Neowin is reporting that Microsoft hopes to hit release to manufacturing status for Windows 7 on July 13th. RTM is the last major milestone in Windows 7's development before the OS is officially released to the public in October.

Wondering which video cards perform best with ARMA II? Wonder no more. In this article we've combined GPUs ranging from the Radeon 3870 up to the GeForce GTX 295 across two different CPUs: a Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, and a Core 2 Quad Q8400. See how well the game scales across the various GPUs and CPUs inside!

>> Click Here to read the article

According to a news post on NewsFactor Network, Mozilla plans to host a community bugday on July 7th to address bugs found in Firefox 3.5. To date the new browswer has more than 50 published bugs. NewsFactor says that a 3.5.1 update will be released later this month to fix some of the issues users are reporting.

Speaking with Computer and Video Games, Valve PR-man Doug Lombardi confirmed that Valve plans to offer more news on an upcoming Left 4 Dead update later this summer: "We plan to keep supporting Left 4 Dead 1. There will be some announcements coming before summer's out about what's coming there, and then we haven't shown everything that's in Left 4 Dead 2 yet."

Lombardi also confirmed that Valve plans to offer a demo for Left 4 Dead 2, as well as free play weekends: "With Left 4 Dead 2 we plan do a demo before the game comes out that'll have multiplayer in it and hopefully we can continue the free weekends with the full game post-launch."

Looking for a nice deal on a large monitor? Zipzoomfly is currently offering ASUS' VH242H for $169.99 (after $10 mail-in rebate) shipped. The VH242H is a 23.6" 16:9 TFT LCD with max res of 1920x1080 and 5ms (grey-to-grey) response time, 20000:1 contrast ratio, and 300 cd/m2 max brightness. The monitor weighs 5.8kg with DVI, VGA, HDMI video outputs, and also sports built-in speakers.

Downsides? No built-in USB ports. The monitor's base also lacks support for height, swivel, and pivot adjustment (you can tilt it between 25 degrees forward and backward though). Judging from the reviews online though, it offers good image quality for the price. PCMag.com gave it 4/5 stars. (Spotted on CNET)

This weekend's Steam sale is Bethesda's hit RPG, Fallout 3, which is on sale for $24.99, 50% off the regular price.

Employees in the computer repair department at retailer Staples have discovered some pretty interesting items inside customers computers. They estimate that up to 80% of users ignore maintaining their computers regularly and most of the problems they've encountered are easily preventable.

Besides the usual array of viruses, spyware, and malware, the techs have found bizarre things such as a family of cockroaches inside one users PC, a beehive, and enough dust inside one computer to fill up a handheld vacuum cleaner.

Scary stuff.

Speaking with videogamer.com, Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada acknowledged that Tekken 6 will forgo the system of locking characters until they're unlocked as you progress through the game's campaigns: all 40 characters will be available from the start in Tekken 6:

“Why we locked the characters originally was that in the arcades, it was kind of to extend the life of the game by gradually unlocking characters. And also with the home versions as well, because you can rent games or whatever, it was to protect us against that.

“That’s kind of outdated now though, especially with online play. If we were to have locked characters it would irritate a lot of people, to be playing against others online and to not have all the characters available. So I think it’s no longer useful.”

A long-winded court case over Xbox LIVE is finally beginning. Claimants Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum have accused Microsoft on infringing on their 1994 patent for "communicating live while playing the same video game in separate locations".

Back in 2004 they sued Microsoft and Sony over their Xbox LIVE and Playstation 2 online networks. Earlier this year Sony settled with them for an undisclosed sum.

The Microsoft trial is only beginning now due to stalling tactics on behalf of Microsoft's lawyers, including holding up the case for weeks back in February due to one typo.

Speaking with Industry Gamers, Activision President Mike Griffith acknowledged that the company has thought about entering the sports genre now dominated by EA:

"[The sports category] certainly has the characteristics of a category that would be interesting to us, but we would have to convince ourselves that we could enter successfully, accomplish leadership and that we'd have something new and different to bring to the party.

"Right now the barriers to entry there are pretty significant, but it is certainly the size of a category that we would be interested in.”

(Spotted on MCVUK)

Relic has announced that today's planned release of the DoW 2 1.4 "There Is Only War" update has been delayed to tomorrow:

It comes with great regret that we need to delay the launch of the ‘There is Only War’ Beta to tomorrow, Thursday, July 2nd at 2:00 PM PST (22:00 GMT). We are experiencing an unforeseen technical problem and believe it will be resolved in the next 24 hours.

We know you’re all really excited to get your hands on the new maps, balance and features – so are we. Please bear with us.

-The DOWII Team

In his latest Nanotech Circuits Blog, Brooke Crothers writes about the issues OEMs and ODMs are suffering from with the first generation of consumer ultra low voltage (CULV) notebooks.

Promising the benefits of ultra-thin notebooks like the MacBook Air with pricing that's only marginally higher than a netbook, both AMD and Intel see CULVs displacing the growing netbook segment. However, in order to deliver such a thin notebook at that price point manufacturers have to forgo the use of expensive materials like aluminum in favor of plastic. This in turn has led to cracked chassis': "Early production units being built in plastic, with the bottom case being plastic, are cracking," said Broadpoint AmTech analyst Doug Freedman. As a result, ODMs are urging their customers to switch back to enclosures made from metals like aluminum. This in turn leads to higher pricing for ULV notebooks.

As a result of these design issues, Freedman notes some OEMs are switching to designs built around NVIDIA's ION platform paired with Intel's Atom CPU.

Sokal, community manager for the Wolfenstein forums, has announced the minimum system requirements for Raven's upcoming shooter:

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP or Windows Vista(R) (Windows 95/98/ME/2000 are unsupported) Microsoft DirectX(R) 9.0c (included & required for Windows XP & Vista)

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 3.2 GHz or AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3400+ processor
RAM: 1GB RAM
Video Card: 256MB NVIDIA(R) Geforce(R) 6800 GT or ATI Radeon(TM) X800
Sound Card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
HDD Space: 8GB (Plus an additional 800MB for Windows swap file)
Media: 100% Microsoft Windows compatible DVD-ROM drive
Internet: Broadband connection and service required for multiplayer

(Spotted on Blues News)

Street Fighter IV is now available for pre-order on Steam. Like the Impulse deal, users who pre-order the game will get 10% off the retail price, bringing Street Fighter IV PC down to $35.99. The game will be released to the public next week, July 7th.

Word out of China is that Sony has sourced Foxconn and Pegatron Technology to begin production of their upcoming PS3 Slim console sometime this month. Foxconn has already issued a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange declining to comment on the rumor citing customer confidentiality.

The PS3 Slim console is expected to debut later this summer along with PS3 price cuts.

Relic has announced that the beta for their "There Is Only War" update begins later today. The beta is open to all owners of Dawn of War II and will open today at 2:00PM Pacific and run through Monday, July 13th. For more details on how to participate in the beta, Relic provides instructions here.

According to Wedbush Morgan games industry analyst Michael Pachter, up to 100 million used games were sold in the US last year. Those used game sales generated over 2 billion in revenues and comprised up to 1/3 of total sales.

Pachter believes the rise in used games hasn't hurt the sale of new games. In fact, if anything used game sales have helped the new games market, as users who trade in their used games tend to use that money to buy new ones: "Because the average used game value is around 20 per cent of the new game price, we think that used game trade-ins fuel incremental sales of over six per cent of total new game sales, suggesting that the cannibalisation from the used game 'push' is more than offset by the benefit from used game currency," Pachter said.

Blizzard has issued a statement on StarCraft II's lack of LAN support. Unsurprisingly LAN support was axed in part due to piracy concerns:

We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Today Mozilla has released their highly anticipated update to Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5. The browser update offers improved Javascript performance, open audio and video support, location aware browsing, and a new private browsing mode.

A direct link to the Windows version of the browser can be found here.

Swedish torrent site The Pirate Bay has been acquired by game networking company Global Gaming Factory for $7.8 million. As a result of the purchase, Global Gaming Factory plans to turn the site legitimate, with content providers and copyright holders being compensated for their products that appear on the site. Hans Pandeya, CEO of GGF said:

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.

The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary.

Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File-sharers need faster downloads and better quality."

The deal is expected to close in August.

Today AMD has revealed more details on their "TWKR" Black Edition CPUs we've been telling you about for the past few weeks. As we've mentioned, AMD confirmed that TWKR CPUs are designed to handle more voltage, which in turn allows them to safely be cranked up to higher clock speeds provided you have extraordinary cooling.

AMD says that the chips are limited edition parts -- less than 100 CPUs will be made -- and won't be made available to the general public. AMD has posted three TWKR photos on their AMD Unprocessed flickr account, and a new Youtube video has been released showing off their OC'ing prowess (CPUs are OC'ed to speeds in excess of 6.5GHz on LN2 and liquid helium). Here are the highlights straight from AMD:

The AMD Phenom II X4 42 Black Edition TWKR processor is a limited-edition chip created to provide extreme overclockers with a powerful tool to initiate serious performance.

Designed to reach the utmost performance barriers under extreme cooling, this part demonstrates AMD’s superior engineering design quality.

The TWKR parts can handle more voltage, scale higher, and run faster than other processors on the market.

As the same processor that AMD used to demonstrate the record-breaking overclocking potential of AMD Phenom II CPUs earlier this year, the TWKR processor is unmatched in yielding high frequencies at extreme cold temperatures, like in this video here.

With less than 100 processors worldwide, these TWKR processors will not be for sale.

AMD is giving these parts to select members of the extreme overclocking community as a tribute for their support and to encourage them to push the limits of overclocking.

AMD understands that overclocking is not for everyone. For mainstream users that don’t push their desktop PCs to the absolute limits, the same engineering that goes into the extreme performance of “TWKR” processors can be found in every AMD Phenom II processor available today.

And here's the Youtube video featuring TWKR CPUs:

Noted games industry analyst Michael Pachter expects the current console cycle to last through at least 2013 says Gamasutra. Previously it was expected that the console cycle would last through 2012. Pachter believes that Nintendo will win this console generation, with the PS3 and Xbox 360 duking it out for second place. While Microsoft's console is ahead of Sony in the sales race right now, Pachter says that Blu-ray could give the PS3 an advantage going forward, and by 2015 the PS3 could move past the Xbox 360.

Pachter thinks Nintendo will release a Wii Plus (HD) console by the end of 2010 at a sub-$200 price point. He also sees digital distribution growing in popularity on consoles, with digital downloads taking up to 50% of the market away from physical media by 2019.

Earlier this month NVIDIA introduced their first 40-nm DirectX 10.1 GPUs, the GeForce GTS/GT 200M series for notebook PCs. Now the company plans to bring desktop variants of those GPUs to market timed for introduction this fall.

VR-Zone has snagged GPU-Z screens of the value-oriented G210, which will ship with 24 stream processors clocked at 1425MHz, while the graphics core operates at 600MHz. GPU-Z also confirmed 512MB of DDR2 running at 790MHz, although VR-Zone says DDR3 support will also be offered. The board's memory interface is just 64-bit, with peak memory bandwidth of 12.6GB/sec. The cards will supposedly sell for $30-$35 and replace today's GeForce 9400 in NVIDIA's lineup.

Upping the performance factor is NVIDIA's GT220 GPU, which was previously codenamed GT216. GT220 ships with 48 shader processors clocked at 1373MHz and 625MHz graphics core clock, while the memory interface is 128-bit wide and runs at 800MHz (although the GPU-Z screenshot indicates 790MHz). VR-Zone says 3 variants will be offered, with each SKU shipping with a different memory type: DDR2, DDR3, or GDDR3. Up to 1GB of memory will be offered and prices will top out at $60. This GPU is intended to replace the GeForce 9500 family.

While speaking with The Inquirer, AMD's recently promoted Products Group head Rick Bergman (formerly in charge of the GPU business) says that they won't get caught in a GPU price war with NVIDIA: "Are we interested in winning share by losing money on every GPU we ship? No," Bergman said. "We're not going to engage in that and we haven't had to."

Earlier this month AMD slashed prices on their Radeon 4800 series of GPUs. The company is expected to roll out the first DirectX 11 GPUs in time for the launch of Windows 7 this October, perhaps even slightly sooner. But Bergman says AMD isn't stopping there: "A year from now we'll have something new and exciting"

A Fusion reference perhaps? Or something better? We'll have to wait and see.

In a wide ranging interview posted on IncGamers, Blizzard's Rob Pardo confirmed that Blizzard has no plans to support StarCraft II gaming over LAN. The game's only multiplayer component will be Blizzard's battle.net service. In a follow-up interview Pardo says that LAN isn't supported "because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net".

In a surprising move, Pardo also confirmed Blizzard has no plans to port StarCraft II over to consoles:

"In our opinion we just don't feel like we will deliver the type of RTS game that we've been creating [on consoles]."

"We have tried in the past, we actually tried the original StarCraft on Nintendo 64. It works, it's playable, it's just such a different playability gameplay experience than on PC and we really don't want to have it be that different."

Kudos to Blizzard for bucking the trend of porting popular PC franchises to consoles in a quick cash grab. (Spotted on Blues News)

Eurogamer reveals that StarCraft II's development was held up by one year due to World of Warcraft.

While Blizzard began work on StarCraft II back in 2003, and a "legitimately playable build" was finished in late 2005/early 2006, the game is only now beginning to see the light of day due in part to a 1-year delay so members of the StarCraft II dev team could help finish World of Warcraft. Explains Rob Pardo: "One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off"

Despite the delay, StarCraft II is the first project where Blizzard didn't have to make major changes to the game:

"This may be the first game in our recent few games that we haven't done that major reboot with.

It's been a long project for sure, but if you look at say World of Warcraft, or Warcraft III - or even the original StarCraft - there was a halfway point where we took a dramatic left turn and took a different direction. We haven't done that with Starcraft II. That said, it's certainly taken a long time to get to where it's at, for a variety of reasons."

Stardock has announced that Street Fighter IV PC is now available for pre-order on their digital download service, Impulse. In fact, if you pre-order the game now, Impulse is offering the game for 10% off the regular price, $35.99 instead of $39.99.

While this rumor isn't exactly new -- PSP phone rumors have been around for years -- Japanese business newspaper Nikkei seems to think the rumors are real this time, with Sony eager to introduce a PSP phone device to rival Apple's iPod, which is increasingly gaining in popularity as a portable gaming platform.

According to Nikkei, Sony plans to setup a development team next month that will merge the PSP with cellphone maker Sony Ericsson. No target release date is mentioned, nor do we know the hardware capabilities of the proposed device, but considering Sony decided to essentially recycle the guts of the PSP hardware for their upcoming PSP Go, it's likely Sony would do the same for a PSP phone in order to bring it to market as quickly (and at the lowest R&D cost) as possible.

Intel's 32-nm transition appears to be coming along perfectly so far. In fact, yields are looking so good DigiTimes reports that Intel plans to bring up the launch of their first Clarkdale CPUs from Q1'2010 to Q4'09.

If you recall, Clarkdale will be the first processor to sport integrated graphics functionality. DigiTimes says the dual-core chip will account for 10% of Intel's desktop CPU shipments in Q4'09, while Lynnfield and Bloomfield will reportedly account for just 2% and 1% respectively.

Ars Technica believes price cuts for Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 are on the horizon. Over the years their source, lovingly dubbed "the mole", has had an extremely solid track record of predicting these price cuts and limited edition SKUs months in advance.

The mole says Sony plans to introduce a new PS3 Slim this fall. Ahead of the PS3 Slim's launch however, Sony is planning to clear inventory of existing 80GB and 160GB PS3 parts. Once they've drawn down inventories of these consoles, Sony will then implement the price cut.

Considering that the PS3 Slim should be cheaper for Sony to manufacture, this report makes sense. Obviously Sony doesn't want to lose more money than they already have to on existing PS3 consoles. Exactly how significant the price cut will be is still a mystery however.

News from Microsoft isn't quite as dramatic. According to the mole, Microsoft plans to replace today's $300 Xbox 360 Pro 60GB SKU with the Xbox 360 Elite sometime in early September. This essentially amounts to a $100 price cut for the Elite, although Arcade pricing will apparently remain unchanged at $200. To help clear inventory of existing Xbox 360 60GB Pro consoles, Microsoft plans to offer "solid" game bundles. As usual, a holiday bundle will hit retailers in October as well.