MSI has unexpectedly announced the K9A2 Platinum motherboard featuring AMD's 790 FX chipset (the new official name of the RD790). The board includes four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, support for 800/1066MHz DDR2 memory and HyperTransport 3.0. The board supports all AM2 and AM2+ processors, although a launch date is still unknown.

VR-Zone has compiled the launch date and relative specs regarding AMD's quad-core Phenom 9-series. According to the site, the quads will arrive in Nov/Dec while the Phenom FX will debut in Q1 '08. All chips are socket AM2+ compatible, 65nm and house 2MB L2 cache. The clock speeds range from 2.2GHz - 2.8GHz.

Asus has finally unveiled the PCIe version of their popular Xonar D2 sound card, the Xonar D2X. The D2X supports 7.1-channel surround sound, Dolby and DTS, and according to Asus, "undoubtedly provides the best gaming experience ever." Asus has also announced the Xonar U1 external sound card, which boasts an SPDIF output with Dolby Digital encoding.

Seagate has finally announced their first hybrid drive, the Momentus 5400 PSD. The 2.5" drive operates at 5400 RPM, and will ship in 80, 120, and 160GB capacities. Using a technology called ReadyDrive, the drive predicts the commonly used data, and then transfers it to the drive's inbuilt flash memory - resulting in improved boot times and overall lower access times.

According to DigiTimes, citing unnamed sources at graphics card makers, the launch of Nvidia's 8800 GT has been brought forward from November 12, to October 29. The site noted that the earlier launch will give the company "an advantage" over the RV670, which shares a tight performance/price ratio.

I'm sure many of you are pleased to see this (well, that's providing you haven't already skipped to the juicy bits below, in which case you'll most likely be searching for your wallet). If you're too ecstatic to wait for the full release, the demo is expected to arrive on October 26, while the retail version will land on November 16.