As the last major update to XP draws nearer, Microsoft has released the beta to a small selected group of testers. According to NeoSmart, SP3 will include 1,073 patches and hotfixes - 140 are security-related. Although that's not all. SP3 will also bring four new features to XP, most of them from Vista...

Known as "Shoot 'em up," AMD promised huge performance gains though Catalyst 7.10, and it seems that the promise has now been met. Aimed at CrossFire systems with DX10, performance improvements hit 80% in Company of Heroes, while Bioshock improves 70%. You can grab the drivers here for all the usual OS's - or read the release notes.

Intel has finally pulled the wraps off the flagship product of their Bearlake series chipsets, the X38. First introduced in the form of the P35 and G33, Bearlake brought support for PCI Express 2.0, DDR3 and 1333MHz FSB's. Below you'll find some early reviews and pre-announced boards...

According to a report by Expreview (via TweakTown), Nvidia's 8800 GTX and Ultra will be the only boards capable of running three-way SLI - that's providing you have a 680i or 780i SLI chipset, three PCI Express x16 slots, and a new three-way SLI bridge. The setup relies on the dual SLI connectors on the top of the GTX and Ultra boards, hence why the GTS isn't supported.

Many of you (mostly 8800 GTS owners) have been wondering how many shader processors the G92 has, ever since we first heard of such a chip. It has now been confirmed by Nvidia that the 8800 GT will boast 112 shader processors - the same amount as the recently bumped 640MB GTS. The shaders are clocked at 1.5 GHz, and accompany the board's 256-bit GDDR3 memory running at 900MHz.