Look, you never know when you'll be 820 feet away from your gorgeous duo of dual-link displays, audio inputs, six USB 2.0 ports and piping hot cup of joe, but Matrox is here to make sure that's never a concern you'll have to sweat. Upping the ante from last year's Extio F1220, the Dual-Link Extio F1240 now plays nice with those swank 30-inchers that are gracing your desk and extends of all the aforesaid parts some 250 meters via a single fiber-optic cable. Better still, the whole thing is fanless, and there's even a mini-Toslink audio port, VGA sockets and stereo audio in / out connectors to boot. Mum's the word on a price for the currently available unit, and just FYI, that whole transfer of coffee thing is totally not recommended.

[Via BIOS]

Alienware's AMD-powered Aurora ALX picked up CrossFireX support just as soon as it went live from ATI, but it has taken a few weeks for the technology to make its way over to the iconic Area-51. Said gaming rig is now available with ATI CrossFireX, meaning that you can take advantage of all four GPUs across a pair of Radeon HD 3870 X2s. Full release posted after the jump.

Looks like Intel's plans to enter the graphics space in a big way with its Nehalem and Larrabee lines strike NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang as being rather foolish -- in a conference call with analysts today, Huang said Intel's integrated graphics offerings were "a joke," and that even a tenfold increase in performance would put them behind NVIDIA's current products. Huang didn't stop there, saying that NVIDIA was "going to open a can of whoop-ass," and that while Intel's graphics chips were fine for running Office, they would never cut it for gamers and other demanding users. Huang kept going, responding to questions about all those driver-related Vista crashes by saying that NVIDIA had to support new games weekly while Intel's chips aren't ever put to the test. Actually, that's toning it down a bit -- what Huang actually said was "You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago... How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?" Yeah, them's fightin' words -- you going to sit there and take it, Intel?

[Thanks, Mike A.]

Quick note to the graphics enthusiasts in the house, HardOCP took a long look at CrossFireX using dual Radeon HD 3870 X2s. As you might expect, some games benefit from the raw power, some games require driver tweaks and knob-fiddling to get going right, and some games were just about the same without (read: your mileage my vary -- for now). Check out their full review for the details.

[Thanks, Risk]

Okay, so it's not like we were oblivious to the fact that NVIDIA's 8800-smashing GeForce 9800 GX2 was just around the bend, but we're getting that much closer to seeing it on store shelves judging by a finished product shown off at CeBIT. The Albatron card you see pictured above is most certainly proof that the mythical GPU is indeed a reality, and while no one in Germany will spill the beans on this thing's specifications, price or release date, feel free to check out a few more snapshots in the links below while clutching any spare change you can.

[Via PC Perspective]

AMD's deliverance of two 45-nanometer CPUs wasn't the only thing new from the company today, as now we're getting wind of an all new motherboard GPU that's DirectX10 compatible. The AMD 780 Series is hailed as "the industry's most advanced" mobo GPU, and is slated to be "widely available" in a variety of boards in Q2. Essentially, AMD's hoping the chip will enable casual gamers to join in on the fun without having to fork out big bucks for pricey discrete graphics cards, but for those that eventually do pick up such a device, the ATI Hybrid Graphics technology ensures that the power from both will be harnessed in order to boost overall performance. Check out the read link for all the nitty-gritty, and head on past the break if you're scouting a couple of educational videos.

Sure, SLI technology is fine and dandy, but ATI's hoping to remove some of the restrictions found on current multi-GPU setups with its forthcoming CrossFire X technology. As we've seen before, the idea here is to "take two, three or four GPUs and use their power to render one game faster than you otherwise would be able." Over at PC Perspective, those kind folks were able to pick AMD's brain on the topic, and aside from getting confirmation that CrossFire X "supports multi-GPU configurations of any combination of RV670- and R680-based products," we also found that a public release was just weeks away. Better still, there's a full report detailing the results of putting the technology to the test, and yes, initial impressions do seem quite positive. Hit the read link for the full spill, cool?

[Thanks, sizewise]

We had a hunch NVIDIA was prepping Hybrid SLI technology, and although it's taken over half a year for it to go official, we suppose now's better than never. As we already knew, the tech's primary purpose in life is to increase graphics performance and decrease power consumption simultaneously, and apparently, it will soon be incorporated into a "wide variety of graphics and motherboard desktop and notebook products." In case you've forgotten, Hybrid SLI enables NVIDIA motherboard GPUs to work cooperatively with discrete NVIDIA GPUs when paired in the same PC platform, and only the GPU(s) needed will be called upon in order to save energy (and battery life in laptops). For more on what upcoming products will sport the technology, head on down to the read link.

[Via HotHardware]

Details are unsurprisingly light on this one, but DigiTimes has it that NVIDIA is gearing up to launch its next-generation GPU just after the Lunar New Year in February 2008. Reportedly, "sources at graphics card makers" have revealed that the GeForce 9 series will include the D9E -- a "high-end product that adopts 65-nanometer manufacturing," supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 -- and the mid-range D9P, which will supposedly adopt 55-nanometer processing. Apparently, the former will be the first product in the new family, while the latter won't see light until June, but of course, we'd take every ounce of this with a healthy serving of salt for the time being.

We first got wind of AMD's wishes to boost the graphical prowess of handsets way back in February of this year (and saw it reaffirmed in March), and now it seems that the firm is making it happen. Apparently, AMD has agreed to license "cutting-edge graphics core technology to Qualcomm" for next-generation chipsets. The deal will reportedly bring AMD's Unified Shader Architecture (introduced in the Xbox 360) to Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem chipsets, which both firms hope will boost the adoption of 3D gaming and graphic-intensive applications on mobiles. Sadly, we're still left to wonder when we'll see a device actually take advantage of the horsepower, but at least it's in motion.

[Via ExtremeTech]

Intel's Paul Otellini IDF keynote shed some new light on the company's Larrabee processor, which is now set for a 2010 release and will compete against AMD and NVIDIA in the realm of high-end graphics. Paul says the chips will scale up to teraflops in speed, and be targeted at science and analytics in addition to graphics -- though he dodged questions about Larrabee potentially being a discrete graphics competitor for AMD and NVIDIA, and only reiterating that "Graphics will also be an area for the chip." Intel has so far stayed squarely in the realm of integrated graphics, but a move to discrete graphics would be quite a welcome shakeup to the current market, and teraflops would certainly make it all the more interesting.

Diamond is no stranger to packin' an awful lot of RAM onto graphics cards, and apparently, the forthcoming VFX 2000 Series Professional Workstation GPU will keep the legacy alive. According to Hot Hardware, Diamond is readying a 2GB (of GDDR4 memory, no less) professional card based on the R600 (now known as the HD 2900 XT), and reportedly, "the card's PCB has been modified from the standard HD 2900 XT reference design to support the workstation-class features inherent to the FireGL line of professional graphics cards." Still, there's no word yet on what frequencies the GPU and RAM will hum along at, but word on the street has this beast launching "in the coming weeks." Click on for another glimpse.

According to "sources" at AMD, the firm's official graphics card diagnostic and validation software was recently discovered "to have a bug that failed to detect defective ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 graphics cards." The problem was actually discovered by various "channel vendors" who supposedly pointed out an error in the BIOS application process, and it was noted that Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte were all bitten by the mishap. Thankfully, the glitch can seemingly be rectified by "reapplying the BIOS," but now some 20,000 to 30,000 units are already being shipping back in order to be mended before reaching consumers' hands; interestingly, there's no mention of a remedy for the "small number" of end users that may actually own one of these marred boards. Nevertheless, AMD has responded by stating that this ordeal was simply "an isolated incident," and assured us all that "measures were taken to solve the issue as soon as it was detected."

[Via TGDaily]

While some of you may be holding out for a 1GB Radeon HD 2900 XT, those looking to spend a little less can get a bit of instant gratification. ATI has just announced that the Radeon 2400 HD and 2600 HD are now shipping to board customers, meaning that a few more DirectX 10 graphics cards will be hitting store shelves in the not too distant future. Both cards will also include the company's Unified Video Decoder (UVD), are based around a 65-nanometer chip, and will support HDMI and HDCP. Time to start scouring the neighborhood couches for spare change, eh?

[Via TGDaily]

With leading-edge graphics cards getting more and more dedicated RAM shoved onto their PCBs, it's only surprising that it has taken this long for a 1GB single GPU card to hit the market. Diamond Multimedia has just announced the launch of its Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB, which packs a full gigabyte of GDDR4 memory, second-generation unified shader architecture, 512-bit memory interface, integrated CrossFire scalability, and built-in HDMI support. Moreover, it also includes ATI's Avivo display technology, dual-link DVI output, HDCP compliance, and DirectX 10 support. No word just yet on what kind of premium you'll be expected to pay for this momentary claim of superiority, but we'd wait for the benchmarks to see if it's even worth the extra coin.