Seems that non-modded consoles are having issues. We have been getting some reports from the Wii faithful that the 4.2 update is causing problems for Wii units. We suspected that these were illegally modified Wii consoles that were causing the grief, but a closer look at the complaints seems to suggest that some Wii consoles that are not modded are being bricked by the update.

At least Best Buy’s CEO thinks so. Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn is sounding a bit more upbeat and optimistic about the holiday season with current comments that he made. At a recent media conference in New York Dunn was quoted as saying “consumers are back out spending again” and, of course, this is good news.

According to info that we managed to get from Nvidia, GPU accelerated flash will be officially introduced on October 5th.

The guys from notebookjournal.de have posted a Youtube video showing an internal flash player build running a trailer of the latest Star Trek movie in 720p. The trailer was running on an ION-based netbook which had no trouble in pulling off smooth playback.

As real as it can get. Nvidia will show its DirectX 11 card that we used to call GT300 and that everyone internally calls Fermi. The hardware is real and we will learn much more about it tomorrow. We expect that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will demonstrate the card at the GTC keynote that should start at 1.00 PM Pacific time or roughly 10 PM Central European time.

Fermi will concentrate a lot of a computing processing and it should be very fast with DirectX 11 and older games. Fermi has a lot of cache and supports instructions that use to be common only for CPU and many people believe that this is a hybrid between a graphics card and a CPU. This might be the direction that Nvidia will be heading.

One down three to go. Battleforge can now be called the first DirectX 11 game, as thanks to the patch that guys from Phenomic has released and the DirectX-SDK dating from August, this game runs faster on DirectX 11. According to the graph over at Pclab.pl the DirectX 11 patch was enough for the HD 5870 to be faster than Radeon HD 4870 X2 at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF. The game doesn't bring any eye-candy and you can't exactly call it a full DirectX 11 game, but at least the patch brings some gain for the HD 5800 series, as it does indeed give few extra frames per second.

Efficient use of multithreading with DirectX 11. During AMD’s DirectX 11 training sessions last week, the company brought out its upcoming flagship HD 5800 series card under the Hemlock codename, the card which will also be the top model in its entire 40nm Evergreen series.

This multi-GPU beast more appropriately known as Radeon HD 5870 X2 was shown in a meeting room running CryTek’s latest CryEngine 3 development build at very smooth framerates. More specifically, the engine was running at 1920x1200 with AA turned off (as CryEngine has never needed manual AA) and the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) rendering technique was significantly more pronounced than in Crysis and Crysis Warhead.

The almighty HD 5870 X2. It was just a matter of time before AMD's crown jewel was pixellized, and now we can take a look at the first pictures of the ATI HD 5870 X2, known also by its Hemlock codename. The pictures appeared at Xtremesystems.org forum, and we are quite sure that we will see more of these pretty soon. This card features two 40nm Cypres GPUs, a dual 256-bit memory interface and a total of 3200 stream processors. Judging by the pictures, the card needs a 6 and 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors while the exact clocks are unknown due to the fact that it could have an unacceptably high TDP and thus might have lower clocks than the HD 5870. The card should be up and running sometime in November, at a rumoured price of around US $500.

After a lot of rumours about bad yields with GT300, Nvidia has decided to talk to us and give us a simple quote about the state of its next generation 40nm product line.

Senior manager from Nvidia has told Fudzilla that “Our (Nvidia’s) 40nm yields are fine. The rumors you are hearing are baseless.”

We have to give AMD a lot of credit for being the first with DirectX 9, DirectX 10.1 and now with DirectX 11. Radeon HD5870 does support DirectX 11, but when it comes to games that support it, there are still not out.

Dirt 2 PC version is postponed, and now we are hearing that Stalker DirectX 11 version is also pushed at least to January 2010. The bad thing for ATI is that Nvidia should also have its DirectX 11 card before the end of the year.

Kingston has teamed up with Rambus on delivering a new DDR3 prototype, which is a multi-threaded memory module tailored for multi-core computers. The optimization of these modules allegedly resulted in a 50% performance increase compared to the current DDR3 modules.

Furthermore, the companies claim that the power consumption has been lowered by up to 20%, as the new circuitry is much more effective and doesn’t have to be activated as often as the current ones.