Right on the heels of the launch of the 4850 and 4870 GPU's, AMD has plans to introduce the 4870X2 dual GPU by August. Reference design boards will be shipping mid-month, with 2GB GDDR5 memory by the end of the month. The 4870x2 is expected to have a price of $499.

In light of the unforeseen success of AMD's Radeon 4000 series, NVIDIA has come out of the gate swinging with price cuts.

The heftiest chop comes on the 9800 GTX, which has twice previously been discounted for manufacturers to the tune of £60 and $30. Word now comes to us that another $17 cut brings the cost of the board for manufacturers down to $165, with a target MSRP of $199.

Other cuts come in for the new GTX 200 series of boards with a $30 reduction for AIBs on the GTX 260, setting it at $222 manufacturer price. The recommended MSRP clocks in at $329 for a tidy margin. The GTX 280 joins its little brother on the block with a deeper chop of $90 to $392, and an MSRP that is now $499, right in line with the MSRP of the Radeon HD 4870.

Apple has cut prices on MacBook Air upgrade options. The base price of $1,799 for one with an 80GB HDD and 1.6GHz processor remains the same, but the cost of upgrading to a 1.8GHz processor has come down from $200 to $100.

The bigger price cut comes when buyers purchase the 1.8GHz system with the 64GB solid-state hard drive. It's fallen from $3,098 to $2,598; a $500 difference.

Unfortunately for consumers, Apple's SSD option is still PATA, so resourceful buyers can't make use of the upcoming less-expensive SATA SSD options coming out in coming weeks. *cough*OCZ*cough*

As the second fiscal quarter draws to a close the quarterly filings with the United States SEC have begun to roll in from US technology firms. Of particular interest to us this year is NVIDIA, and their July 2nd filing as excerpted below:

On July 2, 2008, NVIDIA Corporation stated that it would take a $150 million to $200 million charge against cost of revenue to cover anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems. All newly manufactured products and all products currently shipping in volume have a different and more robust material set.

Run-around-and-put-the-fires-out language aside, this is bad news for black and green. Their filing states that any profit made in the third fiscal quarter of 2008 will be hamstrung by a 150-200 million burden of reimbursement to vendors.

While details of makes and models remain elusive, the filings indicate that mobile MCPs and GPUs were manufactured with poor packaging or had improper thermal characteristics ascribed to them. The result is a "higher than normal" failure rate on products that shipped in "significant quantities." Global laptop vendors have turned to NVIDIA to foot the bill for a substantially increased volume of RMAs and repairs.

As the violin plays on, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) continues to make a precipitous decline on the stock market. NVIDIA wound down Wednesday's trading with a steady $18.06, and opened with a crushing 30% dip to $13. Their stock is currently valued at $12.52 and falling.

In the Viacom v. Google court case of YouTube copyright infringement, Viacom just got one of its major requests: usernames, IP addresses, and which videos have been uploaded and watched by each user.

Viacom wants to show that copyright infringing material is more popular on YouTube than original material. To that end, the judge in the case has ruled that Google shall turn over their entire user database to Viacom. This info is to be turned over directly to Viacom (not to the court) on four 1TB HDDs. The drives shall also contain every video that Google has ever removed from YouTube.

Viacom's lawyers posit that if they can show that users are watching and uploading more infringing material than they are original material, then Google can be held responsible for the infringement. Google argues that it has complied with every request to remove infringing material, and that it cannot be held responsible for the actions of every user in an open content sharing system like their popular video browsing site.

Early reports are slowly coming in that resident slob, Thrax, has finally landed a job. He had an interview today that he "totally nailed, dude."

Stay tuned, more to come.

ZD Net released a free overclocking tool called ZD Net Clock that allows Mac Pro owners to overclock the front side bus of their systems.

The aspect of this sure to get Steve's turtleneck in a knot is ZD Net claims it allows buyers of the lowest end 2.8 GHz Mac Pro to get performance that romperstomps all over their highest clocked 3.2 GHz system; an option that costs $1,600 more.

In an effort to protect gamers from account theft, Blizzard has announced a security key for World of Warcraft. The keychain device will generate a six-digit PIN to be used by gamers when logging in to their accounts and is expected to cost $6.50 when it's finally released. No news on when it will hit shelves.

Sony has pulled its 2.40 firmware for the PS3 after reports of it bricking consoles.

>> Continued

Having the utilities on hand to diagnose, troubleshoot and fix issues is imperative for geeks like us to do their jobs and hobbies. Yours truly is a proficient collector of freeware or GPL utilities that make my life a little easier, so I thought I'd share them with all of you:

GParted: With functionality similar to Acronis Disk Director, you can freely merge, move, resize, split and create partitions with this swanky liveCD.

Knoppix STD: Contains a vast collection of encryption, password recovery, networking and conversion tools for all sorts of security functions. Another liveCD.

Memtest: The grand daddy of all memory testing utilities, this bootable ISO will allow you to see if your blue screens and instability is from bad RAM. Icrontic has the hookup with another tutorial!

Drive Fitness Test (DFT): Courtesy of Hitachi GST, this hard drive testing tool does SMART analysis, sector-by-sector integrity scanning, interface tests, cable tests and more! Icrontic can help you give the tool a run, if you click over here.

TestDisk: An amazing piece of freeware that allows direct access to hard drives where the partitions, MBR or MFT have been borked. Did you know that Icrontic can help you with its usage?

Ghost4Linux: Need to archive an image of your hard drive, but can't afford Norton Ghost or Acronis TrumeImage? Ghost4Linux saves the day! Similar functionality, all for free courtesy of the GPL. Another convenient liveCD.

Dozens of freeware utilities: Courtesy of econsultant, this is a comprehensive list of freeware utilities that do darn near anything you can think of when it comes to getting your PC in fighting shape!

Have fun!

7/3 UPDATE: Long-time Icrontic member LIN studiously noticed that the final link in this post was broken. It seems that the eConsultant domain is having some configuration issues, so we've posted Google's cached page in its place. Cheers!