After upsetting the GeForce 560 Ti launch, the Radeon HD 6950s are starting to appear from many different partners. Only available from Sapphire at first, we have however seen these cards listed on the HIS and Gigabyte sites, though these cards are not yet available. Club 3D has now joined the list by announcing its own HD 6950 1 GB, which is starting to be listed online and should be available as of next week. The card has the same clocks as the stock card (800 MHz for the GPU and 1.25 GHz for the memory) but has a reworked cooler with a radiator which extends down the entire length of the card with three heatpipes running off it and two fans underneath. Although Club 3D is the first manufacturer after Sapphire to list the cards, others should soon follow, with HIS likely to be announcing availability within a few days.

	Microsoft has just officially confirmed on one of its blogs that Service Pack 1 of Windows 7 will be available for the general user as of February 22. In addition to all the updates already published, the main innovation of Service Pack 1 comes in the arrival of the new AVX instruction set. This was introduced by Intel for its Sandy Bridge CPUs and it is also soon to be found in AMD’s Bulldozer architecture. SP1 of Windows Server 2008 R2 will be available at the same time and will bring several improvements in terms of virtualisation (dynamic memory and accelerated 3D graphics driver for VMs).