Whilst we all continue to count down the days until NVIDIA lets Fermi (GF100) off its chains, little has been shared to give a clearer perspective on just how these latest and greatest monsters from NVIDIA dubbed the GTX 480 and GTX 470 will perform.

But, one thing that we're sometimes seeing pop up is the box designs some of the AIBs are going to use to ship their variants in. Not exactly exciting, but sure whets the appetite a bit.

The folks over at Toms Hardware have acquired box art images from Palit for its GTX 480 and 470 models, both using a V designed engine theme.

Whilst motherboard makers continue to offer better and better incorporated audio solutions onto select enthusiast oriented models, there are those of us who still refuse to use anything but a quality discrete solution and Creative are one of the most trusted in this area with its Sound Blaster range.

The company has just extended its Sound Blaster lineup with two new models in the form of the X-Fi Titanium HD and USB based X-Fi HD Audio.

These two audio solutions are said to be the first on the market to make use of THX's TruStudio PC technology. Here's a bit of a rundown on it :-

There's been a bit of a hole in AMDs mobile lineup for a while now when looking at Intel and its dominance with the Pine Trail/Atom families for the ever-growing netbook market. But it looks like the company's been at the drawing board for a while and we learn today that they do indeed have something on the cards.

AMD's John Taylor has let it be known that the company is working on a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid setup codenamed 'Ontario' which he thinks they'll have ready for release by sometime next year (take this with a grain of salt given we've been waiting for any form of Fusion from the mob for years now).

The graphics side of things does sound tasty, though, with word that its integrated graphics will be DX11 supporting. Stronger graphics abilities are much welcomed in the netbook world, but with that said, NVIDIA already has a good answer for that with its Optimus based Ion 2 chipset that combines Atom's efficiency for extended battery life + discrete GPU performance. Not to mention, a lot can happen between now and this time next year; who knows where Intel will be at in this area of the market by the time AMD finally gets this product to market.

A day after Intel lifts the NDA on its latest bad boy that is the 6-core Gulftown monster, leaked slides have made their way onto the web which paint a clearer picture for AMDs processor release plans throughout the remainder of the year.

We can ascertain from this road map that indeed AMDs naming scheme on its soon to be unveiled six-core (Thuban) processors will stick to the Phenom II X6 branding. Three six-core models will hit the market initially in the form of the 1075T, 1055T and 1035T and we can see there will also be some new quads coming which make up the Phenom II X4 900T series.

This new quad core family of processors will also be based on the Thuban dies, but with two cores disabled and carrying the codename 'Zosma'. AMD will make six-core Thubans into quads when there are minor defects in one or two of the cores in order to salvage its foundry produce which also in turn gives the ability to target lower price points in the market.

We've heard bits and pieces about Galaxy's plans to release a one of a kind dual GPU GeForce GTS 250 graphics card to market in the near future and more recently obtained concrete information that it was definitely being produced, but until now have seen very little in terms of performance expectations or how it looks in its final form.

Expreview have obtained some nicely presented images of the final retail version of the card together with a screenshot indicating its performance capabilities using 3DMark Vantage. They were able to confirm it uses 1GB of memory (512MB per GPU) and comes with clock speeds of 600/1500/1000 MHz for the core, shader and memory clocks. Galaxy also bundles the card with its Galaxy Magic Panel HD software that gives the ability to further push the clockspeeds.

The card requires two x 6-pin PCI-E connectors for power and has a unique cooling solution with the heatsink also covering the memory and VRM areas. It uses dual 70mm fans running at 2000RPM, each nestling directly above one of the two GPUs onboard.

With GDC (Game Developers Conference) underway this week, OnLive took this opportunity to unveil the launch date and pricing for its upcoming service which is unlike anything else available on the internet at this point in time.

OnLive gives the ability to play games across the internet with the entire performance aspect of the game being offloaded to a remote server, meaning even entry-level computers can get somewhat smooth gaming at up to 720p without the requirement of faster hardware. The only real important requirement is relatively fast broadband internet.

The system allows for multiplayer gaming across the net and is capable of also providing saved replays of game sessions for later. Lag has been removed as much as possible with a lot of clever work done to fine tune the coding, but would still cause an issue for more timing-sensitive gaming titles. However, games like Borderlands and Mass Effect 2 are in the works and there's some older popular ones on the cards as well.

Our VGA man Shane Baxtor has managed to sus out when AMD/ATI plans to officially announce its new Eyefinity6 technology which gives the ability to drive up to six monitors from a single card.

We can expect the launch to take place during the week of the 29th of this month and it shouldn't be far beyond that date when we begin to see cards surface from AIBs which harness this extended form of multi-monitor support with half a dozen mini-DisplayPorts on their I/O plates. Word at the moment is that initial cards with Eyefinity6 support will be HD 5870s carrying double the RAM (2GB) to better assist the extended multi-monitor abilities.

However, there will be some super duper Eyefinity6 equipped variants of the top dog dual-GPU HD 5970 coming out as well, one of which got some showtime at CeBIT last week from XFX.

After reading a story from Ars Technica discovered by way of Elite Bastards, I thought it may be worth chiming in on the subject of Internet ad blocking in this day and age and how it harms the websites you frequently visit.

Ars Technica recently published an article titled 'Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love' and as a long time tech site owner, I naturally found it very interesting. The article basically starts off by mentioning that one of the editors recently discovered how its ad blocker audience didn't fully realize how blocking ads affected the sites that they love. If you are an ad blocker, I encourage you to read on for my take on the situation.

As Ken Fisher from Ars mentioned, many people believe that if they don't click ads, banners, text links and the like, there is no harm in blocking the ads. This couldn't be any further from the truth, though. While TweakTown does run programs that pay CPC (cost per click), the majority of our ads are based around CPM campaigns. That means we are paid a set rate for every 1000 views of any particular ad. While obviously advertisers prefer as many clicks on their ads as possible, we still get paid that set amount no matter if it gets clicks or not.

We learned when reviewing ASUS' new M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 motherboard based on the just released 890GX chipset last week that one of the main unique features ASUS is promoting with the board is its ability to unlock extra cores that by default are disabled on a dual or tri-core processor, though not all dual and tri core processors are designed in this way.

We didn't get time to check this feature out in detail as to how well or if it even works; ideally we'd have a decent amount of dual and tri-core AM3 processors in hand to whack into the board and see how consistent the results are, but unfortunately we don't at the moment and am yet to hear of reports giving the thumbs up to it.

In theory it seems difficult to believe that it would work as effectively as ASUS says, what with AMD themselves disabling cores on some quad core and tri-core processors due to those cores not being as reliable as AMD would like during QA testing.

SPARKLE is giving NVIDIA a helping hand in pushing its 3D Vision technology by putting together a promotional bundle package which includes the 3D Vision glasses, drivers, software and a bunch of 3D Vision supporting game titles together with one of SPARKLE's factory overclocked GeForce GT 240 graphics cards.

Two models of card carrying the bundle are on offer, one being the GT 240 GDDR5 OC Edition which runs clockspeeds of 561/1371/3400 MHz for the GPU, shader and memory out of the box and comes with either 512MB or 1GB memory.

The other card SPARKLE is doing with the bundle is part of its Calibre series, the X240/X240G with 630/1677/3600 MHz frequencies.