Dell has the Poweredge SC 1430 on sale right now for $729.  The dual quad core Xeon 5310 (1.6ghz) are a free upgrade.  This by itself makes for a great budget server box.

In case you've missed it, we're supposed to be 30 days from the launch of Nvidia's 9800 graphics card. Why should you care? Well, reports indicate this one will be 3x the card the 8800 ultra is, 1 gigabyte of video ram and an onboard audio chip?!

 Specifications and prices follow, make sure you take a look.

Well, the last couple of weeks have been pretty interesting around here. First, from Artic Cooling we've got a new product they have asked us to review, their mx-2 thermal compound. I'm hoping to get that review up pretty soon. And Koolance got in touch with us and asked us to review their cpu-330 and a couple of other things. I hope to have the Koolance stuff in house pretty soon and I'll get to working on that asap.

 How was your weekend? Hit the forums and tell me about it.

As many people know, Dell started offering Ubuntu Linux V.7.04 earlier this year. This was a huge step for the Linux community to becoming a mainstream end user operating system. However, recently it has come to light that maybe Dell is doing this half heartedly and I partly agree with this claim. 

This is a brilliantly written article by eWeek journalist, Steven J. Vaughan, entitled, "Night of the Living Vista"

Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it.

If you have ever thought about switching your main machine to run Windows Vista, you may want to think again, because as claimed by Microsoft, they will not just be supporting Windows XP until June 2008, but it appears they are going to continue supplying Windows XP until that date as well. 

Back in 2001 Tom's generated a lot of publicity by removing the heatsink from a running processor and making it go 'poof'! Now they have done it again by disabling the HSF on processors while benchmarking . The results are interesting and should probably be read by anyone who is concerned about their processor's health. 

Branded by former experience with the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz (throttling under load due to overheating) and Athlon 1200 processors (product killed in action when fan was removed), we decided to put AMD and Intel low-cost and high-end processors to a special stress test by disconnecting the processor fan in order to simulate a fan failure.