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Optimise XP, personal sky-cars, geek fashion

GameCube and more

HWRoundup Geek fashion: Geek.com decides to find out what fashion is doing to make geeks cool. From Dockers' cargo pants that hide your gizmos to raincoats from Sanyo built to handle PDAs (and some stuff from Technology Enabled Clothing), you can check if your threads are new trends or just retreads.

The site also reviews Nokia's 9210 communicator, giving it the thumbs up.



Gaming & graphics

A fortnight or so ago, Anandtech got into the

guts of an Xbox

and wrote all about it. As promised, it's followed up with part II,

taking a look inside the GameCube

and finding out all you want to know about the bits and pieces hidden away that bring you awesome gaming experiences.



Extreme Tech has a showdown between two graphics giants - ATI and nVidia - putting their all-in-one cards head to head. Find out if they deliver on their promises of TV, 3D acceleration and more, all wrapped up and crammed together.

Tom's Hardware (THG) has an interesting piece on converting DVD movies into MPEG-4 process, taking a look at all the progress that has been made in this field of late, such as Intel optimising the DivX codec to help speed things up. Using version 4.11, a 2GHz P4 is able to break the real-time barrier when simultaneously converting video and audio, although AMD users are certainly not left behind in the dust.

WinXP performance

Talking of performance, Extreme Tech also has an interesting piece on optimising Windows XP and getting it all tuned up for speed..

Tweakers Asylum takes a look at the changes that have been introduced in WinXP's MMC (Microsoft Management Console), which has apparently been nicely re-tooled to provide all kinds of nifty new things for power users to tinker with.



Power tools, power toys & more

Ace's Hardware has its budget guide for power workstations, especially catering for graphics users needing serious crunching power, but not quite able to fork out top dollar for high-end kit. Check out part one of '

The workstation guide

.'



Gaming in 3D has its holiday buying guide posted. Gear up with a desktop robot rover, various electronic gizmos and then something that has to be the ultimate Christmas gift: the Moller M400 skycar, a personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle capable of speeds of over 350 MPH with a ceiling of 30,000 feet. Sadly, it's not yet available for sale, as it's still being tested. Moller's president reckons its not going to be long before licensed drivers (pilots?) can take on the skyways. [Anyone buying this for me will be guaranteed lifelong devotion and thanks.]



Drivers and bits

Electic Tech has a

3DFx Voodoo Banshee WinXP driver

available for download, as well as

graphics chipset drivers for a whole range of Intel mobos

(I810/810e/810e2/815/815e/815em/815eg/815g).



THG also takes a peek at NICs for laptops and compares how PC-card and CardBus NICs face up to each other. It tests various cards from 3Com, D-Link, SMC and others and finds out who's winning the speed race.




Got something interesting on the hardware wires? Drop us a mail.

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