I think you already know about two hottest novelties announced this week, these are NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and AMD Athlon XP processor utilizing 400MHz EV-6 FSB. I also think that you have read our own reviews of these latest technology achievements (NV35 review is here and Athlon XP 3200+ here). But if you want some more articles about the new flagship products from AMD and NVIDIA, here come the links:

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra:

• AnandTech with Doom III benchmarks!
• Bjorn3D
• Hexus.net
• Neoseeker
• NVNews

Athlon XP 3200+:

• Computerbase.de (German/English)
• Hard Tecs 4U (German/English)
• Hexus.net
• AMDZone

AcceleNation had a talk with Tim Handley, who is in charge of CPU Marketing in VIA Technologies. The interview is dedicated to VIA EPIA Small Form Factor platform, thus, they cover questions such as possible availability of two DIMM slots in EPIA M platform, DivX playback feature and other things some of you may want to know. There are also questions about TV-Out quality, C3 processors with 200MHz system bus and many other things they cover. If you are interested in VIA efforts in CPU and platform development, read the interview here.

We already told to you about Sharky Extreme’s Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - a guide which tells you how to spend your $4000 on an amazing gaming system. Now it is time for a cheaper personal computer for a gamer in tight-budget. Sharky Extreme published its May edition of Value Gaming PC Buyer's Guide. In this guide they tell how to build an optimal gaming system for about $1000 (w/monitor). Of course, there are AMD and Intel platforms taken into view. Read the guide here.

Hardware Zone has done a great job of modifying AMD Athlon XP on Barton core CPUs to enable their functionality in SMP mode. The background of this modification is quite simple and does not differ much from the ways of modification AMD processors based on Thoroughbred core; all you need to do to close the circuit between L5 bridges and set the multiplier through L3 bridges. Hardware Zone has also done a couple of benchmarks which show some clear advantages of dual Bartons over dual Thoroughbreds in everyday tasks, such as Internet Content Creation (SYSmark) and rendering in LightWave 3D 7.5. Nevertheless, performance in CINEBENCH 2003 rendering and DivX encoding does not benefit from increased cache size. Unfortunately, the number of benchmarks is too small to draw any solid conclusions, but I hope that Hardware Zone will make more benchmarks soon. Read the article here.