Apogee Digital has begun shipping it's Symphony 64 soundcard worldwide. The PCI Express-based card supports up to 64 channels of 24-bit 192kHz digital input and output, or double the amount of I/O in Apogee's previous Symphony soundcard. Apogee has designed the card to interface the company's X-Series and Rosetta Series converters directly to the Mac Pro, the culmination of which would create The Symphony System, a complete pro audio solution.

Other goodies include Apogee's VBus technology, which gives users the ability to route stand-alone software instruments directly between Core Audio based applications rather than as plug-ins, and the company's SBus technology, which Apogee claims "doubles the DSP power of The Symphony System."Gamers and PC users (as in, non-Mac owners) need not apply, and that's probably a good thing given the soundcard's $1000 price tag.

Gainward has introduced an improved version of the generic ATI Radeon HD4850. The graphics card we have in our labs today features a faster GPU and memory and has 1GB of DDR3 memory. Before starting with our usual presentation of the card's features and specifications, let's say a few words about AMD's HD48xx series.

ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series GPUs is a "TeraScale graphics engine " according to AMD, promising to offer HD gaming and Blu-ray/HD content playback with incredible visual fidelity.The new graphics engine combines the power of one teraFLOPS, 800 stream processors and next generation GDDR5 memory. It also supports tessellation, DirectX 10.1 and scalable ATI CrossFireX technology.Like their predecessors, the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series graphics cards offer optimal performance and efficiency with platform-independent intelligent power management. Regardless of platform, these graphics cards deliver the power needed during gaming while conserving energy at idle or when demand is low.According to the system requirements, the Gainward HD4850 1GB GS needs a PCI-e based PC with one X16 lane graphics slot and a 450Watt (or greater) power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin connector. For CrossFire configurations, a 550 Watt PSU with two 6-pin connectors is recommended.

Our sample comes with a different cooling system than the generic ATI Radeon HD4850, potentially offering better conditions for overclocking. Our sample comes with a massive 700MHz core (625MHz for generic HD4850) and 1000MHz of memory (vs 993MHz for generic HD4850) clocks. As we have mentioned, it has an 1GB memory onboard (0.8ns) with a bandwidth of 256bits.

- Retail package

Below you can see the photo of the retail package of the Gainward HD4850 1GB GS. The graphics card is available for approximately €180.All the included box contents are well-packaged and secured. In the box you will find a printed manual, a driver's disc, a power adapter and the DSub15-to-DVI converter. No retail game is included.

Motherboards with G45 Express chipsets have begun slowly trickling into the market, and some manufacturers are giving the new Intel integrated graphics chipset royal treatment. Case in point: Gigabyte's EG45M-DS2H, which pairs the G45 with some features you'd expect to see on much fancier boards.

The EG45M-DS2H channels the G45's built-in GMA X4500 HD graphics into VGA, DVI, and HDMI display outputs. You'll also find six 300MB/s Serial ATA ports (including one external port) with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 array configurations. Other features include Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver tech, Dolby Home Theater-certified audio, a built-in Trusted Platform Module chip, S/PDIF, FireWire, and Gigabit Ethernet.The G45 chipset gives the board support for 1333MHz front-side bus speeds and 800MHz DDR2 memory, but Gigabyte claims the board can hit 1600MHz on the FSB and 1066MHz for the memory when overclocking. Speaking of overclocks, the EG45M-DS2H features enthusiast-class goodies like dual BIOSes, solid-state capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and low-resistance MOSFETs. That said, enthusiasts may feel limited by the mobo's lone PCI Express x16 slot, which only features four lanes of PCIe connectivity.

Have you ever run into an old ex-girlfriend only to realize she's nothing the way you remembered? Or fired up that retro-game and wondered what you found so appealing about it in the first place? Every once in awhile a blast from the past (like bringing WarGames back to theaters) will make a worthwhile comeback, but more often than not, old relics are best left buried, and Albatron might be finding this out.Earlier this month the company let it be known it would be bringing Nvidia's 8-series videocards in 8400, 8500, and 8600 trim to the PCI bus, but those plans have hit a snag and it might be awhile before we see another PCI videocard. Even though the PCI bus has been around since close to the dawn of time, not all motherboards stick to the same signaling implementation for the PCI interface, and Albatron fears that compatibility with different motherboards could become a problem.

Sam Nada, Albatron's International PR representative, says the company's engineers are working on optimizing the BIOS to ensure a smooth rollout, but it will be a couple of weeks before the new Retrotechnology cards make a debut. But what's a couple of weeks if you've already staved off the upgrade bug for this long?

Creative has all but dominated the PC sound card market, in no small part thanks to its prowess with hardware-accelerated 3D audio. The EAX positional audio framework born from the SoundBlaster line became the de facto standard for 3D audio in games, giving Creative a distinct advantage over its rivals. Creative licensed EAX, of course, but it kept competitors at version 2.0, limiting them to 32 concurrent 3D voices and standard-definition sampling rates and resolutions. Meanwhile, Creative extended EAX to version 5.0 with support for 128 simultaneous voices and high-definition resolutions and sampling rates.

Despite its positional audio dominance, Creative has faced increased competition of late, largely from sound cards based on C-Media's Oxygen HD audio chip. Microsoft's decision to drop hardware acceleration for DirectSound 3D audio in Vista has also posed a challenge to the SoundBlaster monopoly by blunting some of EAX's appeal. All the while, motherboard makers have diligently worked to improve the quality of onboard audio solutions, creating a perfect storm that has spawned more PC audio choices than we've ever seen before. Interestingly, two of the most recent additions to the sound card ecosystem use existing audio chips. Asus' new Xonar D2X, for example, is based on a tweaked version of C-Media's Oxygen HD. More interestingly, it comes with a PCI Express interface, finally providing fodder for the scores of empty PCIe x1 slots that dot the enthusiast landscape. On the other side of the fence we have Auzentech's X-Fi Prelude, which is the first third-party card to employ Creative's X-Fi silicon. The Prelude uses a custom board design and upgraded components in an attempt to wring better sound quality from the already impressive X-Fi audio chip.

The Xonar and Prelude both target the high end of the desktop sound card spectrum, so it's only fitting that we face them off against each other in Windows Vista. Read on to see how they fare in a range of gaming, signal quality, and subjective listening tests.