If you're a Verizon DSL customer, your bandwidth just went up.

"On Monday, the company announced it would be doubling the speed of its $30-a-month service. It also said it will add 11 new communities in Massachusetts to its list of fiber-to-the-home deployments."

First word out of my mouth was, "whoa." See if you can find your house, & those of your friends. It's eerie. You can see a shot of it in action here.

"The new satellite feature allows consumers to get an aerial photo snapshot of the location for which they are searching. People can enter an address and click on the 'Satellite' link to view an area, zoom in or see neighboring locations by moving the cursor."

Bunch of sites took a look at the reference board that NVIDIA sent out for their nForce4 SLI solution for the P4 yesterday. I'll post 'em as I find 'em.

Hard|OCP
Hexus
HotHardware
PCPerspective
ViperLair
Bjorn3D

Video Cards

HIS Radeon X800XL @ OverclockerCafe

Motherboards

Albatron Px915P4/G4 Pro @ Techware Labs

Etc.

Coolermaster Aquagate Mini R120 @ Ninjalane

Samsung TS-H552 @ Designtechnica  Xtrac Hybrid @ XYZComputing

Etymotic ER-6i Canal Phones @ Designtechnica

Do the words, "custom triple phase change unit" get you as excited as they do for me? A couple of the PimpRig forum members are out to grab the #1 3DMark score by building a custom-cooled mega-rig. Check it out.

"Not satisfied with his #13 worldwide score in 3DMark2001, PimpRig staff member $Solid$Necro has enlisted the help of the infamous cooling madman known as ZENNZZO. These two have a thread log currently running where they are trying to build an 'ORB Buster' comprised of a CUSTOM TRIPLE PHASE CHANGE UNIT which will cool the CPU as well as the GPUs for two 6800 Ultras!"

I guess since these really are geared towards the Walmart buyers, they may actually be able to sell a few of these things. The specs really aren't all that bad... except for the glaring omission of a gaming video card. *Ahem* Sorry. Multimedia machine? Yes, sure. Gaming rig? Not without adding a vid card they ain't. You can see photos of the machines here, as well.

"The desktop PCs, belonging to the eMachines brand, will be available for prices ranging from $370 to $580 after a $50 mail-in rebate. The company expects the prices to be attractive to consumers who find that the costs of digital entertainment-enabled PCs are generally steep."

If you've just got a board with Intel's Matrix RAID on it, & want more info on how to go about setting it up for peak performance, ARP's got just what you're looking for. This ain't yer ordinary RAID, now, children...

"RAID 0 offers better performance but no data redundancy. And it's the opposite for RAID 1. We all want the best of both worlds but often, that isn't possible. But when it comes to RAID, it might just be possible with Intel's Matrix RAID technology! Let's see what's so great about the Intel Matrix RAID and if it really works!"

Several sites took a look at the upcoming dual-core processors from Intel yesterday & today. I'll post 'em as I find 'em.

Hexus
[H]ard|OCP
HardwareAnalysis
ExtremeTech
FiringSquad
HotHardware
LegitReviews
TrustedReviews

Etc.

Arctic Cooling NV 6 and ATI 1 VGA Silencer @ Techniz

Ultra X-Connect 500W Titanium PSU @ SLCentral

Kingwin SS-350S-BK SATA External Enclosure @ 3DGameMan

Saitek Gamer's Keyboard @ TheTechLounge

Ultra Products "Titanium Series" @ OverclockersOnline

Leadtek WinFast TV USB II Deluxe @ GruntvillE

ESPN Major League Baseball 2K5 @ NewsTechInfo

Ilya over at X-bit has an in-depth look at the new E3 core of the A64, aka Venice. New features include higher core frequency potential, & SSE3 capability.

"However, AMD is going to announce the discontinue program for its Athlon 64 processors based on the cores manufactured with outdated production technologies beginning this April. Since the time the first Winchester based processor came out, the company engineers have done great work. They designed a new 90nm core aka Venice (E3 revision), which should send old 130nm cores to the garbage heap of history."

The way the DDR2 market is going, it was only a matter of time until we saw this happen.

"Samsung’s quotes for 512MB DDR2-533 modules (comprised of eight 512Mbit chips) now range from US$52-53 (equivalent to US$6.63-6.50 per chip), down from last month’s US$64-65 to within a 5% difference of the prices for 512MB DDR2-400 modules, the IC distributors said."

Email I can see... I just don't see a bunch of priests texting each other. I dunno, just not something I think of when I think of priests I guess. Looks like I might need to update the ol' mental image, here, tho'...

"Just a quarter of an hour after the pope was pronounced dead Saturday, the Vatican sent journalists an SMS message alerting them to a pending statement."

If you're planning to build yourself a system anytime soon, Socket 939 is, imo, the way to go. The XYZ gang lays some groundwork to make your decision that much easier.

"In this guide we are going to put together three systems, each at a different price level. These are not systems we have built up so there will be no testing or anything like that, but it will give readers a good idea of current prices and some new products."