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AMD have released this months ATI Catalyst Driver 10.5. From my own testing and reading around the internet, these already pose a potential major issue, in that when software is set to overclock 3D mode, graphics cards will fail to downclock to idle speeds. For instance, a HD 5870's idle speeds are 157 Mhz core, 300 MHz memory. But with a software overclock enabled be it through the Catalyst Control Center or any other utility, the card will clock to 400 MHz core, 1200 Mhz memory in idle, causing an increase of over 10 degrees Celsius on idle with the stock cooler, and therefore an increase in power consumption would be without doubt.

More than a week before the 890FX boards were expected to surface, and with mentions of NDAs on these boards of the 27th April, the UK Retailer Scan (www.scan.co.uk), on Saturday listed the ASUS Crosshair IV Formula as in stock for the price of £141.89 (exc VAT), thats about $215 US. Thats only £15 (or $22) more than the board it replaces the Crosshair III Formula, based on Scan's pricing.

I thought about posting this over the weekend, but though better of it, expecting this to either be pulled or moved on to a pre-order. However, I placed an order for this board on Sunday, and have now received confirmation it has been authorised, packed and and despatched, for delivery tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I do not own any AMD processors to be able to test this board should it arrive tomorrow, so we will have to wait for the Phenom II X6's to become available before I can power it up and show you some performance figures. Until then, keep a look out for an in depth first look at the board and packaging, hopefully in the next few days.

UPDATE:

I have now purchased an AMD Sempron to do some inital testing of the board. Hopefully trying out the unlock feature giving me a free upgrade to an Athlon X2. More to come, I will keep you updated on the progress.

UPDATE 2:

The motherboard has now been pulled from Scan's site, one would assume they have spotted the error. However my board appears to have been dispatched and I have tracking information, stay tuned, I will post if/when it arrives tomorrow.

Expreview has found AMD's yet to be released Phenom II X6 1050T, retail boxed, on sale in China. AMD appear to have gone for a new colour scheme as can be seen below, although the same Phenom II logo has been used. The box confirms that the 1050T is in fact clocked at 2.8 GHz and features 9 MB total cache, what is not noted is the TDP, as the 1050T was expected to be released in 95W and 125W variants. With a listing price of RMB1999 (US$293), it does seem a littler higher than expected, however this could well be down to early availability pricing. The 1050T is one of three new AMD Phenom II X6 processors, with the 1035T clocked slightly slower at 2.6 GHz and the 1090T BE clocked at the higher speed of 3.2 GHz, they are expected to be released officially on the 26th of this month.

Source: Expreview

NVIDIA have now released the first WHQL driver for thier recently announced GTX 480 and 470 graphics cards, in time for consumer availablity on 12th April. Without a modified inf (which would negate the WHQL certificate anyway) the driver will only work with the two said cards from NVIDIA. PhysX version 9.10.0129 and HD Audio Driver version 1.0.9.1 is included in the package. You can find the download on NVIDIA's official download page here.