Now that both the R300 and NV30-series of graphics cards have been around for some time, we are getting more familiar with the major differences between the two architectures. One of the most-significant differences between the competing micro-architectures lies in the choices the two main graphics IHV’s made with their Pixel Shader model: ATI’s general purpose Pixel Shader utilises a single high precision (24-bit) mode that covers all prior shader models, whereas NVIDIA picked multiple Pixel Shader precisions (12bit, 16bit and 32bit) with varying performance levels. Beyond3D talks to a number of developers, including Epic’s Tim Sweeny and Muckfoot’s Tom Forsyth, to find out their feelings about those shaders and their precision. Also, their expectations about the future. Read it here.

AnandTech has posted a huge roundup of i865PE/i875P mainboards. They reviewed 20 totally different mainboards based on these chipsets from broad range of manufacturers, including ASUS, ABIT, Gigabyte, MSI and others. AnandTech says that this is the first part of their i865PE/i875P roundup and they got about 10 mainboards more in their lab. Read the first part of AnandTech’s roundup here. By the way, AnandTech named ABIT IS7 as the best mainboard from this 20-piece set. 

ComputerBase.de has released an interesting article about power consumption of contemporary graphics cards. Although they measured power consumption of not a graphics card alone, but of the whole system with different cards, the article, nevertheless looks interesting as the components of the test system, besides graphics card, remained the same throughout all the tests, including POST screen, Windows XP desktop and, of course, synthetic and gaming benchmarks. Read the article here in German. For automated translation you should click here.

An important news for the whole overclocking community. As Overclockers.com revealed, there may be problems with overclocking certain systems with Serial ATA-150 HDDs. They discuss it in this and this news-stories.