In this article, ZeGermans reports to you what has recently been going on in the hardware world.

These last two weeks have been quite important for the computer hardware scene. New video technology is nearing final development, new video cards are just hitting market, and new system chipsets are taking the power-user’s world by storm. We’ll start by looking at the big news coming out of the ATi camp.

ATi recently ‘taped-out’ their new core, the R520. What does taped-out mean? It means they’ve actually built a core instead of just having it on paper and are in the process of creating mass production facilities for it. What does the R520 sport? Honestly, no one knows. Many suspect, however, that it will have somewhere around 24 pixel pipelines (compared to the X800XT’s 16) and be clocked at around 600-700 core/memory. As far as ATi products that are actually on the market right now, the X850 series is starting to pop up. Below is a chart of the properties for each member of this card family:

Source: AnandTech

All of these cards will be PCI-Express only, so sorry to those of you that don’t have a PCI-E mobo. The cards that look like the most glaringly good deals are the X800XL and the X800. The X800XL outperforms the 6800GT and the X850 Pro in most preliminary benchmarks, while the X800 outperforms the 6600GT and the 9800 Pro, both of which are in the same price range. It’ll be interesting to see performance figures on the new X850XT’s, and to see nVidia’s response to this.

In other hardware news, it’s all about the nForce4. What does nForce4 give you? A ton of things. While it doesn’t offer a huge performance boost over older nForce3 chipsets, it does offer a few things critical to future proofing; these being PCI-E support and SATA-II support. PCI-Express is the wave of the future and anyone building a computer now should get a PCI-E computer. ATi has finished making AGP cards, and nVidia will soon follow. AGP is dead. Switch while you still can. SATA-II is hardly as important, seeing as no hard drive can even saturate the SATA-I bandwidth limits, but it gives you a bit more headroom if you want to upgrade to some futuristic super-fast hard drive. Another interesting thing about this chipset is the SLI version of it, which allows you to link two nVidia-brand, 6-series, PCI-E graphics cards together to gain about a 50% to 75% performance boost in games. This is not only a good way to have the best performing system in existence, but also a nice upgrade path, allowing you to have performance on par with the next generation of cards for cheaper.

On the CPU front, both AMD and Intel have been quiet as of late, not really releasing any new chips. Next month should be interesting as Intel starts releasing it’s 2MB L2 cache chips, called Prescott 2M. Also, the FX-57 is due out around that time, so it’ll be interesting to say the least.

And that about wraps up the important news of the last two weeks on the hardware front. To sum up, if you’re buying a new computer, get a PCI-E mobo (I’m rather fond of the cheap Chaintech VNF4), and get one of these new ATi cards. They really set the bar up there. Or, if you have a ton of money, go SLI and get a pair of 6800GT’s.

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