severe disappointment.

Updated: Clarified a point on DX11 performance.

YOU MIGHT ALREADY have read one of the many guides on the net about how to get your PC running OS X. We have come across an approach that makes the whole install process a lot easier and thought we’d share it with you. By a lot we mean that you don’t need a Mac for starters, which should be a huge help to those who own only a PC and want to have a go at building a Hackintosh.

IT IS THAT TIME of year again, Nvidia's quarterly conference call for the financial set. Since the company gets pouty every time we try to ask it questions, we decided to publish an open list of questions for you, the people they have far less disdain for than SemiAccurate, to ask directly.

WITH ANOTHER LAUNCH of the Nvidia GT300 Fermi GF100 GTX480 upon us, it is time for an update on the status of that wayward part. Production parts have been coming back from TSMC for several weeks now, and the outlook for them is grim.

AMD IS FINALLY starting to talk about its Fusion CPUs, specifically the first one called Llano. The bad news is that it is not saying very much, but there are some interesting bits that leaked out at ISSCC 2010 in San Francisco.

PROTEX 3.0, available in triple pack or singles. Oh, sorry. We were thinking about something quite different. Asus is apparently touting its latest mainboards under the Protex 3.0 banner, although we cannot help but think about condoms rather than motherboards, given a name like that.

DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING new from Intel this year in terms of desktop chipsets, at least not the way Intel’s current roadmap is planned. We’re going to have to make do with what’s on offer for the rest of 2010, despite some “missing features” in all three of Intel’s latest chipsets. What’s worse is that there’s not much to look forward to next year either, if our sources are correct.

IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.

IT SEEMS LIKE Biostar jumped the press release gun as the company posted details of its upcoming TA890GXE motherboard based on the AMD 890GX chipset on its website. The press release has since been taken down, but it has already spread all over the web. However, what makes it interesting is the fact that it includes the retail name for AMD’s upcoming hexa-core CPUs.

HERE WE GO again, Intel has come up with yet another nifty marketing name, Core vPro. These are not only Intel’s 'new' processors for businesses of all sizes that add a host of features, but they're also said to gain cost savings.

THIS PAPER FOCUSES on the accuracy and time needed to run, review and supplement the results of the web application scanners (Accunetix, Appscan by IBM, BurpSuitePro, Hailstorm by Cenzic, WebInspect by HP, NTOSpider by NT OBJECTives) as well as the Qualys managed scanning service.

A LOT OF people were disappointed by Apple’s last product announcement, as only a single product was unveiled. However, it seems like those that were waiting for new desktop machines from Apple might not have to wait that much longer, because the rumour mill is suggesting mid-March for some new Mac Pro action.

BY NOW P55 based motherboards are a dime a dozen. Well, maybe not quite, but all the big motherboard makers have pretty much put their entire product line-ups out the door already. However, it seems like Gigabyte wasn’t happy with its GA-P55A-UD6 as its top of the range model and as such, the company has launched the GA-P55A-UD7 as of today.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.

OK, SO WE might be a little bit sarcastic here, but we can’t quite figure this one out. Asus has announced no less than six new motherboards, based on very basic chipsets, that are not only meant to have the lowest electromagnetic emissions in the industry, but they also feature “advanced protective shields”, “anti-surge features” and reduced “system-wide power consumption by up to 80.23 [percent]”.

IT SEEMS LIKE there has been some confusion as to AMD’s naming convention of its chipsets and what we thought was the 890G is actually the 890GX. There will also be an 880G model, but that is expected to launch a month or two after the 890GX, which is set to arrive the first week in March.

APPLE HAS JUST announced its latest addition, the iPad. We’re not sold on the name, but one of the big news items here is that Apple might be forced to change the name, as iPad was a registered trademark of Fujitsu Japan and there’s also a company called Magtek that sells a product called the IPAD. But that’s for another day; let’s take a closer look at what’s on offer.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.

AMD SPENT SOME time talking to the press in Singapore today and unveiled some details of its upcoming platform plans for 2011. What we’re looking at are more cores, fusion and improved notebook battery life.

COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN getting smaller and smaller over the years, although the x86 architecture hasn’t really changed much. However, VIA has been something of a pioneer when it comes to making it smaller and smaller and the company has just announced its first Mobile-ITX module which measures a mere 6  by 6 centimetres.

LOCKHEED MARTIN MIGHT not be a company that most of us associate with computers, but as the company is heavily involved with the US military, it has come up with a secure computing solution called the IronClad in co-operation with IronKey. At first glance it might just look like any other USB key, although in a fancy brushed aluminium casing, but one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

WE’VE BEEN GIVEN a sneak peak at Gigabyte’s upcoming AMD 890G board, the GA-890GPA-UD3H and although it’s not that different from the Asus board that Charlie spotted at CES, it does have a few extra features that makes it standout from the so far very small crowd.

WE’VE HAD SOME criticism on our original story about the rusty chokes on certain Asus motherboards that got pointed out to us, so we decided to do a follow up. This time around we’ve done what many of the comments around the web have asked for, we cracked one of the chokes open to see what it looks like on the inside.

NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.

IT LOOKS LIKE it's time for dueling product videos once again, with ATI and Nvidia both releasing their own 'viral' videos. ATI's is about upgrading to a DX11 card and Nvidia's is about the birth of Fermi GF10.

SOME OF YOU might not be old enough to remember the farce about a decade ago about blown capacitors on motherboards. It was a huge issue and came down to the matter of poor choice of components as the motherboard makers tried to save some cost. Although we’re not the first to unearth this, it now appears that a certain manufacturer has ended up with at least some board models that come with pre-rusted chokes.

Update: Asrock responds

Update2: More information in part 2

ONE OF THE worst kept secrets of the year, all 14 days of it, is that the ATI 56xx Redwood parts are coming out today. They are more than half of a Juniper 57xx series and have all the goodies that those chips do.