Seems the embargo on Geforce 8800 series cards has been lifted, Slashdot has an article linking to a few reviews here.

The consensus seems to be that its rather useless unless you have a 24" or bigger widescreen display.

...AND IT'S FINALLY HERE! Sorry...got a little excited, but can you blame me? Turns out it's made by MSI, not Leadtek, but no biggie as long as it works...and works it does :D Of all the games I own, only Quake 4 required me to scale back my settings just a bit (4x antialiasing rather than the 8 I would have preferred). I am running all my games at 1600x1200 resolution. I've got Battlefield 2 running smoothly at 80-90 fps with the highest available settings at 1600x1200. Pretty impressive :)

...to do my regular computing tasks. You may be wondering why, so I will tell you. I have just ordered an Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 for my main computer, through a friend of my dads who gets a good discount on computer parts, and to help pay for it, I had to sell my GeForce 7800 GTX. I sold it to my friend Dave, for $200. Which is a great deal for him considering this card retails for $300, and it's great for me, because I got 66% of the retail price, which in my book isn't bad. We''ll just forget the fact that the price I originally paid for it was $630 for now, OK? :) The specific card I got is the Leadtek Winfast PX7950 GX2. My old 7800 GTX was also made by Leadtek, and it worked very well, and was cheap (Leadtek always seems to have the lowest prices.) Anyway, this new card is a killer. Basically, it's two GeForce 7900 GTXs bolted together and using a single PCI-E x16 slot. SLI on a single card technically. Nvidia plans to make it so you can connect two such cards together for quad-SLI. The drivers aren't ready yet though. So there you have it.

At last, the long awaited support for DDR2 memory has arrived in the form of AMDs socket AM2, but there is a problem with the memory controller, I'll get to that, but first I will outline some background information.

In computer systems, the CPU clockspeed is determined by multiplying the system's Front Side Bus (FSB) in Intel systems, and the internal clock speed in AMD systems, by a multiplier that is hardwired into the CPU. In modern AMD systems using socket 939, and now socket AM2 as well, the internal clockspeed is 200mhz by default. For a 2.0ghz CPU, you would multiply 200 by a multiplier of 10 on the CPU to get 2000mhz (200*10=2000). Similarily, a 2.4 ghz CPU would have 200mhz multiplied by 12 to get 2400mhz (200*12=2400).

With socket 939, the memory clock was calculated by dividing the CPU clock by the CPU multiplier. So for a 2.0ghz CPU: 2000mhz/10=200mhz which at Double Data Rate (DDR) is 400mhz, thus we get the DDR-400 that 939 supports. With socket AM2, the maximum supported memory is DDR2-800, which means that the maximum memory clock is 400mhz. To determine the memory clock, AMD divides the CPU clockspeed by half the multiplier, so for a 2.0ghz CPU (multiplier of 10) and a 2.4ghz CPU (multiplier of 12), the calculations looks like this:

2000mhz/5=400mhz (800mhz DDR)
2400mhz/6=400mhz (800mhz DDR)

The problem is introduced when you have a CPU that has an odd multiplier, currently only 2 exist, 11, and 13. Dividing these in half will not give you a whole number. The way the memory controller deals with this is by rounding the number up. So for a CPU multiplier of 11, the number that the CPU clock would be divided by to get the memory clock is 6, and for a multiplier of 13, it would be 7.

2200mhz/6=366mhz (733mhz DDR)
2600mhz/7=371mhz (742mhz DDR)

As you can see, this means that you will not get the optimum memory speed. The only solution is to overclock the processor in question by 200mhz, which would result in higher power consumption, greater heat output, not to mention voiding your warranty.

So, which CPUs are affected? On AMDs current AM2 product list, the following CPUs will result in the less than ideal memory clock:

Athlon 64 3500 (2.2ghz, 512KB L2 cache)
Athlon X2 4200 (2.2ghz, 2x512KB L2 cache)
Athlon X2 4400 (2.2ghz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
Athlon X2 5000 (2.6ghz, 2x512KB L2 cache)

So, take this as a warning if you're planning on buying a new socket AM2 CPU. Do not buy a CPU with an odd multiplier.

Today I bought an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, and next week, when it arrives, I will be putting a dual-core Athlon X2 3800+ in it :D I couldn't be more excited. Besides some issues I had regarding the Nvidia Firewall, and having to reinstall windows (I was due for a reinstall anyway), I've had no issues whatsoever. I overclocked my current Athlon 64 3000+ to 2.0 ghz from 1.8 ghz, and it still runs much cooler than it used to thanks to the silver-based thermal paste I applied. It now idles at 36°C when before it idled at 45°C at stock speed! I plan to overclock the X2 to 2.2 ghz, or 2.4 ghz, I will decide when I see what temperature it runs at.