Would you splash out on a high performance PC costing over $5,000? And that's just for the base unit. You can add on a 24inch monitor and keyboard while you're at it and maybe even some software eh. Well that's the cost of a top of the range gaming system these days capable of running monster games such as Crysis.

Here's a breakdown of the Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX we priced up - Hypersonic were recently bought out by OCZ who know a thing or two about top of the range gaming PCs having been at the forefront of cutting edge memory technology for many years.

For anyone with some money to burn, of course, because 3 Teraflops aren't cheap. How did they reach this computing level, you ask? Basically by cheating. The processing power of this workstation doesn't come from the two quad core Xeon 5335 CPUs it has, but rather from six Tesla C870 cards..

Each Tesla GPU is able to provide up to 518 Gigaflops, as much as the GeForce 8800 GTS is based on, but with twice the memory (1.5 GB). This is way more number crunching than the 8 Intel cores can do together.

Interesting progress in the supercomputing arena, no doubt, but you will be surely disappointed to hear that the price for the standard configuration (case side panel included) is $24,995. At least, we can use the waiting time looking at the list of CUDA compatible programs to grow (right now, all that power would do you little good).

Link: OverclockersClub.

If we are to believe the story at the other end of the link below, a Wall Street analyst assured us that Apple would announce, at the just finished Macworld, the company's strategy regarding high definition video, which will be to side with Sony and the Blu-Ray format.

The whole thing loses some credibility when the same source says: "[there is] a smaller chance Apple may use a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive to ensure full compatibility and not get involved in the format wars." Add to that, the lack of informations about any decision in this respect, coming from McWorld 2008, and we aren't able to say when Macs with Blu-ray support will ship.

In March of 2005, Apple announced they had joined the Blu-ray Disc Association, but to date, hasn't done a great deal about it. Recent events have shifted the tides in favor of the Blu-ray camp. Maybe it's time they took a bite of the Apple.

Link: AppleInsider.

Even though it's not among the program specifications, it hasn't taken a lot of time to discover that it can be turned into a very interesting tool for the enthusiast as well as for the overclocker. Being so taxing on the system as it is, it could very well end up replacing other specialized stress software out there.

Case in question. A computer with a Phenom 9900 running on an Asus M3A32 MVP Deluxe may look sound at 2.8 GHz, but not be able to complete all the tests PCMark Vantage includes. The Inquirer found at almost the same voltage levels, they had to step it down to 2.7 GHz for the entire system to be stable. This is not a CPU burn application but one that burns your whole PC.

And things don't stop here. Not only does it show a small instability, if you look at the tests results, you will find out the hard drive guilty for getting a score 50 points lower with a 100 MHz higher CPU frequency. Your guess is as good as anybodys here.

Link: The Inquirer.

At Tom's Hardware, somebody wanted to check what any one of us, who has lived in more than one country, already suspected: hardware prices are not one and the same.

To obtain good data, they compared prices before taxes (no VAT, thank you) and verified that products with suspiciously low prices were in stock. With the intention of avoiding a great exchange impact, prices are given both in USD and Euros. The components chosen for the comparison were: an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850, a Zalman CNPS9700 cooler, an Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, a Crucial Ballistix DDR3 kit, a Western Digital WD5000AAKS HDD, a Gigabyte GeForce GV-NX88S320H-B-RH graphics card, a Coolermaster RS850 EMBA power supply and a San Disk Extreme III 2 GB SD Card.

Conclusions, when it comes to countries, are not to be taken without surprise, even if they were expected. To explain. France is expensive (expected), but it is more so if compared to their neighbours the germans (who are cheap). The best prices are to be found in the United States (go figure). If we talk about products, a usual component (like a graphics card) will not vary more than a 10 to 30%. Differences are much bigger when you either want something special (an aftermarket heatsink or a good power supply) or basic consumer electronics accessories (for example, a memory card).

Link: Tom's Hardware.

Microsoft insisted on this: no XP SP3 before Vista's first service pack comes out. It looks like the delays on everything Vista-related hasn't translated into this last Windows XP upgrade to be postponed any more. "Last" here probably means there won't be any more service packs for this version of Windows, not surprising given the fact that they will stop selling it shortly.

The public beta will arrive in just a few days, but if you want to know NOW what it brings along, you can check at Tech ARP, where they cover the Technical Beta. After the betas we will have a couple of release candidates before the final build is made available in the first half of 2008. "First half"?, you may ask. Yes, that's a very vague timeframe and it will surely place the actual date of release AFTER Vista's SP1 comes out. As promised.

This doesn't mean you have to wait for the final build, since we're dealing with a recap of all the hot fixes and patches accumulated over the past few years, the last release candidate should be a good place to stop by. You could even try the public beta soon, if you feel a little bit adventurous.

"As we reported overnight, a recent court filing submitted by the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Microsoft revealed that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be available later this year as a beta. Will that mean final delivery in 2007 or 2008?"

Link: microsoft-watch.

In case you are one of those customers that likes to wait for the first service pack to come out, before buying a new NT-based OS from Microsoft, this time you are not getting it very soon. Not long ago, Microsoft announced they would be phasing out Windows XP before 2008. It looks like technical arguments for selling Vista are running scarce.

The soon to be launched Nanobook is based mainly in this mini-ITX platform, so it's a good time for a review about it's performance. TweakTown has it.

They say it's a huge improvement over the old C3 and partner chipset, just don't get your hopes high. For example, against a Sempron 2800+ (Socket 754), looses by a score of 421 - 576 under WorldBench 5.0 (*). That's not very good news, considering the primary focus of this platform is productivity. Don't you even bother about gaming. Despite some improvement in the FPU and the use of the quad-pumped bus that even Intel still uses for Core 2, the CPU is slow.

But not everything is black. At 1.5 Ghz, it still delivers some performance, and with low power consumption the efficiency raises and heat and noise go down. Furthermore, the CX700M2 chipset works when it comes to hardware MEPG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (DivX) and WMV9 decoding.

(*) ACDSee PowerPack 5.0, Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.5, Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3, Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (DirectX), Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (OpenGL), Microsoft Office XP with SP-2, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Mozilla 1.4, Musicmatch Jukebox 7.10, Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5 and WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1.

This picture from  LegitReviews shows what we would like to have at home: a system with no less than eight cores and 16 Gb of memory.

Intel is at Computex, and they only waited until day 2 for a private tech session where a group of selected individuals could see a pair of 3.00GHz Penryn processors running Cinebench release 10. If a score of 22,936 doesn't ring any bell, let's just say that people in the know stated that AMD is around 16,000 with a pair of Barcelonas on this same benchmark. If we take into consideration that the 45nm Penryn V8 system is underclocked, AMD will have to resort to other programs to back up their statements about Barcelona being so good.

As for comparison with other Intel processors, it scaled nicely against the dual-core and quad-core 3.33GHz Penryn as well at the Core 2 Extreme QX6800. The latter lags behind, maybe because de new CPU from the blue boys has a cache size of 12MB per processor!

Watercooling systems are one of the best solutions for modern processors. Improved cooling with quiet sounds levels make a convincing argument for any PC enthusiast.

SilverStone is best known for their exceptional, elegant and functional case products. The craftsmanship can now be found in the SilverStone Tundra TD01 external water cooling system. The styling fits very well with audio components and therefore would be an excellent option for a HTPC setup. It's performs very well, looks great, and is completely silent. 3dGameMan has a full review in video. Check out the bloopers at the end.