The 8 and 9 series Intel processors have been released and most are now available. The 8 series are dual core and the 9 series are quad core. Across the range they vary in speed and cache memory - the fastest are up to 3.2Ghz. Intel have also introduced some new speeds - 2.5Ghz and 2.83Ghz. The main advantage of the new processors is that they are 1333 front side bus, i.e. notably faster than the older Q series (which were 1066 FSB). You need a motherboard that supports them properly, but with this in place you can really take advantage of the higher speeds. The new processors are also sometimes called 45nm Yorkfield processors (as opposed to 65nm with the old Q series). Adobe have produced a patch for their software which takes advantage of the new processing power to improve rendering times. An nice by-product of these new processors is that they consume less power and so can have quieter fans - although at the same time graphics card manufacturers are putting bigger and noisier fans on their cards, so we lose some noise in one area of the PC only to gain it somewhere else!

If you are not a very technically-minded person and most of the above went straight over your head, it could be summarised as: Intel have brought out a new generation of chips which are better and faster than the old ones.

In addition we can also do systems with new DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2 RAM. Again this RAM is better and faster. We have been testing various components and motherboards and now have systems we can offer for all our software/hardware.

At the same time various new Xeon (dual) processors have arrived - again 1333FSB. In our tests these are about 30% faster at some tasks (like encoding DVDs) than the previous models. We have also recently sourced a new quiet case for the Xeons - the latter are very powerful and require a lot of cooling, which normally means noisy fans. In our new Antec 190 case they are working very quietly!