Two big hardware announcements took place this morning. First up, is Creative Labs, who announced two boards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 256 chipset, the 3D Blaster Annihilator and Annihilator Pro (press release at 3DGPU). The Annihilator Pro is the same as the standard board, only with 32MB of double data rate RAM on board. Also announced this morning is Diamond's new MX400 sound card, which suprisingly enough is not powered by an Aureal chip like its predecessors, but instead the ESS Technology Canyon3D chip. A press release is up on GA-Source, and a full preview of the hardware is up on Thresh's Firing Squad.