The extent of the problems plaguing Nvidia's graphics cards is still controversial, though the company has confirmed that "weak" materials have caused "higher-than-normal" fail rates in certain mobile GPUs, which appear to be the G84 and G86-based graphics cards. The Inquirer said those issues extended to the desktop as well, which Nvidia denied. Interestingly, VR-Zone is reporting that Nvidia has issued a product change notification to customers that they're changing the underfill material for their desktop G86 chips from Namics 8439-1 to Hitachi 3730. Could mean nothing, but since their original problems stemmed from "weak" materials, it stands out. Is there a non-conspiratorial reason they would do this? [VR-Zone]

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Just on Monday we were talking about ATI's monster new 4870 X2 graphics, perhaps the most powerful around, and already Asetek have come up with a liquid cooling system for it. The LCLC is designed to either let you run the card nearly silent (the heat exchanger fan on the cooler runs at just 30 dB(A), which is pretty quiet) or overclock the ATI board for even more extreme performance. Either way, it's capable of lowering the GPU temp by 28 degrees, and takes up only two more slots. Price and release date not available, but read on for the press release.

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Rumours of imminent high fail rates notwithstanding, today's a pretty good day to own any GeForce 8 series or higher desktop graphics card, since they all get PhysX support with a free download (three PhysX-juiced UT3 maps are free too). Also tapping the CUDA goodness is badaboom, an insanely fast video transcoder, Folding@Home and a couple of tech demos--Nvidia showed me the Fluids demo on a GTX 280, and it was pretty neat. I'm snagging this stuff right now, actually. [Nvidia]

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Last month, the Inquirer made the shocking accusation that every Nvidia graphics card with the G84 and G86 chipsets were bad (every 8-series card up to the 8800 basically). Nvidia said that's crap, but the Inquirer said it was all a big cover up. Now the Inquirer is reporting that "four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates." That would mean all of the GeForce 8800 GT, GTS and GS desktop cards, the mobile 8800s, and most of the 9600 and 9800 series graphics cards are defective.

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ATI's Nvidia-slaying Radeon HD 4870 X2, previewed last month, will get official tomorrow at SIGGRAPH says the WSJ, who notes that some reviewers are calling it the most powerful card around. It's an interesting test of ATI's graphics card strategy: Cheaper, less power-hungry GPUs that can be easily strapped together (like the dual-GPU 4870 X2) versus Nvidia's penchant for obscenely powerful single GPUs. The best part? Whoever you go with, you can't really go wrong anymore. [Read More »

A local Beijing paper has revealed that some of the amazing fireworks in the Olympics opening show were digitally-crafted fakes, inserted into the live TV feed. The Beijing Times quotes the head of visual effects, who says that the 28 giant footprints that stomped through the air above the city, ending at the stadium, were advanced CGI. Though the pyrotechnics really were set off, the airborne camera view that the rest of the world watched was fake. Why go to these lengths? Apparently the Olympic committee decided that to follow the real trail of firework footprints was too dangerous for a helicopter camera. Instead a team spent almost a year crafting the fake segment, paying attention to even get the smog lighting effects correct. [The Telegraph]

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About a year ago, we first brought you news on Intel's Larrabee multi-cored GPU chips, but some new info is hitting the intertubes and hints that the chips could have uses beyond graphics. An alternative to developing faster—but hotter—processors, Larrabee will have between 16 and 48 processor cores aboard, all compatible with the classic x86 instruction set.

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The Gadget: The ViDock Gfx, a box with an ATI 2600XT inside that allows you to add two DVI displays to your ExpressCard Laptop (e.g. MacBook Pro). It doesn't affect your current display setup, which might already have an external monitor being driven by the on-board DVI port, which means you can have a total of three external displays plus your MacBook Pro's going at the same time. Mac and Windows versions are available in both 128MB and 256MB flavours, running at up to 2560x1600 resolution.

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Even after Nvidia downplayed their original report that GeForce 8400-8700 cards were failing in large numbers due to overheating, Dell has issued a BIOS update for all of its machines running the affected GPUs anyway. The update tweaks the fan settings to "regulate temperature fluctuations" to keep the maybe-faulty-maybe-not chips cooler. So who do we believe here?

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A graphics card can cost you almost as much as a bona fide Batman gadget, especially when you get up to ridiculous amounts of power and performance, but that ludicrous price is actually less ludicrous than it could be, because of the cutthroat competition between ATI and Nvidia, right? Not so fast. An email Nvidia sent by Nvidia senior VP of marketing, Dan Vivoli, to ATI's president and COO, Dave Orton made public by the judge in an ongoing anti-trust suit against the two companies reveals that they both see eye-to-eye on prices. Namely, that they should be higher:

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