When a company says 'available now', it's normally taken to mean 'today' rather than in a month's time. So when AMD reiterates its position that 760-based DDR systems are available now from NEC in Europe and that Gigabyte is shipping its GA7-DX 760 mobo now, it's only fair to check our sources again.

Yesterday, we were told by NEC in Scotland that they had only received the first sample Gigabyte mobos on Monday. A representative of Gigabyte UK said there was an issue with the 760 chipset which was under investigation by AMD.

Subsequently, AMD denied there was any problem with the 760 and that systems were available now from NEC. The chipmaker had however, changed its message subtly - systems were available in France 'as we said all along'.

Sorry AMD, you said 'Europe', not France.

A check with NEC's French website revealed no mention of the GA-7DX. We rang Gigabyte in the UK. A salesman there said they had no stock of the mobo and had 'no idea' when they would have.

The main Gigabyte web site in Taiwan also has no mention of the GA-7DX.

A mobo specialist at Computer 2000, one of the UK's largest distributors - listed on Gigabyte's web site - said he had 'never heard of the GA-7DX', adding that 'Gigabyte are a nightmare who never tell us anything.'

And finally we double checked with NEC's UK telesales operation:

"We're doing in house testing now. The earliest the Direction A+ will be available is the end of the month."

That's hardly 'now', is it?

When we put these points to an AMD Europe spokesperson, they replied:

"If that's the case, then the information we were given to write the press release must have been incorrect." ®

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