Here we are, in 2008, heading for the PCI Express 3.0 standard and Albatron Technology comes along and claims that millions of integrated motherboards without AGP or PCI Express slots are still produced. OK, you might find a few AGP cards these days, but cards for the old PCI slot? Are there millions of PC owners that haven’t made the jump for PCI-e yet? I find that quite hard to believe. Anyway, Albatron considered that it’s unacceptable to forget about that many potential buyers of discrete graphics cards, so they went ahead and released an array of GeForce 8 series cards designed for the old PCI slot.

The new PCI lineup includes 3 models: PCI8600GT-256X, PCI8500GT-256X and PCI8400GS-256. The company claims these products not only increase performance, but also increase the number of connectable monitors up to two, three or even four, which wasn’t possible with any previous PCI card.

Albatron did some preliminary tests and came to the conclusion that the new graphics cards considerably surpass current integrated graphics solutions from Intel. In 3DMark2006 the discrete cards running on the PCI slot outperformed Intel 915G by up to 1329% (on a Pentium-4 520 2.8GHz, 1GB DDR2-800 platform).

All three cards are low-profile solutions that feature DVI (Dual-Link), TV-Out (HDTV) and HDMI interfaces. The PCI8600GT (pictured above) has 540/1188/800 MHz clock rates, while PCI8500GT operates at 450/918/800 MHz. There's no information about the third card for now, but that would be the cheapest of the three. Prices should be way below $100.

The official WHQL Catalyst 8.7 driver from ATI has just been released. The new driver had to stay a bit longer into beta phase, but that is not because of the upcoming HD 4870X2.

ATI’s release notes inform that the newest version comes with some improvements for the Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 products in 3DMark Vantage, while the latest GPU generation along with the HD 3800 and HD 3600 series are supposed to be getting major improvements in Company of Heroes DX10 and Lost Planet DX10. Catalyst 8.7 also brings some improvements for Lost Planet and Call of Duty under DirectX 9 on HD 4800 series and better Crossfire scaling on all products.

There’s an additional feature located in the Catalyst Control Center, which is now enhanced to show full hardware information for each physical graphics accelerator installed, in case you have more than one cards. The ATI team managed to resolve many issues with games such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, World in Conflict, Hellgate: London and some other minor games. As always, there is an updated list of known issues that haven’t been corrected just yet.

Windows Vista and XP owners, as well as Linux owners can download the latest Catalyst version from the AMD Game site.

If you can’t get enough cooling out of those air-based fans and water-blocks, but you don’t really want to waste money on nitrogen and carbonic snow, there’s some new kind of cooler out there that runs on liquid metal.

Well, if you aren’t really into extreme overclocking or case-modding, you don’t have to make the jump for this one. However, the Danamics CPU cooler is bound to lure you with nifty tech oozing around it. According to Gizmodo, the Danamics LM-10 is the world's first commercial CPU cooler based on liquid metal. This reminds me of the T1000 Terminator model that was made of mercury or something. The guys of at Danamics figured out that liquid metal has thermodynamic properties that apparently improve temperature uniformity on the cooling surface, and allow for lower temperatures when compared to other cooling solutions available on the market. The good thing is that the cooler doesn’t need a separate pump like water-blocks have since the cooling is done by metal that can be pumped electromagnetically. Thus, the cooler has no moving-parts and comes with an integrated silent pump that draws just 1W of power.

Danamics haven’t yet released any info on pricing and availability.

Intel still thinks it can revolutionize the GPU market with their upcoming Larrabee solution. Of course Intel is capable of doing that and with the help of GDDR 5 memories, they can easily come to par with ATI’s and NVIDIA’s solutions. However, a 12-layer PCB (4 more layers then current graphics card PCBs) will most likely give Intel’s partners some splitting headaches. OK, partners and integrators might figure out a way to reduce costs, but what about game developers? Are they getting DirectX and OpenGL support? Intel says it’s a NO-NO! Enter “direct mode”, the API of the future.

Well now, Larrabee wants to be proclaimed as the rightful 3dfx Voodoo successor. A new API like the good ol’ Glide from 3dfx might bring a lot of hassle for the game developers, as they'd have to write specific code to support Larrabee based products, which doesn't sound like it'll be a popular thing when the card is to be released in summer 2009. But 3dfx proved that Glide was better than DirectX and OpenGL, so Intel is not really treading on new grounds with Larrabee.

Fudzilla informs that Larrabee will launch together with six games that will have been specifically designed to take advantage of the features integrated in Intel’s solution, but Intel doesn't seem to have revealed details about which six titles this will be. Six games by launch time is not that bad, but Intel has to make sure developers will keep rolling a fair number of games that run smoothly on Larrabee’s new API. Then again, DirectX 11 is to be launched around the same time and game developers will be faced with some dilemma: do they make the shift to DX11 or get acquainted with Intel’s API… or both?

Surprisingly enough, AMD is not doing that well these days, although ATI is starting to catch up on NVIDIA. CPUs don’t seem to represent AMD’s ace in the sleeve for the moment and that’s why the company is concentrating more on the GPU sector. Techtree.com managed to interview Raja Koduri, worldwide CTO (Products Group) at AMD, who primarily spoke about ATI’s upcoming products.

Koduri mentioned that "AMD has already built a computer that has four 4870X2s in it. So it has eight GPUs; drivers will not be supporting eight GPUs at this point of time." That sounds a bit CUDA-like to me. After all, ATI is preparing to bring CUDA support for their latest GPUs and maybe AMD has finally approved this move. I don’t think gamers, not even the hardcore ones, will want to buy four 4870X2 cards when the drivers are ready. However, we could be considering some cheaper setups like four 4850 or 4870 cards.

Fudzilla informs that Koduri was asked at some point about PCI Express bandwidth limitations on motherboards with dual x8 slots and if there was enough bandwidth for the latest generation of cards. The AMD representative replied:"Yes, because our drivers and the games, at least the last generation games, they've been optimized to avoid traffic between GPUs. But my prediction is that moving forward it will be important that there's more bandwidth between GPUs." So that’s why an important number of games tend to scale poorly on CrossFire setups.

Another important aspect presented by Koduri is AMD’s intention to bring midrange and possibly high-end graphics acceleration to the upcoming Fusion CPU/GPU hybrid units. This might point to the fact that the era of discrete graphics cards is nearing its final days for ATI, which could be totally fusing with AMD in this case.