News Archive
Monday, April 30th 2007
Review
CPU Coolers
Ever hear of "the point of diminishing returns", where something gets to the point where you can't improve on what you have unless you come up with a completely new idea? With air coolers, manufacturers are hitting that wall, but recently some companies have devised a new means of heat sink technology. Direct touching heat pipes - Today we take a look at Xigamtek's new cooler using this design.
Inno3D has introduced today new members to its i-Chill series of video cards. The
Inno3D i-Chill series is built with top-notch quality, which includes faster core speeds; a gold plated DVI & TV out connector that allows better signal quality; top quality OS-CON capacitors; aluminum ramsinks to stabilize memory; a full game bundle and 3 years warranty. Four new models will be available from today: GF 8600GTS DDR3 (710/2100MHz), GF 8600GT DDR3 (620/1800MHz), GF 8500GT DDR3 (650/1600MHz) and GF 8500GT DDR2 (600/1000MHz). Each card will be assembled with the Xstriker3 active cooling, which is specially designed for the i-Chill extreme gaming series. The Xstricker3 features copper base, two high efficiency heatpipes and single low noise cooling fan. For more information please click
here.
The third tier version of Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console went on sale in North American stores yesterday. The updated version of the original Xbox 360 comes in black, along with a new 120GB hard drive and a high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) output. The Xbox 360 Elite console is currently available with an estimated price of $479, which is $80 more than the 20GB version. Unlike the launch of the PS3 and Wii, the Xbox 360 Elite should not be too difficult to find stocked on store shelves in the days following its debut. The new detachable 120GB hard drive will also be available separately for an estimated retail price of $179.99.
NDAs about the GeForce 8800 Ultra will expire on the 2nd of May. The final speeds of the card will end up at 612 MHz for the core and 2160 MHz for the memory. The original plan was to have the chip running at 650 MHz, but it looks like NVIDIA didn't push the limits as far as expected.
The shaders of this card will run at 1.5 GHz, which will make them faster than the R600 shader units. The card should end up with a $900 price tag.
Intel is rolling out a pair of ultra-low power chips for compact notebooks and small PCs.
The two new Core 2 Duo chips only consume a maximum of 10 watts of power when running full speed, which makes them ideal for ultraportable notebooks or other devices where size or battery life is at a premium. As a comparison, Intel's Core 2 Duo processors for regular notebooks consume about 34 watts of power at maximum performance.
Intel will offer the chips in two speeds, the U7600 runs at 1.2GHz and the U7500 runs at 1.06GHz.
Chip maker AMD is struggling financially at present, largely due to the $5.4 billion acquisition of ATI last year. The company had already reported a net loss of
$611 million for the quarter ending March 31st, but it has now been forced to raise finance by offering Convertible Senior Notes to investors. These differ from stocks because AMD will have to pay back the money it has raised once its stocks hit a price of $42.12 (the current price is at $14) which is essentially plunging the firm further into debt. Analysts are now worried that AMD could run out of cash by the forth quarter of this year if it doesn't borrow more money, with an estimated figure of just $1.1 billion in the bank. Meanwhile, AMD's closest rival Intel is in it's
strongest market position since 2005, with profits of
$1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2007. AMD will be banking on the new
Barcelona core and the R600 series of graphics cards to help it back onto its feet.
Samsung Electronics, announced today that it has become the first to begin mass producing 16 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash, the highest capacity memory chip now available. The company said it will fabricate the devices in 51 nanometers (nm), the finest process technology to be used in memory mass production to date.
The success of Nintendo's two newest consoles, the Wii and the Nintendo DS, has led to Nintendo reporting record profits for the year ending 31st March. The Japanese based company managed revenue of 966.6 billion Yen (about $8 billion US) and operating profits of 266 billion Yen (about $1.9 billion). These figures show a 90% rise in revenue and 150% rise in profits compared to the same period a year ago. Nintendo sold 23 million Nintendo DS units with 123 million DS games during the year (that makes 40 million units since they started selling the handheld), whilst the Wii managed to sell 5.84 million consoles and 29 million games in the five months after its launch. Read on for Nintendo's press release.
Sunday, April 29th 2007
IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene/L has been used to run a 'cortical simulator' as complex as half of a mouse brain. The researchers say that their work has shown characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains, and are now working on improving the simulation to allow it to run faster in order to make it more neurobiologically faithful. Blue Gene/L is one of four Blue Gene projects in development and is the fastest computer in the world with a theoretical peak of 360 TFLOPS. Using 4,096 processors, each with 256MB of memory, the team managed to create a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons with up to 6,300 synapses each. Real mouse brains will have about 16,000 neurons which can have up to 8,000 synapses (connections with other nerve fibres) each.
AMD will be launching ten DirectX 10 capable
products towards the end of May 2007. They will be "covering the entire stack" - affordable to high-end - with their series. AMD's Chief Sales and Marketing Officer also commented that "we do not do soft launches," so there will be no waiting for retail stores to have the video cards in stock.
AMD's main competitor regarding video cards, NVIDIA, already has had a series of discrete DirectX 10 cards available to consumers. Although NVIDIA's line does span from entry-level to high-end, they do not have
ten DirectX 10
products.
According to
DailyTech: there will four entry-level/home-theater and three affordable mid-range cards. Which leaves three possible products, out of the ten, for the high-end niche.
Source: AMD Earnings Transcript via X-bit labs
I think many readers will agree that The Inquirer sums up this story quite nicely with the title
'Sony finally goes mad'. At the God of War II launch showcase, Sony has managed to pile yet more controversy onto itself by inviting members of the press to reach inside a warm goat's carcass to eat offal (internal organs) from its stomach (although the offal itself was prepared beforehand). Not only did Sony arrange this grotesque 'sacrifice' for the event, but it then went on to publish it in the Official PlayStation Magazine. Guests were encouraged to compete to see who could eat the most offal, whilst other activities such as topless girls dipping grapes into guests' mouths, throwing knives at targets and pulling live snakes from pits were all on the agenda.
A spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare said "We are always opposed to any senseless killing of an animal and this sounds like a gruesome death. We condemn Sony's actions. It is stupid and completely unjustified." The event was held last month in Athens, and Sony has now commented "It has come to our attention that at the God of War II launch showcase, an element of the event was of an unsuitable nature. We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again." The magazine has now been recalled and will not hit UK shelves, but anyone who is subscribed to it will already have been sent a copy. If you wish to see the picture,
here is a link to the censored version (the original apparently had the goat's head hanging by a thread of tissue with blood dripping out) - it's still a bit gory so isn't suitable for the main page.
Intel Q6600, Xeon X3220 and X3210 to Receive New Stepping
Intel has informed its customers that the Core 2 Quad Q6600 desktop quad-core processor as well as the Xeon X3220 and X3210 server quad-core CPUs have been transitioned to a new stepping. According to a product change notification released on Friday, the three processors were transitioned from the B-3 to the G-0 processor stepping. All new stepping CPUs have 10W lower TDP - 95W instead of the original 105W. The new CPUs, which can be identified by the CPUID "06FB" (B-3 processors were labeled "06F7"), also increase the Tcase, a value that describes the maximum temperature a CPU can sustain, by 11 degrees Celsius. All three G-0 CPUs require BIOS updates. Samples of the processors are expected to be available on May 11. General availability of the units is scheduled for July 16.
Saturday, April 28th 2007
Today's Reviews
The sequel to the very popular racing game Forza was up and running at a local cart tournament. The current build runs on a debug XBox 360, which means the game itself runs from the hard drive instead of a DVD. The game needs to be started by hand every time the console is turned on. Below you will find a few images of the launcher and of the game itself. Please remember, the product is not yet finished by a long shot. The current build has reproducable freezes when choosing certain cars and the graphics are not finished yet.
Gigabyte, a company well known for manufacturing computer components such as motherboards, has lost $5 million due to an internal scandal. A factory manager at Ningbo Gigabyte Technology in China, named Chang Chaosong, listed the company as a guarantor for a bank loan of $5 million towards a third party, meaning that Gigabyte would be held responsible for repaying the loan if the third party did not. As things happened, the third party company (which is not named) did not repay the money, leaving Gigabyte out of pocket. The deal had been carried out by Chaosong without the company's permission, leading to him being fired whilst Gigabyte investigates deeper into the matter. Gigabyte commented that this loss greatly damaged its shareholders' rights and interests and that the company now intends to strengthen its management of human resources to prevent such incidents in future.
The trailer for
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has been released - you can download the 720p version via
FilePlanet. It looks quite impressive and is definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of the series. The download is a 35.3MB Quick Time Movie, with FilePlanet requiring free registration before you can download it (there may be queues). Apparently the footage is taken straight from the single player campaign so shows what gamers will actually be able to play - the game is also rumored to be PC only.
Creative Technology Ltd., today introduced the
Creative Live! Cam Optia AF webcam, the world's first webcam to offer auto focus technology and a true 2.0 megapixel CMOS sensor. Finished in glossy black, with a new multi-element Precision Lens, Creative Live! Cam Optia AF raises the bar and sets a new industry benchmark for webcam video quality.
Anyone who's bought the version of the Xbox360 with the 20GB hard drive knows the underwhelming collection of free stuff pre-loaded on the hard drive. The Xbox 360 Elite will have much more free content pre-loaded on it. For the extra money it would cost to get an Xbox360 Elite, you get three game demos, free episodes of popular television shows, and some movie previews. The three game demos are Burnout Revenge, Kameo, and Tomb Raider: Legend. There will be eight videos on the Xbox 360, including one full length episode of Justice League. All this free content sums up to one thing: Microsoft is trying to show off how their machine is more than just a gaming platform.
Some of you may have heard about Wal-Mart's
plans to buy 2 million HD DVD players. Wal-Mart has recently stepped up to the plate and denied all rumors. The manufacturing company had posted what looked like an order for $300 million worth of HD DVD players, but in reality, that form is nothing more than a price-check, a figure to see how much it would cost to get that many HD DVD players. So, in short, Wal-Mart is considering getting a gazillion HD DVD players, just not from the supplier that posted an "order".
Students have recently been busted for a brand new form of cheating: loading test answers on their iPod's and MP3 players. This new form of cheating extends all the way from simply putting information in a lyric file to "podcasts" of test answers. Two students have already been caught red handed, and so a school in Meridian, Idaho has banned MP3 players of any form being on a student during a test. These incidents have even triggered talk of a national ban. This is vastly in contrast to the move
Duke University made in 2004 when they bought 1,650 iPod's so that their students could keep up with studies.
If you've bought a MacBook between February 2006 and April 2007, you may have noticed a small problem with the battery indicator. Some common problems include the battery not charging when plugged in, a lack of battery recognition, low charge/run capacity, or visibly deformation of the battery. Apple has released a software patch for these flaws (aside from the deformation problem), which you can grab
here. If you still experience those problems, especially the deformation issue, please contact Apple for a free replacement.
What is the difference between a normal hardware enthusiast and a true one? A real one is known to break world records with the help of liquid nitrogen, has a ton of spare cash to blow, and now, has enough spare time to thoroughly review 105 individual power supplies. Stephane Charpentier is the man who is responsible for that little 105 power supply review. And by little, I mean 140 pages. His work
should seriously be published like a very nerdy version of Kelly Blue Book breaks records for being the longest hardware round-up ever. If you're bored out of your mind, need a new power supply, or want to appreciate Mr.Charpentier's effort, please read his
140 page review.
The article is in French, so you might want to run the individual pages through Google translator.
Friday, April 27th 2007
Today's Reviews
A lot of people seem to think that Pokemon was just a fad, as was Brittney Spear's music. However, judging by the sales figures of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, it is obvious that Pokemon is far from dead. One million copies of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl have been sold in little less than five days. This is apparently a "faster rate than any previous Pokemon games since the franchise's U.S. introduction". These sales are partially in thanks to the gigantic sales of the Nintendo DS.
What do Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Dickens, and now Lara Croft have in common? They all have commemorative plaques at their figurative I-did-something-important-here place in the UK. The former site of Core Design, located in Ashbourne Road, Derby, is going to be commemorated with a blue plaque to signify that Lara Croft from the PS1 smash hit Tomb Raider was "born" there. Of course, people are currently building flats in that region, so the plaque will be officially put in once the buildings are complete.
Thanks to several factors, including a lower value of the dollar, Microsoft throwing in their $3-per-copy operating system, and production delays, the $100 OLPC project will now cost nearly double that figure per laptop. The asking price is now $175 per laptop. We are seeing production delays because the OLPC project needs $3 million USD to begin production of their laptop. While they have offered their laptop to several countries, few have actually followed through with the project. The founder of the OLPC project hopes that orders from Peru and Russia will allow them to start production by October 2007.
If you bought a Listan/Be Quiet! power supply that was made in December 2006 or later, you are supposedly eligible for a free upgrade to PCI Express 2. This means that before the ATI Radeon HD 2900 series is released, you can get the proper power connector. The new connectors will be compatible with the older 6-pin PCI Express power interface, thanks to a simple mechanism to remove the extra pins.
In short, look at the pretty picture, and expect a form to get one of these if you own a Listan/Be Quiet! power supply made on or after December 2006.
A very curious ArsTechnica member (Nivenhbro/jjwalker), as far as I can tell, got very bored one day and decided to start project Float32. The end result of all this concentrated boredom and effort is an extremely well done S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod. Of course, as we all know, third party add-ons may easily be broken by the makers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with patches.
The modification boasts better bump mapping, adds real time calculated specular effects, improves full reflection vector calculations, and boosts soft shadow quality. At the same time of offering all these improvements and more, the mod improves efficiency of the game, increasing frame-rate by no less than 20%, which is no small feat. Using next generation (and NDA) hardware, The Inquirer claims that they see a 20-25% improvement in frame-rate.
If you want to try this modification for yourself, save a copy of your original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. files, and head over to
NGOHQ.
After year s of pouring money into Windows Vista and Office 2007, the work has finally paid off with Microsoft reporting record profits for the quarter ending 31st March 2007. Microsoft's closest rival, Apple Inc, yesterday
reported that it managed a turnover of $5.26 billion and profits of $770 million from software and hardware sales, but Microsoft has maintained its dominance with revenue of $14.40 billion and a net income of $6.59 billion. Much of this has been thanks to strong sales of the company's newly released OS, with Kevin Turner (Microsoft's chief operating officer) commenting "This quarter marked the consumer launches of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and we are delighted with the positive customer response these products have received. We continue to deliver on our compelling product cycle and build upon strong field sales and marketing execution in order to drive revenue and profit growth for the company." Read on for the full press release.
NVIDIA has released new WHQL certified 8 Series ForceWare driver version 158.18 that adds support for GeForce 8600 GTS, GeForce 8600 GT, GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8400 GS, and GeForce 8300 GS GPUs. This version offers increased performance in 3D applications. Please read the
release notes for more information.
Windows Vista 32-bit (30.4 MB)
Windows Vista 64-bit (43MB)
OCZ Technology Group, today announced two new additions to the Reaper HPC family, reflecting OCZ's dedication to evolving their memory lineup for enthusiasts of all walks of life. The two new kits will be available in two classifications depending on the platform at hand and desired performance levels. While both feature DDR2-800 speeds, the PC2-6400 Reaper Enhanced Bandwidth Edition is designed for optimal performance on NVIDIA nForce 680i chipsets.
It seems that everything is shaping up nicely with the OLED based keyboard. The company blog mentiones a planned November 30th release date. The price also get pinned down at US$ 1564. That is a tad bit more than we were told at CeBIT (US$ 1490). If you want that Optimus Maximus, you better keep your eyes peeled on their website. Only 200 pieces will be constructed monthly, with a ramp to 400 units in January. A countdown to preorder will be placed on the Art. Lebedev website today or tomorrow.
Thursday, April 26th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Mouse Pads
The Ideazon Fragmat rounds up the company's offerings with a unique mouse pad, which features a hard plastic surface with a thin but soft underlining. It is also available in multiple themes and is big enough for high and mid sensitivity gamers. We give the pad a test run and let you know if it is something for the crowd of all-round gamers.
Review
Graphics Cards
Zotac is a new player in the NVIDIA video card business and one of their first new cards is the GeForce 8500 GT which is based on NVIDIA's brand-new G86 graphics processor. Unlike the reference design Zotac's card is factory overclocked to a GPU clock of 700 MHz which gives the card a healthy performance boost for a price increase of about $10.
The Dell Plant a Tree for Me fund has just gotten a large benefactor: AMD. AMD is donating $1 for every employee they have, which just so happens to be 16,000 people. This means that Dell will have $16,000 worth of trees to plant. The Plant a Tree for Me fund is a fund-raiser that tries to negate the environmental impact of their computers. By donating two to six dollars with your desktop or laptop purchase, Dell will plant a tree that will properly negate the environmental impact of your new computer.
At this point, it seems like the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray high-definition media war looks a lot like a game of chess. And right now, that game of chess is locked in a stalemate. In an effort to break the stalemate in favor of HD DVD, Wal-Mart has made a cunning move. They are attempting to make HD DVD the first affordable HD medium. They have placed an order for 2 million $299 USD HD DVD players. While a noble effort on Wal-Mart's part, we won't be seeing any of these players until at least late 2008. By then, Blu-ray may have come down in price enough to win the HD media war.
In a figurative triple play, the Delaware Multimedia Patent Trust (MPT) is suing three technology giants for large sums of money. They are claiming that they own patents to Lucent technologies, and the right to sue for past infringements. The MPT is suing over patents regarding an "adaptive non-linear quantizer", "optimized scanning of transform coefficients in video coding", and "video coding with optimized low complexity variable length codes". The MPT wants a lot of money to cover damages, costs, and expenses.
Infinity Ward, the driving force behind the development of the Call of Duty series (with Activision), did not do any work on the third Call of Duty installment. This is because they were too busy working on the fourth installment. Anyone who wants to see an in-depth look at Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had better be watching ESPN 10 A.M. PDT / 1 P.M. EDT on Saturday, the 28th.
People getting tired of seeing "No Wii" signs in front of their favorite video game store while waiting for the Nintendo Wii might be seeing some relief soon. Nintendo has been somehow managing to make 1 million Wii's a month, which simply isn't enough to meet all of the demand. Nintendo hopes that adding a new plant or two into the production team will let Nintendo make 14 million units within this fiscal year.
Sony Computer Entertainment today officially revealed the next-generation
PlayStation Eye USB 2.0 PS3 camera scheduled for a summer release. The PlayStation Eye is an accessory for voice, video chat and online gaming on the PlayStation Network. Key features of the PlayStation Eye include a new camera capable of a frame rate of 120 frames per second at 320x240, or 60 frames per second at 640x480, even in low-light conditions. The PlayStation Eye features all-new four microphone array, incorporating multidirectional voice location tracking, enhanced echo cancelling and background noise suppression. Bundled with each PlayStation Eye will be the EyeCreate editing software, which allows users to save photos, video and audio clips to the PS3 hard disk drive.
Newlaunches.com has managed to obtain a list of the most commonly used passwords from the upcoming May 8th issue of PC Magazine.
The passwords are below:
1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10. (your first name)
If you are using any of these passwords, it is strongly advised that you change them ASAP.
StarCraft was by far the most popular game in Korea and the korean website thisisgame.com has some juicy information about the sequel. Apparently Blizzard will be announcing StarCraft 2 at the Blizzards World Wide Invitational which is held from May 19th to May 25th in Seoul. There will be developers of the game at the event and pictures of the 3D sequel will be shown. A new race has been added to the mix and the original units have gotten new upgrades. Teamliquid.net has a translation of the korean text
here If you are able to read the language, follow the source link below for the original.
So we all know that there are signs of a GeForce 8800 Ultra everywhere and PCINLIFE now has a picture of it. The picture you see below has appeared at
PCGH with no direct link to the source. The card is much longer than a GeForce 8800GTX and features a massive heatsink.
A membership at PCINLIFE is required to view the picture in their forums.
Apple Inc has seen its profits surge an impressive 88% for the second quarter of the fiscal year compared to earnings this time last year. In the second quarter of last year (the second quarter of the fiscal year ends on 31st March) Apple managed a turnover of $4.36 billion giving it a profit of $410 million. However, this year it managed a revenue of $5.26 billion and profits of $770 million, which equates to $0.87 per diluted share. During the quarter Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macs and 10,549,000 iPods - a growth of 36% and 24% respectively compared to a year ago. Read on for Apple's press release.
After
impressive benchmark results for the Radeon HD 2900 XT, the Radeon HD X2900 XTX (AMD's flagship DirectX 10 card) has failed to impress in the same way. When compared to NVIDIA's 8800 GTX, the 2900 XTX is lagging behind in frames per second when it comes to games such as
Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Half Life 2: Episode 1 and
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You can see the results for yourself (as well as pictures of the card) by clicking the images below - all tests were run on an ASUS P5N32-E SLI motherboard with a Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor and 800MHz Corsair XMS2 RAM. The HD 2900 XTX is based on the same GPU as the HD 2900 XT, but uses GDDR4 memory running at 1010MHz instead of GDDR3 memory running at 800MHz. There aren't any comparisons between the cards when they are overclocked, nor is there any data on DirectX 10 performance, but at present it looks like NVIDIA could be a step ahead of AMD. The card used by DailyTech was a sample released to board members in the second week of April, and the benchmarks were made with the drivers AMD plans to provide when the new cards hit retail.
Microsoft released its next-generation Windows Server "Longhorn" software for public testing on Wednesday and said the product is on track for a debut in the second half of 2007. The company said it expects hundreds of thousands of information technology workers to download the Beta 3 version of the next server operating system code-named Longhorn. Longhorn, which will replace the current Windows Server 2003, is the server operating system equivalent of Microsoft's new Windows Vista PC operating system with an emphasis on many of the same features such as better security. The download is available at
www.microsoft.com/getbeta3.
NVIDIA Corporation, today announced a new version of the NVIDIA Quadro Plex visual computing system (VCS), which incorporates the unified architecture and GPU computing capability of NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 GPUs. This new Quadro Plex VCS pushes visual computing to new extremes, boosting workstation and cluster performance for a wide range of high-performance, graphics-intensive styling and design, oil and gas, and scientific applications.
In respond to AMD's Quad FX, Intel announced in January at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, new platform dubbed "V8". The guys at
HotHardware.com have managed to take a good look at it and run some benchmarks. The "V8" consists of Intel workstation-class S5000XVN dual-socket motherboard, coupled to a pair of Xeon X5365 processors, 4GB of Samsung DDR2-667 FBDIMMs, and a GeForce 8800 GTX. The motherboard is based on Intel's 5000X chipset and the processors are clocked at 3.0GHz a piece(1333MHz FSB). Click
here, to see some preliminary testing on this rig.
DFI, the most enthusiast-oriented motherboard designer announced today the self-designed and manufactured
LANParty UT NF680I LT SLI-T2R and has launched it into the market with a brand new package design. This motherboard adopts NVIDIA's NF680I LT SLI northbridge and MCP55P southbridge chipsets and furnishes both SLI and Physics rendering solutions. Moreover, it offers the highest-end 6 phase digital PWM technology. The UT NF680I LT motherboard features unique heat pipe cooling solution for the North Bridge. DFI also offers a particular copper-sink for the South Bridge. The DFI LP UT NF680i LT SLI motherboard includes all the features that gamers and enthusiast would ever need: EZ On/Off and EZ reset, that allows you to OC without a chassis. Further, the EZ Clear is the easiest way to clear the CMOS without opening the chassis. Additionally all DFI LAN Party UT NF680I LT SLI-T2R motherboards will come with customized and tweaked BIOS, which will give full control and overclocking potential of your system. It is certain that this model offers many new elements to satisfiy all high-end users.
Wednesday, April 25th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Mouse Pads
The XTracPads Zoom is incredibly thin and lightweight. In fact it is thinner than the pad's own packaging. The Zoom is meant for speed and the low height should make it quite comfortable. We take a few mice for a spin and let you know if the hard surface stays in place and does the job.
Review
Cases
The Moneual LAB MonCaso 932 series carries a price tag of just under $900, but features all the specifications to justify it. A 7" touchscreen LCD placed inside an incredibly solid all aluminum case, a great software and easy installation as well as the included keyboards are what you get for your money. We take a real close look at the case which costs more than most complete systems and let you know if it is worth it.
Today Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game publishers, announced that it is creating Tom Clancy's EndWar, a new brand in the Tom Clancy series of video games. Led by strategy veteran and Ubisoft creative director Michael de Plater, Tom Clancy's EndWar is being developed by a world-class team at Ubisoft's Shanghai studio whose members have experience developing Ubisoft's hit franchises including Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. Tom Clancy's EndWar is scheduled for release on next-generation consoles in fiscal year 2007/2008.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) today announced that it has met its commitment to begin shipping the world's first one-terabyte hard drive (HDD) to retail customers within the first quarter of 2007. The Deskstar 7K1000 began shipping to retailers and e-tailers in March 2007 with inventories reaching critical mass in April 2007. Announced at CES 2007, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive is built using a 5-platter design to deliver 1TB of storage capacity. The drive is available with Serial-ATA 3.0Gb/s interface and 32MB of data buffer. At a suggested retail price of $399 (USD), the Deskstar 7K1000 is now ready to meet the needs of high-performance, gaming and media center PCs as well as external storage devices.
Japanese Buffalo Ltd. anounced that it will ship its first DDR3 memory modules in Japan by the end of the month. The company will offer a kit of 512MB memory modules (2x 512MB), a single 1GB module as well as a 2GB set (2x1GB). The DDR3 memory standard is considered as the successor of the DDR2 SDRAM. It promises power consumption reduction of 40% compared to current DDR2 modules, allowing lower operating voltages (1.5V, compared to 1.8V in DDR2 modules). Buffalo's new modules run at 1,066MHz((PC3-8500) and maintain the 240-pin DIMM interface of DDR2. Intel has preliminarily announced that they expect to be able to offer support for DDR3 in mid 2007 with a version of their upcoming P35 Bearlake chipset. AMD's roadmap indicates their own adoption of DDR3 to come in 2008.
Another laptop battery recall has begun from today, when Acer Inc. announced that about 27,000 laptop batteries are defective. Again we are talking about Sony-made lithium-ion batteries that could overheat and cause a fire. The affected Acer models were sold in the U.S. and Canada from May 2004 through November 2006 for between $500 and $1,500. The laptops possibly containing the recalled batteries were the TravelMate series with 4-digit model numbers beginning with 242, 320, 321, 330, 422, 467, 561, C20, and the Aspire series beginning with model numbers 556, 560, 567, 930, 941, 980. Acer, whose U.S. division is based in San Jose, says consumers should immediately stop using the recalled batteries and contact the company for a free battery replacement. The laptops could still be safely used if powered by the AC adapter, the company said. Please click
here, if you want to find out how you can replace your defective laptop battery.
Samsung has launched the latest addition to its wide range of hard drives with the new SpinPoint N2 Series of 1.8" drives, ranging from 30GB to 120GB. Spinning at a rate of 4,200 RPM with 2-8MB caches, these drives are aimed mostly at ultra-portable laptops, ultra-mobile PCs and portable media players where a compact size is more important than overall performance. This means they could soon be finding their way into 120GB iPods and Zunes, a nice boost for hardcore music fans with enormous collections of songs. Samsung also commented on the pricing of Solid State Drives (SSDs) which are being viewed as the replacement for spinning hard drives within the next few years, particularly portable computers. Samsung's market research has suggested that by 2010 1.8" SSD drives could have come down in price to costing
just 3x more per gigabyte than their spinning equivalents - still quite a considerable gap, but an improvement nonetheless.
Free online encyclopaedia
Wikipedia could soon be available on a CD as volunteers work on an offline version of the website. A preliminary version of the CD has already been released earlier this month, with Wikipedia hoping to become available to those without access to the internet - although this obviously destroys Wikipedia's aim of allowing users to contribute to the encyclopaedia themselves. The CD, which can be
purchased for $13.99 plus postage, is intended to be of a higher quality than the online version with all bad language and vandalism is being removed. Although the current version only features 2,000 articles, it likely to slowly expand to become a comprehensive offline encyclopaedia to compete with the likes of
Britannica and
Encarta.
Online retailer Amazon.com could be about to launch a DRM free music store next month providing that it can reach an agreement with the music industry. According to The Times, Amazon has been approaching major music companies in the last fortnight with ambitions to provide unprotected music downloads in order to compete with Apple's iTunes store. Although Amazon has previously been unsuccessful in such requests for the last 18 months, Apple's recent deal with EMI to provide music without any digital rights management protection has reignited Amazon's hopes. EMI and the smaller independent labels are expected to be the first to allow Amazon to sell their music (if they are successful), whilst record labels such as Sony BMG, Universal and Warner generally seem reluctant to allow their music to be distributed online without DRM.
Laptops based on Intel's new Centrino platform Santa Rosa are starting to leak out, this time they're from Lenovo (a few Fujitsu models got out last week). The new ThinkPads T61 and R61 are both based on Intel's Core 2 Duo processors and use Intel's Gm/PM965 chipset. Other specs include both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows XP Pro, Intel's new Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 IGP (for systems using integrated graphics), NVIDIA graphics (for other systems), 14.1" screens, Intel Turbo Card, smartcard support and full hard disk encryption. These laptops should be available from May this year, with a Blu-Ray version coming in July. Lenovo will also finally be removing the IBM branding from palm rests after acquiring Big Blue's laptop division in 2005.
The introduction of the PS3 as a
Folding@Home client has now helped the project to reach an impressive 693 teraflops of processing power, with 390 coming from PS3 consoles alone (despite only accounting for 11.4% of active processors). This figure is a significant improvement on the
367 TFLOPS being contributed by Sony's new console last month - the continued support from everyone who participates in the project helps Stanford University research cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, along with many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Anyone wishing to become involved in the project should take a look at techPowerUp!'s own
F@H team which currently stands in
741st place out of 62360 teams contributing. It is completely free (other than electricity and internet costs) and will put your idle processing power to good use.
Corsair has just launched a new series of ultra-durable USB flash drives, nicknamed Survivor. Building on the massive success of the Flash Voyager line-up, the new (limited availability) Flash Survivor is an extremely durable, water resistant, drop-tested flash USB memory drive. The Corsair Flash Survivor USB drives are available in 4GB and 8GB capacities. The Survivor drives are made of extremely strong CNC-milled, 6061 Type 2 Aluminum, the same used in aircraft parts manufacturing. They are water resistant to 200m, protected from vibration or impact damage and work flawlessly with any USB 2.0 certified peripheral computer port (backward compatible with USB1.1). All Corsair Suvivor drives are also protected by a 10 year limited warranty.
Dell is the next big manufacturer to enter the solid-state disk arena today by offering 1.8" SanDisk UATA 5000 drives on its Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and Latitude D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks. SanDisk's 1.8" SSD drive was first announced in
early January and features patented TrueFFS flash management technology. Also of importance is the drive's MTBF of 2 million hours. The drive offers sustained read speeds of 62MB/sec and had an average access speed of 0.12 milliseconds. The drive also boosts overall system performance by 23 percent and reduced boot times by 34 percent on the D420 and D620. The SanDisk UATA 5000 is currently available as a $450 option on the D420 and a $300 option on the D620 ATG. The drive is also available direct from Dell at a price of $549.
Tuesday, April 24th 2007
Anyone who thought that the new Windows Vista search features were based off of Mac Spotlight will be interested to hear that someone is suing Apple for ripping off their technology. That someone is a small-town company called IP Innovation. IP Innovation, the plaintiff, is alleging that the widespread use of tabs in OS X Tiger is infringing on a patent they've had since
1987. If the lawsuit somehow succeeds, Apple will have to throw $20 million USD at IP Innovation, and then take Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off the shelves. Apple has no comment on the situation at this time.
You'd think that after America and Europe get a price cut for the Sony PlayStation Portable, the rest of the world would be entitled to the same treatment. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Sony market in Australia has no imminent plans of changing the PSP price. Sony claims that they are not changing the price now because they are currently investigating the Australian markets, to figure out exactly what the new price should be set to. Time will tell what's actually going to happen with Sony in Australia.
Those of you who have waited for a video game to come out know how awesome a beta is. Unfortunately for Halo fans everywhere, the Halo 3 beta is only going to last three weeks. Obviously, most people with invites are wondering why it's going to be so short, especially after putting so much effort into getting a Beta invite. Bungie has this official answer to that question.
...obviously the number one reason is that the longer we're spending resources taking care of the Beta, the less time we're applying what we've learned from it to the final game. And statistically, three weeks is going to seem like a pretty long time when you look at the hours you log on the game.
In short? Enjoy it while it lasts.
Fans of the Fallout series, which was recently
purchased by Bethesda, will be pleased to know that Fallout 3 development has been coming along quite nicely. There is now an official Fallout 3
'teaser website', as well as official Fallout 3
forums. While things haven't really taken off with this site or the forums just yet, with Bethesda working hard on making Fallout 3 amazing, we can be sure that the final product will be well worth the wait.
It's been eleven years since the original Tomb Raider was released. And so, the original makes of Tomb Raider have felt it necessary to make an anniversary edition. Of course, the actual production wasn't done by the original producers. A lot of franchise ownership transfer has been going on, and now Eidos Interactive is responsible for Tomb Raider: Anniversary. On June 5th, you will be able to get this game for the PS2, PC, and "shortly thereafter", the PSP.
The latest instalment in EA's highly successful World War 2 shooter - Medal of Honor: Airborne will be available on August 28, 2007. Developed by EA Los Angeles the game will feature the major allied airborne operations of the war, including Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943; Operation Avalanche, the invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943; Operation Neptune, the airborne element of Operation Overlord in June 1944; Operation Market Garden, the famously ill-fated attempt to cross the Rhine into Germany through Holland in September 1944; and Operation Varsity, the largest airborne operation ever undertaken, to cross the Rhine in March 1945. The game will be released on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The title speaks for itself.
DailyTech has managed to run through some benchmarks with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB graphics card. The tests were conducted on an Intel D975XBX2 BadAxe2, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and 2x1GB DDR2-800 MHz. The operating system on the test system was Windows XP, with a fresh install before benchmarking each card. Testing of the AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was performed using the 8.361 Catalyst RC4 drivers, while the GeForce 8800 GTS used ForceWare 158.19 drivers. All game tests were run with the maximum detail settings at resolutions of 1280x1024.
The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is expected to be widely available in mid-May, with a suggested retail price of $499.
The Swiss cooling solution provider - Arctic Cooling brings a radically new noise free
Accelero S1 cooling solution for high performance graphics cards. The Accelero S1 is a high performance passive cooler featuring 4 thick copper heatpipes connected with extra large surface area of 32 fins that extend beyond the height of the graphic card. Together with the bundled RAM heat sinks and voltage regulator heat spreader, Accelero S1 provides an all-round zero noise passive solution that achieves the best cooling performance. Accelero S1 is compatible with ATI (Radeon X1950, X1900, X1800) and NVIDIA (GeForce 7950, 7900, 7800, 6800) graphic cards. Accelero S1 will be available by end of May 2007. The MSRP is $29 or €24 (excl VAT).
While E3 2006 was a blow out for the show, with 400 companies exhibiting and over 60,000 people turning up to get their first play on the PS3 and the Wii, this year, there will be just 32 exhibitors and around 3,000 attendees, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
The focus of the event is on small-scale business meetings rather than on big public demonstrations. Whilst E3 was always supposed to be a trade-only event, it turned out that anybody savvy enough to register a blog could get a press pass, which rather defeated the purpose of the whole thing.
Companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Sega, Electronic Arts, Eidos, Atari, Square Enix, Take Two, and others will be present. The event will take place in July.
Power supply specialist be quiet! is launching the new Dark Power Pro 1000W to
Computex 2007 in Taipei. This model will be designed specially for 4x4 AMD CPU architecture and for server use. The most powerful variant of the Dark Power Pro model from be quiet! will have a total of six 20A each +12V circuits. Five PCIe connectors (2x PCI-E 2.0 6+2-pin & 3x PCI-E 1.0 6-pin) will ensure the optimum power supply of tomorrow's high-end SLI or CrossFire systems. Another striking feature of the Dark Power Pro 1kW model will be its 3-minute fan follow-up control after computer shut-down. All the power supply units in the Dark Power Pro range are manufactured in accordance with ATX12V Version 2.2 and EPS12V Version 2.91 including 8-pin 12V connection specification. The Dark Power Pro 1000W will become available in June 2007 backed with 3-year warranty and free technical support.
Hitachi GST today announced three new hard drive models targeting the enterprise market, including the 15K RPM Ultrastar 15K300, 7200 RPM Ultrastar A7K1000, and the company's first small form factor (SFF) hard drive, the 10K RPM Ultrastar C10K147. The new 15K300 Ultrastar is a 3.5-inch Ultra320 SCSI 15K RPM 300GB hard drive with 16MB data buffer. The drive comes with Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) as well as Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) and is also available with 3Gb/s SAS and 4Gb/s FCAL interfaces. Optimized for the power, performance requirements of servers the Ultrastar C10K147 is a 2.5-inch 3Gb/s SAS interface 10K RPM HDD with up to 147GB capacity and 16MB data buffer. The third Ultrastar A7K1000 hard drive offers 1TB of space for lower duty cycle enterprise environments. The Ultrastar 15K300 is available now with production quantities available in the first week of May 2007. The Ultrastar C10K147 and Ultrastar A7K1000 will be delivered in the second quarter of 2007. Additionat information is available at
Hitachi GST.
OCZ Technology Group, today announced the new StealthXStream Power Supply. This new 600W PSU features a conservative look with a sleek, black case and fan. Designed for the value-minded consumer seeking simple, quiet performance, the StealthXStream includes OCZ's acclaimed reliability and feature-sets with a lower price point. Ideal for system builders and enthusiasts who prefer a low-key PSU, the StealthXStream focuses on performance, quality, and quiet operation.
Monday, April 23rd 2007
Hybrid HDDs are increasingly starting to take place as a primary hard drives in the latest notebooks. Samsung has now announced its Q30 15.4" wide notebook that will feature the MH80 hybrid hard drive (256MB flash). Samsung announced back in early March that it had begun shipping its new MH80 Series hybrid HDDs which are available in capacities of 80GB, 120GB and 160GB. These drives also come equipped with either 128MB or 256MB of onboard flash memory. Internal testing has shown that when compared to a traditional HDD, the hybrid-equipped Q30 has 26% faster writes, 71% faster reads, 30% lower boot times and a 10% increase in battery life. Besides the 80GB MH80 hybrid HDD, the Q30 also packs a 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 processor, 15.4" WXGA screen, NVIDIA GeForce 7400 mobile GPU with 256MB of RAM and a Super-multi dual-layer DVD writer.
Millward Brown, one of the leading UK-based research companies, today said that the "Google" is now the world's most valuable brand. The firm's name is now valued at about twice the amount of IBM, three times Disney or five times Yahoo. Google has risen to the top of this year's ranking, taking the number one spot with a brand value of $66,434 million. This was followed by General Electric ($61,880 million), Microsoft ($54,951 million) and Coca-Cola ($44,134 million).
Some people may consider the new 120GB Xbox 360 hard drive to be
a complete rip-off a little expensive at $179 considering that you can buy a 2.5" external drive of the same capacity for under $100. And Microsoft's justification for the price?
"I know it sounds expensive to a lot of consumers but we are comparable to those types of drives and also we have to go through a lot more testing and security," said Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg. Anyway,
Xbox-Scene has a good guide on how you can make your own working 120GB hard drive for the Xbox 360 at a much lower price.
First you will need to get hold of a Western Digital Scorpio BEVS-LAT drive (it's not too expensive and it's the
only drive that is known to work). Next you need to download Hddhacker v0.90 (built by
The Specialist) and dump your
hddss.bin firmware file from your 20GB Xbox drive onto a floppy disk by attaching the drive to a SATA controller (most modern motherboards should be fine), and then flash this file to the new 120GB drive. After this your drive should be ready to go. For full details on this procedure, read the guide on
Xbox-Scene. This is one area where the PS3 can clearly show its superiority, as users can add their own 2.5" drive without voiding the warranty. Which reminds me, the warranty on both the new drive and the Xbox will probably be useless after doing this, so keep that in mind!
Warning: Microsoft is now
blocking modded consoles from Xbox Live!, so it is recommended you
DO NOT try this mod!
Following a
$30 price cut for the PSP in the USA earlier this month, Sony has now officially reduced the price of the handheld across Europe. The price in the UK will be coming down from £149.99 to £129.99, with the rest of Europe having the price slashed from €199.99 to €169.99. This comes after months of Sony ruling out any price cuts, with the changes being effective from May 4th (a week on Friday). There have also been five new platinum titles launched for the console at £14.99 each -
Ridge Racer 2, Tekken: Dark Resurrection, Killzone: Liberation, LocoRoco, and
MotoGP. With the DS being sold for £99 in most retailers across the UK, this reduced price gap gives Sony a better chance of competing in the portable consoles' market.
AMD is claiming that its new quad-core Barcelona processors could outshine Intel's Xeon processors by as much as 50% in floating-point performance, as well as having a 20% advantage when it comes to integer performance. However, despite this claim, the actual benchmarks for the SPECcpu2006 test seem difficult to come across on AMD's website - despite AMD supposedly giving a link - so it's difficult to verify at present.
Luckily, it's much easier to find the results comparing AMD's new Opteron 2222 processor and Intel's 3.0GHz Xeon 5160. These show AMD enjoying greater performance by
as much as 15% in some SPUCcpu2006 tests, which it credits to its Direct Connect Architecture and DDR2 memory. Obviously it would be a good idea to take these results with a pinch of salt considering they come directly from AMD, but Barcelona certainly looks promising.
Read on for the complete press release.
The folks at Xbox have updated the original Xbox list of games playable on the Xbox 360 game console. This backwards compatibility update adds some rare games such as Panzer Dragoon ORTA, Jet Set Radio Future, Pandemic's Mercenaries, Unreal Championship 2 and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee. The full list of games is
here.
Note: A software emulator is required for each original Xbox game you play on your Xbox 360 console.
Samsung Electronics, has developed the first all-DRAM stacked memory package using 'through silicon via' (TSV) technology, which will soon result in memory packages that are faster, smaller and consume less power. The new wafer-level-processed stacked package (WSP) consists of four 512 megabit DDR2 DRAM chips that offer a combined 2 gigabits (Gb) of high density memory. Using the TSV-processed 2Gb DRAMs, Samsung can create a 4GB DIMM based on advanced WSP technology for the first time. Samsung's proprietary WSP technology not only reduces the overall package size, but also permits the chips to operate faster and use less power.
Sunday, April 22nd 2007
We all know that DirectX10, for many of us, means an expensive upgrade and the move to a new operating system. We also know that DirectX10 is going to be necessary to play DX10 games such as Crysis and Halo 2 for the PC. What if I told you that a project sought to change that? That you could run DirectX10-exclusive games such as Halo 2 for PC on a DirectX9 platform with Windows 2000? Thanks to the Alky Project, we may not have to spend a penny to enjoy DirectX10 goodness. A quote from their official blog (I know, it's not an official web-page, but they do link to working models) tells us exactly how we can make DirectX10 work without spending at least $270 on a DirectX10 upgrade ($170 NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT, $100 Windows Vista Home Basic).
I'm proud to release a preview of our DirectX 10 compatibility libraries. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Microsoft Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it. No longer will you have to upgrade your OS and video card(s) to play the latest games.
The preview/beta build is
here. Make sure to read the README file, as it will tell you exactly how to install the project.
NVIDIA has released new beta 100.14.03 Linux driver that adds support for the newer GeForce 8 series graphics cards. Specifically, the NVIDIA 100.14.03 display driver adds official support for the GeForce 8600GTS, 8600GT, 8500GT, 8400GS, and the 8300GS. Download the new Linux 100.14.03 driver from
here.
Saturday, April 21st 2007
Yet another cool-looking USB device: the USB poker chip. It holds 1GB of data, more than enough for most of your family pictures, the average music collection, or some critical office documents. Not only does the poker chip give you something to fiddle with in the middle of a heated poker game, it gives you a pre-loaded PC poker game for when you're lonely. There is no word as to how much this device will cost, but it should find itself in Target stores by the end of April.
Everyone is a little on-the-edge this week, for pretty blatant reasons. G4 is no exception. When a suspicious package arrived at G4 production offices, everyone was evacuated from the building. The authorities were called, and the package was inspected by a bomb squad. Thankfully, the device was not an explosive. Ironically, G4 production offices had called the bomb squad about a bomb prop that they had ordered. G4 office workers were allowed to get back to work the same day of the incident.
Ubisoft has released a bunch of downloadable content for Rainbow Six: Vegas. For 800 Xbox Live points (roughly $10 USD), you can nab yourself two new gameplay modes and five new (three new and two re-done) multiplayer maps.
The new maps are:
- Marshalling Yard
- Roof
- Doscala Restaurant
- Border Town (redone)
- Killhouse (redone)
The two new gameplay types are:
- Assassination ("One team attempts to take out the other team's VIP during an escort mission")
- Total Conquest ("King of the Multiple Hills").
We reported 8 days ago that Google is going to buy
Doubleclick for $3.1 billion USD. However, this move is causing a lot of worry. The FTC is going to investigate whether this move is really legal. The reason is quite simple: search engines are gaining too much power. And while we're not looking at anything like "Skynet" from the Terminator movies, we may be looking at Google being able to gain too much information about people, what they do, and how they spend their money and free time. Doubleclick claims that their methods of collecting information are non-invasive, and would not let Google (or themselves) be able to track down users and/or truly invade their privacy.
Are you a fan of superhero video games? If so, I've got some good news for you! The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Thor are all coming to various consoles. This is because Sega and Marvel have agreed to partner up to help milk the franchises to their limit make the best video games possible. With the comic genius of Marvel, and the programming prowess of Sega, we should see some seriously impressive games coming from Sega studios soon. Unfortunately, we're not going to see these games for a while. We're only at the "agree to hand over licenses of characters" stage. Actual programming of the games will happen over the course of the year, and we should start seeing new games by June 2008.
Despite reports of Microsoft only managing a feeble
244 sales of its new Windows Vista OS, the software giant is now denying that there is any truth in the story. "Recent speculation regarding sales data in China is inaccurate," said Microsoft. "We're pleased with the positive consumer response we've seen around the globe to the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista--and China is no exception."Although Microsoft has not given any exact figures on sales, it has said that Vista sales in China during the first month after its release were double those that XP had in its first month. Microsoft has been facing some criticism for its new OS, with a big blow coming when PC manufacturer Dell decided to
reintroduce XP.
As a Razer Copperhead user I can't tell you how happy I was when this morning brand new driver and firmware update have been released. The new Razer Copperhead driver version 6.10 is now Vista 32/64 compatible. The new firmware version 6.19 has slight profile change. Now the 1st profile is changed from 2000dpi 500Hz to 1600dpi 125Hz. Head over the
Razer Download Center and download your new driver.
Apple today released its fourth security update of the year for the Mac OS X 10.4.9 operating system, with 25 new patches making it to the front this time around. None of the patches are critical, though a few of them do fix flaws that were brought to light during the Month of Apple Bugs. The Security Update 2007-004 can be downloaded from the company's
security update page.
Friday, April 20th 2007
Today's Reviews
For a long time, Dell has enjoyed the "most pre-built PC sales" crown. Now, it seems like HP, with the right combo of advertising and good products, has called snatchies on that crown. While a lot of factors went into the specifics of this little title change, I'll shorten it. Quite simply, HP now has 19.1% of the PC market, and Dell has 15.2%. We'll see if this trend continues, or if Dell has some sort of ace-in-the-hole to combat this recent lapse in sales.
Most of you know that AMD is trying to save power and space by releasing the Micro-ITX platform. VIA has decided that they want in on this market, and so they went and made their own little thing. And when I say little, I mean little. Measuring in at barely 100mm x 72mm (full ATX is 1200mm x 960mm), VIA's new motherboard comes with onboard network, processor, graphics, and is completely fanless. Just like AMD, VIA is trying to make a platform that not only is extremely tiny, but power-efficient. Have a look.
The Dell XPS M2010 laptop is definitely not going to sound like a laptop. Sporting a rather large 500GB RAID 0 array, a 20.1" widescreen monitor, high-definition sound/video stuff, and a gazillion (very professional term for a lot) other un-announced features, the M2010 is going to be one of the most feature-laden DTR (DeskTop Replacement) laptops to ever hit the market. But now, word on the street is that the M2010 is going to have another pioneer feature: a slot-loading Blu-ray drive. This would make the M2010 the first laptop to come with a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, assuming there are no surprise releases to beat Dell to the market.
Trivia fact of the day: roughly 500 million people use computers now.
News flash: Microsoft is going to try and double that number. And to ensure that they will meet this awe-inspiring goal, Microsoft is going to try to lower the cost of their operating system, as we already
reported. This $3 USD Windows Starter Edition, along with a cheaper version of Microsoft Office, will help Microsoft reach poorer countries. Hopefully, with the help of the One Laptop Per Child project, Microsoft will meet their goal.
While we do focus on our computers a lot, most of us have something to remind us how much we love our technology while on the road: a cell phone. And this cell phone is turning into quite the issue. Driving distractions aside, cell phones do add one very negative effect to society: a huge pile of toxic waste. When people upgrade to the latest phone, they frequently throw away their old one. And these old cell phones contain such nasty chemicals as copper, nickel, antimony, and zinc. As time moves on, and phones decompose, the phone turns into a pile of toxic, hazardous mush. And when 700 million tiny piles of toxic mush make their way to the landfill, at an increasing rate of 130 million phones a year, we get several thousand pounds of toxic mush lying around in landfills everywhere. We really ought to find a better way to dispose of cell phones.
NVIDIA's latest Windows XP ForceWare release notes on page 26(now fixed), appeared to reveal yet another new video card, the GeForce 8800GS. NVIDIA responded immediately to the rumours of this 8800GS model:
The initial release notes for the NVIDIA ForceWare 158 Driver had a typo that referenced a product that does not, and will not exist. NVIDIA has no plans to release a GeForce 8800 GS. We have corrected the mistake and will be replacing the document on our website.
It's no secret that many XP users are holding off any OS upgrades until they see the improvements that Vista's first service pack will have to offer, but Intel CEO Paul Otellini has given quite a firm indication of when that should be. During an earnings conference, Otellini let the release date slip when saying "…the [Vista] deployment [in enterprises] will actually happen when the Service Pack gets released in the fourth quarter time frame, probably the October-November time frame." Microsoft still refuses to give any details itself about when we can expect to see SP1 for Vista, but assuming there are no major delays in its production, it's looking very likely we could see it before next year. As of yet, there are no concrete details about what issues the service pack will deal with, but Microsoft has already hinted that Vista's service packs won't be nearly as major as those provided for Windows XP.
Silicon giant Intel certainly has the upper hand in the current chip market, with its market share rising to over 80% for the first time since Q3 2005. Back in Q4 2006, AMD was enjoying a market share of 15.7% according to market watcher iSuppli, with Intel on 75.7%. However, the latest figures show that these statistics have now changed to 11.1% and 80.2% respectively, quite a noticeable drop for AMD. Intel has been gradually clawing back the market share it lost to AMD ever since the release of the Core 2 Duo processors, with AMD's market share peaking at 16.7% in Q3 2006. AMD will be hoping for improved sales later this year when it releases its new desktop and server CPUs.
techPowerUp! doesn't tend give much news attention to other site's reviews, other than listing them just under the date each day, but this is perhaps more interesting than most.
Legit Reviews has posted an quite thorough comparison between the
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ and the
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 when it comes to gaming - two very similarly priced processors at $184 and $185 respectively. The conclusion by the author is that when running games with AA and AF at normal resolutions, the performance difference it too hard to call, which is somewhat justified. However, when you look deeper into the benchmarks it becomes quite clear that, on two very similar systems, AMD's offering is certainly victorious in the majority of benchmarks, often by quite a noticeable margin (15+ frames per second). In fact, the Core 2 Duo only outperformed the X2 on two tests: it had 0.1 more FPS in Call of Duty 2 with 4 x AA and 16 x AF, and 1 FPS more in Quake 4. Although this test doesn't allow for overclocking potential, it would certainly suggest that AMD may still offer more bang for your buck when it comes to gaming with CPUs costing around $200 at stock speeds.
NVIDIA is working on its 45 nanometre part. This year, the company plans to migrate to 65 nanometre as much as possible, but by the end of 2008 it should have 45 nanometre parts ready.
The company first has to shrink its 65 nanometre chips to 55 nanometre as this is the optical shrink and later it will go for 45 nanometre. Intel announced it will go 45 nanometre in late Q4 07 / early Q1 2008, AMD said that for its CPUs it will be able to do it by the mid of 2008.
The good thing about 45 nanometre chips is that on 15x15 square millimetres die you can put 1,350 millions of transistors or roughly twice as much as you can do with 65 nanometre.
After that the next big step is 32 nanometre scheduled for 2010.
A few big retailers and etailers have confirmed that Intel actually can check if you overclocked your CPU. When you burn your CPU Intel asks its retailers and etailers to return the CPU back to its factory. Intel then reads data from a hidden part of the CPU, and instantly finds out if the CPU has been overclocked or overvolted.
Retailers and etailers said that they are not sure about Intel's methods of judging who gets the new CPU, but they said that Intel gets back to them if you overclocked too much, and simply refuses to RMA the part.
Mushkin, today released the HP2-6400 5-4-4 modules available in 4GB dual-channel kits and 2GB single DIMMs. Designed for high-performance and value, the HP2-6400 is specified to work at 800MHz, 5-4-4-12 latencies and 2V operating voltage. Each kit is tested beyond its rated specification to ensure the overclocking headroom and quality that Mushkin customers expect. The 4GB HP2-6400 kit will be available in limited quantities through the
Mushkin.com manufacturer-direct web store and through authorized resellers and distributors.
Nintendo once again claimed the top two spots among the best-selling new video game systems in America in March, according to independent sales data gathered by the NPD Group. Despite widespread shortages for both systems, more than half a million buyers snapped up the portable Nintendo DS, and Wii which is now once again the top-selling new home video game console. Wii remains the fastest-selling new console in more than a decade, based on NPD sell-through information over the first five months of availability.
The Chinese
PCINLIFE got hold of some pictures and information regarding AMD's mid range card HD2600XT. The pictured card is said to have 256MB of memory, a maximum power consumption of around 80W and full HD capabilities.
It seems at Sony the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. A few days ago Sony's President Ryoji Chubachi told the
Financial Times his company is re-examining the pricing and volume distribution of it's gaming console. Today however, Sony released an official statement that says the price will not be cut.
PS3 prices and shipment plans for the future should be determined by market trends and competition. Sony currently doesn't have any specific plan to cut the PlayStation 3's price.
The goal to sell 6 million PS3 consoles until the end of March wasn't reached, analysts say there were only around 4 million sold.
Kotaku still think the examination is not finished yet and they are likely to come up with a lower price in order to boost sales.
Thursday, April 19th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Mouse Pads
The XTracPads Pro is a specialty mouse pad. The smooth surface and small size coupled with a great sense of accuracy make it perfect for RPG or real time strategy gamers. We take a close look at each of these attributes and its durability to see if it is the pro choice for these type of games.
After making the switch to offering just Vista on most of its systems, computer manufacturer Dell has backtracked a little and decided to re-introduce Microsoft's 'old' OS. This move comes due after customers were asking for XP back via Dell's IdeaStorm project which asks customers to help the company come up with product ideas. "We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings," said Dell. Bringing back XP was one of the most popular requests, but it was still well below the demand for features such as Linux and OpenOffice on Dell PCs. Windows XP will be introduced to at least four Inspiron laptops and two Dimension desktops - a move which Microsoft is unlikely to support as it persuades customers towards the new Windows Vista, however Microsoft representatives were unavailable to comment.
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- April 19, 2007 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) today reported financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2007. AMD reported first quarter 2007 revenue of $1.233 billion, an operating loss of $504 million, and a net loss of $611 million, or $1.11 per share. These results include ATI acquisition-related and integration charges of $113 million, or $0.21 per share, and employee stock-based compensation expense of $28 million, or $0.05 per share. In the fourth quarter of 2006, AMD reported revenue of $1.773 billion and an operating loss of $529 million. In the first quarter of 2006, AMD reported revenue of $1.332 billion and operating income of $259 million.
Blizzard is now offering a 10-day free trial of its Burning Crusade World of Warcraft Expansion. The downloadable trial let players try out new races and all the content in the expansion world, Outland. Players can keep most of the virtual loot after the trial ends. The trial is available through Blizzard's
World of Warcraft website and players will need to have the original World of Warcraft game installed. After the free trial, players can continue playing the expansion by buying a retail box or by paying $40 online. More information on the Burning Crusade free trial is available
here.
Patriot Memory, today unveiled the latest in their Extreme Performance line of gaming modules: a PC2-9200 dual channel kit. Engineered with the gamer and overclocker in mind, the new 1150MHz modules offer a cost-effective solution and unprecedented speed, making them the perfect choice for those building their ultimate PC machine. With latency timings of 5-5-5-12 and a 2.3 voltage, the Extreme Performance PC2-9200 kits are available now in capacities of 1GB and 2GB. All Patriot Extreme Performance memory modules come with a lifetime warranty. For more information on these, please click
here.
Sony has updated the firmware for its two most recent consoles, with a few improvements for each. The PS3 firmware has been updated to version 1.70, which will enable gamers to play PS1 software purchased from the PlayStation Store (previously only playable on the PSP) and will allow the use of the vibration function of accessories when playing PlayStation and PlayStation 2 titles (not PS3 games unfortunately, but a step forwards). The PlayStation Store still lists all classic titles as being for the PSP, but this may be changed when it's updated later this week. As for the PSP, the firmware has been updated to version 3.40, with the most noticeable changes being improved support for PlayStation Network titles and a changed method for managing certificates under [Game]. Apparently with the new firmware, gamers can share save data between both consoles allowing PS1 titles to be continued on the move and at home.
Although the Xbox 360 Elite isn't officially set to launch until 29th of this month, the first console has already appeared on eBay. Assuming it's genuine, this console was purchased in California from a
Target store, and anyone wishing to bid on the item (currently standing at $800) can receive it on 24th April - if they're willing to pay the $99 delivery charge of course. So far, there are no figures on how many consoles will be available at launch, but retailers such as Circuit City have already sold out of their initial allocations, so they may prove difficult to get hold of. For anyone who's desperate to get their hands on the new version of this console can bid for it
here.
Source: DailyTech
Update: the console has now bee sold for $5,100 USFudzilla claims that the Radeon HD 2900 manages an impressive 102.4GB/s memory throughput. The card uses a 512 bit memory interface and 1600 MHz GDDR3 memory. The core was clocked at 800 MHz. For comparison, NVIDIA's G80 with its odd 384 bit memory controller scores 86.4 GB/s.
The new HD 2900 XTX with GDDR 4 memory clocked at 2200 MHz, as originally planned, can theoretically have 140.8 GB/s. Both cards have twice or close to twice more memory bandwidth from ATI's Radeon X1950XTX card. This card was limited to a now modest 64GB/s.
Editors note: The NDA on the R600 makes it impossible for anyone to release accurate benchmarks of the R600. In fact, the NDA is so strict, we'll be lucky if the leaked R600 pictures have any accuracy. The theoretical memory bandwidth was attained by simple math: 512bit * 1600MHz / 8bit = 102.4GB/s.
Microsoft today announced that it plans to expand its global reach (and presumably reduce piracy) by offing stripped down bundles of software including as Windows and Office for a mere $3 to people living in developing countries. Although in essence this is a non/low-profit project, Microsoft may be planning ahead by enabling poorer nations to grow using Windows instead of free alternatives such as Linux, a move which could expand its potential market for the future. The project, named
Microsoft Unlimited Potential, would see the $3 software package (including Windows XP Starter Edition and Office 2007) being supplied to governments who could then distribute machines costing no more than $300, with students being Microsoft's main aim. This news comes after figures show that just
244 copies of Windows Vista have been sold in China, and should, alongside the One Laptop Per Child project, help poorer countries developed improved IT infrastructures.
MaddoxX, a member of the No-Steam forums, has managed quite a feat; he has hacked into Valve's computers. He has managed to get access to Cyber Cafe data, as well as several hundreds of credit card numbers, and Valve's balance sheet.
At the moment, he is awaiting some response from Valve, which does not seem to be too concerned.
Source: DailyTech
Mozilla Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. Thunderbird 2 offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista. Download it from
here.
Imation Corp. and TDK announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement under which Imation will acquire TDK brand world wide recording media business and use of the TDK brand name for recording media products, for $300 million in a combination of Imation common stock and cash with potential for payment of up to an additional $70 million based on future financial performance of the acquired business. TDK will retain its R&D, manufacturing and OEM business. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the transaction.
In return to all end-user requests for an aftermarket MOSFET cooler, Thermalright developed a new product called
HR-09 (from High-Riser series) MOSFET cooler. The HR-09 MOSFET cooler with its patented design will cool the motherboard's MOSFET area for a stable operation not only under normal conditions but also when you increase the frequency and voltage to overclock. Now heat is no more an issue. The HR-09 comes in two distinctive designs and types (sold separately): HR-09U and HR-09S. The difference lies in positioning and orientation of the fins and heatpipe for maximum compatibility with various motherboards and CPU coolers.
Wednesday, April 18th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
CPU Coolers
It is big and it is cool - It's the iCEAGE from 3RSystem. With a 120 mm fan and new heatpipe technology that has the heatpipes as part of the contact base it sure does look promising. Today we will put the iCEAGE to the test and see if it can live up to its name. We'll take a closer look at the Direct Touch Heatpipe design, and see if it does make a difference or not.
We reported back in February that Marvel was going to help Bungie publish Halo
graphic novels. We will start seeing these novels in early July. We also got some details on what exactly will be in these novels. The novel is staged after the painful cliffhanger at the end of Halo 2. Fortunately for Halo fans, this is quite possibly a lead-in to the events of Halo 3. Unfortunately for Halo fans, the so-called "series" has been reduced to a four-part mini-series.
Each 40 page graphic novel should cost the customer a mere $3.99 USD. A $3.99 USD well spent, if you're a fan of the Halo series (like me).
Katamari is a series of games with an arcade-like goal of rolling a gigantic ball, trying to attach the most stuff to it. The game was met with so much success, that various sequels, such as Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari have been released. Namco has announced that they are developing even more sequels. 'Beautiful Katamari' will have over fifty playable characters (which have the same abilities), large-as-globe maps, and network capability (possibility of massive multiplayer Katamari battles?). Namco is 50% done creating an Xbox360 and PS3 version of this game, and we should get a Nintendo Wii and DS version sometime later. The reason for the delay of the development of this game on Nintendo consoles is the uniqueness of the controller. It should not cause too large of a delay, however. There is no word as to when we can expect betas of this game, or when it will be done.
Most people know that Vonage is one of the pioneer Voice over Internet Protocol services, that allows people to use the telephone, running off only the internet. Unfortunately, to make this service happen, Vonage has been using patents owned by Verizon. And Verizon flagged them for this. Verizon wants Vonage to not be able to register any new customers until all patent issues are resolved. And as of the time this case went to court (April 6, 2007), Vonage had no such plans to do so. At this point Vonage has three choices. They can either spend an enormous amount of money re-doing their network so it's all their own, pay Verizon a premium for their technology, or to shut down completely.
We can all agree that the tragic incident that happened at Virginia Tech was horrible. However, now is the time that we have to figure out what caused someone to kill this many peers, and how we can prevent this in the future. Unfortunately, as we've seen in the techPowerUp! Forums, this is something that people do not exactly
agree on. Professional lawyers, as well as the highly acclaimed Dr. Phil McGraw, are quick to blame violent video games for the killer's maniacally depressed rampage. Currently, there is no evidence that the killer even had access to a video game console, let alone play violent video games. A much more likely possibility is the way the killer reacted to his anti-depressant medications. Instead of the anti-depressants calming the killer down, like they were supposed to, they made him violent and erratic. And so, this instability could easily have caused him to snap when the killer's girlfriend dumped him.
Xfire, the program that basically acts like a free Xbox Live for the PC, has a tracking feature that lets you log how many hours you spend on a particular game. This lets you brag to people
just how little time you spend outside how good you are at a particular game. Xfire took all the voluntarily sent data, collected it over a 15 month period, and wrote it down in a pretty log. The result? We now know exactly which games are played the most. Are you ready for the list?
1- World Of Warcraft (big surprise)
2- Counter-Strike Source
3- Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer
4- Battlefield 2
5- Guild Wars
If you want the rest of the list, please click
here. Over-all, an impressive 92,000 years of time was spent on games over this 15 month period.
Auzentech Inc., developer of the world's first Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect PCI sound card, announced two days ago a new sound card series based on the Creative X-FI chipset. The Auzen X-FI Prelude 7.1 is scheduled for release near the end of May 2007. It will fully support EAX 5.0 and have the same expandability as the
Auzen X-Meridian 7.1. Support for Dolby Digital Live real time encoding for Vista is scheduled for Q4 of this year. The Auzen X-Fi Prelude marks the first time Creative has permitted a third-party soundcard vendor to use the Creative X-FI chipset in its own soundcard design. "We're excited to provide Auzentech with our award-winning X-Fi audio chipset and technology to provide an outstanding audio experience for Auzentech's customers," said Steve Erickson, VP of audio for Creative. I'd like to thank our forum members for
this story.
AMD/ATI has released new official drivers for ATI based video cards. This release of Catalyst has improved OpenGL performance under the Microsoft Vista operating system for all Radeon X1000 series of products, in both single card and hardware CrossFire configurations. Typical improvements of 15% or more can be seen in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey, with enthusiast class of products seeing improvements of 30% or more. This release of Catalyst also adds the Avivo Video Converter for Windows Vista (32-bit). Head over the AMD/ATI
download section and select the proper Catalyst driver for your operating system and video card.
Microsoft spent millions of dollars advertising its next generation OS 'Windows Vista' in China, in fact the IT juggernaut threw up the biggest Vista Ad on the 421 meter high Jin Mao tower in Shanghai China. However after 2 weeks (Jan 19 to Feb 2) from launch Microsoft managed to sell a mere 244 copies of Windows Vista. Software piracy is rampant in the middle kingdom and a pirated version of Vista sells for a mere $1 on the streets.
Intel plans to reveal two new Core 2 Duo based CPUs just days before Computex, specifically on the 3rd of June.
The E2160 is clocked at 1.8 GHz with FSB 800 and a total 1 MB of cache memory. This CPU will retail for ~$84.
The E2140 is the slower part, running at 1.6 GHZ with FSB 800 and 1 MB cache. Both CPUs are basically Core 2 Duo parts with 1 MB cache memory.
The CPUs have already been spotted in the wild:
Intel unveiled the first benchmark numbers of its recently announced Penryn quad-core processor, which runs at 3.33GHz, at the IDF event in Beijing, China. Intel presented the benchmark numbers of a Penryn 45nm quad-core processor running at 3.3GHz with a 1333MHz FSB and 12MB cache versus an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor QX6800 introduced last week at 2.93GHz with 1066FSB and 8MB cache. Another dual-core version of the Penryn family named Wolfdale with 6MB L2 cache was also included in the comparison. Intel said that the three test systems were configured with identical hardware, including Intel D975XBX2 BadAxe 2 motherboard, single GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory with 5-5-5-15 timings, and a 32-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. The results are available below:
NEW YORK - April 18, 2007 - Microsoft Corp. and NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. today made video game history by announcing the first-ever Xbox 360 "Pac-Man" World Championship, presented by Quiznos. From April 25 to May 9, fans of one of the world's most beloved video games of all time will compete on the classic arcade game via Xbox LIVE Arcade on the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system, evolving "Pac-Man" gameplay from the local pizza parlors and arcades of the '80s to the Xbox 360 and its online gaming community with more than 6 million members. The top finalists from participating countries around the world will be flown to New York City for the finals on June 5, with the winner being crowned the Xbox 360 "Pac-Man" World Champion by Toru Iwatani, the creator of "Pac-Man."
Since launching in 1980 in Japan and in 1981 around the world, "Pac-Man," its host of ghosts and the famous "wakka wakka wakka" sound have become global pop culture icons. This arcade game played an instrumental role in establishing the video game industry in the '80s, while the launch of Xbox LIVE in 2002 was a key factor behind the rapid growth in popularity of online gaming. Today, Xbox LIVE Arcade is the premier online destination for digitally distributed, high-definition games - with more than 25 million downloads - offering fans of "Pac-Man" across the globe a great opportunity to connect, compete and enjoy the fun through the Xbox 360 "Pac-Man" World Championship.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 17, 2007 - Intel Corporation today announced first-quarter revenue of $8.9 billion, operating income of $1.7 billion, net income of $1.6 billion and earnings per share (EPS) of 27 cents. The results included the effect of a $300-million reversal of previously accrued taxes that increased EPS by approximately 5 cents.
"The strong momentum of our industry-leading Intel Core microarchitecture product family, combined with ongoing structural cost improvements, delivered solid financial results in the first quarter," said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. "Our product strength is reflected in the fact that average selling prices for the quarter held up well in a very competitive environment."
Click
here to continue reading the Q1 2007 Earnings Release [PDF 236KB]
US software giant Microsoft said yesterday it will set up its first joint research facility with Lenovo Group, in Beijing(China). The facility will be based in Lenovo's research and development center in the capital, with around 40 engineers from Lenovo and tools, training and some staff from Microsoft. "Based on our common understanding that personal computers will extend to every part of people's work and life, we believe our cooperation will bring many many opportunities to Lenovo and Microsoft," said George He, senior vice-president and chief technology officer of Lenovo. Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, said the two companies will try to identify opportunities in the consumer and mobile markets such as digital photography, digital media and the Internet. He also noted that the joint center will develop products for Lenovo in areas like corporate computing, digital homes, Windows value-added services, as well as ultra-portal computing devices and smart handheld devices.
At the Intel Developer Forum today Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, introduced the Intel Ultra Mobile platform 2007 (formerly codenamed "McCaslin") for MIDs and UMPCs and said systems will be available over the summer from Aigo, Asus, Fujitsu, Haier, HTC and Samsung. The Intel Ultra Mobile platform 2007 is based on the Intel processor A100(600MHz) and A110(800MHz), built using 90nm manufacturing process and 512KB of L2 cache. The processors run at 400MHz FSB and have a thermal design power (TDP) of just 3W. Both processors are paired with the new Intel 945GU Express Chipset and Intel I/O Controller Hub (ICH7). The chipset features a single x1 PCI Express interface and support for up to 1GB of DDR2 memory. The IUMPC2007 graphics core is assaigned to the Intel GMA950, which delivers resolution of up to 1024x768 pixels. Full product information for the Intel Ultra Mobile Platform 2007 can be found
here.
SiS in cooperation with Clevo today announced that the first SiSM671 based notebook PC, Clevo M721S/M720S, is successfully introduced to market. Clevo is the first notebook PC maker who implements the high-performance Windows Vista ready SiSM671 northbridge and SiS968 southbridge chipsets. The Clevo lightweight notebook PCs support Intel Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4/Pentium D processors and up to 4GB of DDR2 667/533 memory. Other notable features include 12.1" LCD display, fingerprint detection technology, Mirage 3 graphics with DX9 support, SATA interface, 3x USB2.0 ports, High Definition Audio, and 10/100Mbps Ethernet.
Hong Kong 17th April, 2007 - InnoVISION Multimedia Limited are pleased to announce the mainstream 8 series that is equipped with high-end performance but priced at mainstream level with Inno3D GeForce 8600GTS, GF 8600GT & 8500GT.
Inno3D GeForce 8600GTS, GF 8600GT & 8500GT is built with the best price/performance GPUs for Microsoft DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 gaming and ideal for Microsoft Windows Vista .
Qimonda and Advantest to Start GDDR5 Testing
Qimonda AG, announced its cooperation with Advantest to develop a hardware set-up for GDDR5 (Graphics Double Data Rate 5) testing. The cooperation aims for a cost efficient high volume test solution for GDDR5 graphics DRAM (dynamic random access memory) devices. GDDR5 will become the next major graphics DRAM standard after GDDR3. GDDR5 memory performance will well exceed existing graphics standards. Its performance in addition to new features will make GDDR5 ideally suited for future high performance graphics applications like PC graphics cards or game consoles.
Have you ever played 'Ground Control', the game made by Massive Entertainment from Sweden? I didn't but the interview with Massive's lead game designer Magnus Jansén over at
Shacknews immediately made me drool over the upcoming sequel 'World in Conflict'. This real time strategy game won't take place in the science-fictional past-third-world-war setting as the former Ground Control games, instead the cold war in the 1980's is the battleground now.
"If you have war where tanks roll over white picket fences and BMX bikes, it's not just some desert town that's getting destroyed that you can't relate to. You say, 'That's a swing set on fire, I fully grasp the power of this event.' Putting it in the middle of familiar environments immediately gives people a sense of the power and the horror of the war."
Massive adds a lot of really cool features to enhance the visual storytelling effects, for instance if you zoom in on a map really close to your troops you will suddenly pick up the radio transmissions between the units.
The game itself is comprised of three parts, one taking place in the US, the second in the European region and the third place wasn't disclosed yet.
As Jansén says the relationship to the publisher Vivendi is exceptionally good, the funding is there and even patience, it sounds like 'World in Conflict' could easily be one of the best games released in 2007 (this fall, for PC only). Just take a look at the screens and of course the rest of the interview and you will realize it yourself.
A group of Electronic Arts Canada executives have formed their own video game company focused on creating and porting games to the Nintendo Wii and DS. Jet Black Games will focus on creating Nintendo friendly versions of games and is partnering up with Flashman Studios to create content. Electronic Arts has been a bit slow with the Wii and only has six games for the console. Jet Black executives did not specify any initial games or release dates.
We
told you about NVIDIA's the updated Windows Vista drivers yesterday. It came to our attention that the driver suite for Windows XP, the Media Center Edition and Windows 2003 was updated as well and leads in the term of version number. It now officially supports the recently released 8300/8400/8500/8600 cards and delivers increased 3D performance as usual. Please remember this driver is still in a beta state!
Windows XP / Windows XP Media Center Edition 32-bit (39.2 MB)
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition /Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (39.2 MB)Tuesday, April 17th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Graphics Cards
Today NVIDIA announced their latest new graphics processors of the GeForce 8 Series. The new cards are called GeForce 8500 GT, 8600 GT and 8600 GTS. In our preview we examine the differences between the products and how they stack up against the last generation GeForce 7 products.
If you've been paying attention to techPowerUp! news for the past few days, you know that NVIDIA and its partners have recently released the GeForce 8600 series. I won't bore you with the details, as you've probably read them at least fifty times by now (though if you'd like a refresher, please click
here). However, prospective customers of this new graphics card have asked themselves: Where can I get it? And as of today, the answer is one of the most loved computer part providers in the USA: Newegg. If you live in the USA, and want an 8600, you'll be very happy to know that they are quite available on
Newegg. The 8600GT series starts at $170, and the 8600GTS series starts at $200.
Sunnyvale, CA-April 17, 2007 - OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the PC2-9600 Flex XLC series. The latest edition to OCZ's esteemed enthusiast lineup implements the proprietary Flex XLC design and is engineered to produce extreme speeds with rock-solid stability. The PC2-9600 Flex modules are guaranteed to run at 1200MHz with ease thanks to the supreme component screening and thermal management of "Flex."
Yan Tai, China, April 17th, 2007 - Foxconn, a global leading manufacturer of quality performance computing hardware, today announced the release of their NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS, 8600GT and 8500GT graphics cards. The Foxconn new GeForce 8600 graphics series feature NVIDIA revolutionary new DX10 unified architecture which brings unparalleled levels graphics realism and performance to gamers, in addition to Foxconn's unique cooling system, which is proven to increase overclocking capability by up to 15%. The Foxconn GeForce 8500GT, on the other hand, is the ideal graphics solution at a sub-$100 price point. It delivers unprecedented levels of graphics realism and gaming performance you have been long craving for, without emptying your wallet.
Go Extreme with Foxconn 8600GTS and 8600GT Overclocked Version
In addition to the standard GeForce 8600 and 8500 series, Foxconn is also launching a factory GeForce 8600GTS and 8600GT "Overclocked" graphics card at the same time. It is spec'd at a stunning
700 / 2200 and 560 /1560 MHz (Core / Memory clock) respectively.
Brea, California and Munich, Germany - April 17, 2007 --- VGA, a market leader and premier provider of high-performance graphics solutions and motherboards today announced the release of the 8600GTS, 8600GT and 8500GT. (
See Press Release)
In addition to the three above products, EVGA is also announcing the 8600GTS and 8600GT Superclocked.
The 8600GTS Superclocked, with an incredible core clockspeed of 720MHz and 2.1GHz memory has undergone vigorous in-house testing and burn-in procedures to meet our own stringent quality, performance and reliability requirement providing the ultimate gaming experience for gamers and power users. The 8600GT Superclocked runs at an impressive core speed of 576MHz and 1.5GHz memory clock. A "Superclocked" core, shader, and memory clockspeed ensures the highest level of performance and stability possible.
Eindhoven, April 17th 2007 - POINT OF VIEW, well known for its range of nVidia based Graphics cards, is launching today a special version of the GeForce 8600 GTS, 8600 GT & 8500GT Graphics Cards. These Point of View cards are the latest expansion of the of the most powerful Graphics Cards ever released; the GeForce 8 Series.
NVIDIA Updates Vista ForceWare Drivers
NVIDIA has updated its Vista ForceWare display drivers for
all GeForce 6, 7 and 8 cards, for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS. This takes the version number up to 158.18 - the drivers are still listed as being beta whilst NVIDIA continues to improve them, but they are the official drivers available through the main downloads section of the site so should be stable. You can view the range of fixes below, although there are no new features in this release.
The 32-bit download is available
here (30.2MB) and the 64-bit download is available
here (42.7MB).
Instead of writing all the boring press releases, I've decided to gather all the manufacturers who will launch new GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500 Series graphics cards in one post and keep it up to date. I'll start with the
BFG Technologies and their BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS(710/2000MHz), 8600GT(565/1400MHz) and 8500GT(450/800MHz) overclocked OC 256MB video cards. The BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS OC graphics cards are available today while the 8600GT OC and 8500GT models will be available in late April. Second comes
GIGABYTE with its Silent-Pipe brand new video cards. The GIGABYTE GV-NX85T256H, GIGABYTE GV-NX86S256H with Silent Pipe 3 and GIGABYTE GV-NX86T256D graphics accelerators are available from today.
VR-Zone also reports that
Point of View and
Leadtek have come up with the new 8600/8500 series.
Biostar is also introducing its Sigma Gate V8603TS21, V8603GT21, V8502GT21 NVIDIA GeForce 8600/8500 Series based video cards. Last but not least for today is
Zotac International with the ZT-88XE760-FSS, ZT-88SE320-FPP, ZT-85TE250-FSL and ZT-85TE25H-FSL video cards. Click on the manufacturer names for additional information about every specific card.
INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, Beijing, April 17, 2007 -- Intel Corporation executives today detailed more than 20 new products, technology innovations and industry initiatives -- many of them industry firsts -- aimed at making the World Wide Web, computers and consumer electronics devices much more responsive, friendlier and secure.
Under the backdrop of Intel's leadership in 45nm Hi-k metal gate silicon technology and how it will ignite new innovation and growth opportunities, Intel executives at the Intel Developer Forum disclosed new performance details for its next-generation "Penryn" processor family. The company also unveiled two product roadmaps for Intel architecture (IA)-based System on Chip (SOC) consumer electronic (CE) devices and business uses.
Fujitsu has launched three new Santa Rosa-based notebooks for the Japanese market. First one the FMV-BIBLO NX Santa Rosa notebook features an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200, 1GB of RAM, 15.4" 1440x900 display and a Blu-ray burner, while the lower-end FMV-BIBLO NF model has a Core 2 Duo T5500 processor, 1GB of RAM, 15.4" 1280x800 display and a dual-layer DVD burner. Also announced was the 13.4" FMV-BIBLO NX. The FMV-BIBLO NX features a traditional XGA screen and can be equipped with a Core 2 Duo T7200, T5500 or Celeron M430 processor. Intel's Santa Rosa platform uses Merom-based Core 2 Duo processors and the Crestline chipset which supports 667MHz/800MHz FSB speeds. Video and graphics are handled by the GMA X3000 graphics core.
Anyone who uses Windows Vista and Mozilla Firefox may be pleased to hear that the Windows Media Player team has now released a plugin for Firefox that should allow the browser to play WMP content on websites. Here are the steps to get it working:
- Installation of the Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin may require administrative access to your PC. It is recommended that you close all other open browser windows before continuing with the installation.
- Click the Install button to automatically download and install the Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin.
- Depending on your security settings, you may see a Security Warning dialog box. Click Install to install the plugin.
There is a known issue if you are using Firefox version 2.0.0.3 on Windows Vista with the installer failing with error code -203. To work around this simply restart Firefox (you will get a notification that Windows Vista will be changing the Firefox compatibility settings) and then install again - the second time should succeed.
The download is available
here, and the new plugin works on all versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista (although it is mostly intended for Vista, as that currently has no WMP support in Firefox).
Taipei, Taiwan - MSI, a leading manufacturer of computer products, proudly unveils its latest MSI graphics card - NX8600GTS/GT and NX8500GT Series. Incorporating the newest NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT/GTS and GeForce 8600 GT graphics processor which deliver superior cinematic resolution and high performance acceleration for today's demanding 3D graphic applications. The MSI NX8600GTS/GT and NX8500GT Series are the best choices with the most sensible prices for the most complete solution for the 3D and video application market.
NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today announced the extension of the award-winning NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series line-up to include three new graphics processing units (GPUs), bringing high-resolution gaming, stunning Microsoft Windows Vista graphics, and stellar HD DVD and Blu-ray video playback to virtually everyone regardless of budget. The new GPUs that complete the world's first top-to-bottom family of DirectX 10 GPUs include:
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS: $199-229
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT: $149-159
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT: $89-129
Transcend is very pleased to announce its 32GB 2.5-inch IDE Solid State Drive (SSD), which is compatible with most mainstream PC and notebook computers. The 2.5-inch IDE 44-Pin interface SSD has a tough outer metal case, enormous capacities, high reliability, low power consumption and anti-shock features that make it ideal to replace Hard Disk Drives. Transcend's 2.5-inch IDE SSD series has a distinct advantage over standard 2.5" HDDs in that it is a solid-state memory with no moving parts, and therefore not susceptible to mechanical failure as a result of vibrations. It is now available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB memory capacities with support for Ultra DMA Mode 4.
Monday, April 16th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Graphics Cards
Sapphire's X1950 Pro Dual is the world's first video card that uses two ATI RV570 GPUs on a single PCB. The board comes with 2x 512 MB of GDDR3 memory for a price of $349. In our testing the card shows that it has to potential to narrow the performance gap to NVIDIA's lineup until R600 is released.
We've all heard things about 802.11N. However, after years of rumors, the specifications are going to be finalized this summer. And so, with the finalization of the 802.11N specifications, we will start to see routers with previously unheard-of ranges/speeds. And thanks to manufacturers like Belkin, we will also see routers with previously unheard-of features. Anyone who has more than one computer and a USB device that needs to be accessed on both computers knows how painful it is to set up, if it's set up at all. Belkin looks to fix this with a $130 router running Linux. Assuming all router clients are running the client software, if a user plugs a USB device into the router, the device is suddenly accessible to all users on the network, as long as the users accessing the device have the proper drivers installed. This makes digital camera/MP3 player/PDA device synchronizations much easier on network users.
Thanks to liquid nitrogen, voltmods, kilowatt power supplies, and powerful Intel processors, the 9 second SuperPi "wall" has been smashed to pieces. The specs, according to Roro's thread on XtremeSystems:
- Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
- Asus P5W64 Ws Pro Full Mod
- Cellshock PC8000 C4
- Enermax Galaxy 1000W
- Windows By Chris
- LN2 Cooling
You can see the exact screenshot of everything below.
It seems as if Google's software, designed to compete with automated map-makers such as MapQuest, still has one or two kinks that need to be worked out. While Google Maps is absolutely wonderful when telling you how to drive in
either the USA
or Europe, it seems not to be so good at telling you how to drive
from the USA
to Europe. The screenshot I attached explains the theoretical situation of me driving from (an area very close to) my house to W1zzard's (the man who started techPowerUp!). I'm not sure I can handle the extremely difficult task of swimming 3,462 miles to get into France.
Special thanks to
'Spud107' for bringing this bug to my attention.
Berkeley, CA -April 2007 - Good Work Systems today announced the release of the Fragpedal Elite, a sleek new edition of their popular new dual-foot 4-button Fragpedal USB gaming foot pedal. The Fragpedal Elite follows in the "foot steps" of the original Fragpedal Classic released in early 2006, this time with a new button design nuanced for ultra-fast "twitch" response in First Person Shooters. Both models of the Fragpedal allow gamers to enter mouse and keyboard commands as well as sophisticated macros with both feet, a capability that has been wholeheartedly welcomed by PC gamers.
Samsung has decided to let its designers get a little more creative than normal, which has led to the fabrication of these rather unusual concept PCs. Although they are unlikely to ever make their way onto the market, they're still quite interesting to look at as Samsung tries to offer a brief glimpse into the future of computing, and what it might look like. The first looks somewhat like a bent witch's hat, the second almost resembles a lamp with a pull cord on it, and the third seems to have some bizarre balls perched on top. All of them are obviously sporting the
stylish Core 2 Duo sticker - but other than that, specifications are a mystery.
Update: It turns out these concepts are actually the result of a Samsung and Intel PC design contest - the design with the 'balls' (which are supposedly a media player, a disk drive and a digital camera) came first, the tall lamp came second and the other finished third (it has a built in projector instead of a monitor).
Sandisk and Sony are now partnering up to push their SxS standard. The new flash based cards will be made for Sony's upcoming XDCAM EX high-def camcorders. Both companies claim the cards will have a normal transfer rate of 800 megabits per second and will be able to burst to a maximum speed of 2.5Gb/sec. The new SxS standard will also be compatible with the ExpressCard industry standard, which means that it can be easily used in notebook computers with an ExpressCard slot. Sandisk and Sony say the SxS cards will be available later this year. No pricing has been announced.
With the GeForce 8600 set to go on sale tomorrow, the details of the 8600 and 8500 series cards have been published by DailyTech - although they aren't 100% certain, it's certainly a more trustworthy source of information than other sites you may find. All three of the cards will be 128-bit, and the details are listed in the table below. As you can see, the specs seem to tie-in with
those released by ASUS for the 8600GTS at least. These mid-range cards should start to trickle onto shelves over the coming weeks, offering DirectX 10 capabilities at a noticeably lower price than the 8800s. Obviously price will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and there will be slight changes to some clock speeds, but in general they should line up like this:
Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD), today introduced the world's first 200GB 2.5-inch USB 2.0 portable external hard drive capable of storing up to 57,000 digital photos, 52,000 MP3 music files, 88 DVD videos or 23 high-definition videos. The 200GB portable external hard drive delivers the highest capacity of any backup solution in the compact 2.5-inch hard drive class. Available in 200GB, 160GB, 120GB and 100GB capacities with 8MB buffer, Toshiba's new personal storage line offers consumers convenient and simple options for preserving and transporting treasured digital files. The 200GB drive is available now at
Toshibadirect.com for a suggested retail price of $229. The 160GB model is priced at $180, the 120GB version for $150 and the 100GB drive for $130.
From the latest Forceware 158.16, NVIDIA has at least four new G80 chips we haven't seen before. The first one is G80-400, then there is a G80-200 chip and finally G80-600 is listed. Last but not least the mystical Geforce 8800 Ultra makes an appearance.
The most important one is the new card ID // 0194, which is called NVIDIA Geforce 8800 Ultra. This new driver should really boost the performance of all G8X parts.
Here are the new cards.
// 0190 - NVIDIA G80-400
// 0191 - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
// 0192 - NVIDIA G80-200
// 0193 - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
// 0194 - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra
// 0197 - NVIDIA G80-600
Most of us natively play our games with a keyboard and mouse - or a gamepad, if you are the owner of a console. There are games that profit greatly from a special controller - I myself couldn't imagine any serious racing games that could be played without a steering wheel. But what about other controllers? How about a control glove, or perhaps a chainsaw, that will definitely make you feel "in the game"?
New launches has a compilation of the Top 10 weird game controllers. For some interesting game controllers, click
here.
We brought news about a suspicion that
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stole from Half life 2 and Doom 3. It now looks like the issue has been resolved, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did not steal a thing from the two aforementioned games. Half Life 2, as well as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., use textures from
Marlin Studios - hence, the similarity. Furthermore, the IMP_Light texture, which also played part in the scandal as being taken from Doom 3, was, in fact, just a standard Impact Light texture, rather than referring to the Doom 3 monster.
Intel should begin to ship a new clock-unlocked Core 2 Duo mobile processor in the second half of this year, aimed mostly at gamers who like to play on the move. This new CPU is likely to become the Extreme version of the Core 2 Duo mobile, with Intel Mobility Chief Mooly Eden subtly commenting about "taking mobile gaming to the Extreme", going on to say it will be an "ass-kicking" product. He also hinted at a four core laptop CPU sometime in the future, but didn't give any indication of when.
Intel is also set to launch its 'auto-overclocking' CPUs next month - using Dynamic Acceleration Technology, the new processors will be able to automatically run faster than the specified frequency whilst monitoring the chip's heat emission in order to prevent it overheating. It can also overclock just one core whilst keeping the other in a low power state to reduce power consumption whilst maintaining gaming performance (most games will only use one core anyway).
SAN JOSE, Calif. and LAS VEGAS - April 16, 2007 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe Media Player at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show. This desktop application expands Adobe's Internet video solutions, adding to an emerging ecosystem that enables new ways to distribute and monetize media, while helping viewers discover and view high-quality content both online and offline. Leveraging Adobe's Emmy Award winning Flash architecture, the Adobe Media Player delivers more engaging video experiences to viewers while offering content publishers new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets. A preview of the new player will be shown during NAB, April 16 - 19 (Booth SL 3220).
"Akamai and Adobe have a longstanding partnership that enables the world's leading media companies to deliver consistently high-quality Flash Player video experiences to global audiences," said Paul Sagan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Akamai. "Adobe continues to be an industry leader in their approach to innovation by delivering new ways for audiences to experience rich, interactive content. We are excited about supporting this latest initiative that will make it easier for our joint customers to facilitate broad distribution of Adobe Flash-based video."
In an MSDN blog, Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis has admitted that the OEM activation hack for Windows Vista does work effectively. The hack involves either using a custom BIOS to trick Vista into believing it is running on a different computer model and therefore allows activation without connecting to the internet or using the phone, or using software to fool the OS in the same way. Windows XP also suffered from a similar hack, which also fools the Microsoft website into thinking the Windows install is genuine, however it received little attention because of the numerous other ways to bypass activation. Unsurprisingly, Kochis' blog is largely trying to deter people from using this method due to its risks (custom BIOSes can be dangerous) and claiming that the software equivalent will be easy to detect and respond to, but it would suggest that Microsoft more worried about this bypass than the others.Notice: techPowerUp! does not support the use off illegal software
With
ASUS officially announcing that it's set to release a card based on NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 a couple of days ago, PNY has followed this by revealing that it is about to do the same. Unfortunately though, there are not as many details about PNY's card as there were about ASUS's, other than that it will be an 8600GTS with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. Possibly more interestingly though, PNY has also let slip that the 8600 itself will be launched tomorrow - the company confirmed that its card will go on sale in PC World stores in the UK on April 17th, whilst also commenting that "graphics card will be immediately available to consumers from the date of launch of the product by NVIDIA," essentially confirming that NVIDIA is launching the new GPU tomorrow (
as previously rumoured). This will be the first of the mid-range DirectX 10 cards to be released to consumers.
LAS VEGAS - April 15, 2007 - Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft Corp. unveiled Microsoft Silverlight , a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Early supporters of the new platform include Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.
Microsoft Silverlight, previously called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), integrates with existing Web technologies and assets to provide higher-quality experiences with lower costs for media delivery. Delivered to end users through a seamless, fast installation, Silverlight offers consistent experiences to both Macintosh and Windows users on a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer , Firefox and Safari.
Fuad has word that the upcoming K10 server processor codenamed Barcelona is 50 percent faster in specfp_rate2000 then Intel's quad core Kentsfield. As the CPU speed was not disclosed it will be near the stated 2.5GHz which applies for its fastest desktop counterpart, the Agena FX. The slowest Agena's will however start at 1.9GHz and will have the 95W TDP for sure.
GeIL USA, Inc. announced the new "Esoteria Series". Esoteria, or Esoteric, means specialized or advanced in nature, available only to a narrow circle of people that are highly knowledgeable.
Esoteria Series Specifications- Available in DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz & DDR2 PC2-8500 1066MHz
- Capacity of 2GB Dual Channel (2x1GB)
- CAS 4-4-4-12
- Optimized SPD for overclocking
- Voltage 1.9V - 2.5V
- GeIL OC Certified FBGA 64MB X 8
- 240pin, Un-buffered DDR2 DIMM
- Optimized SPD for Overclocking
- Black or Silver true carbon-fiber with Heat-spreader
- Black or Silver aluminum base heat-spreaders
- GeIL Limited Lifetime Warranty
G.Skill International Enterprise since being the worlds 1st launching DDR2-1066 CL4 for desktop users recently extended its product portfolio. The new 1GB DDR2-1066 CL5 memory sticks are available as a single module or a 2GB Kit.
Sunday, April 15th 2007
Review
Keyboards
Razer's Pro|Type is their latest keyboard that comes in an iPod like white color with an integrated iPod docking station. The keyboard has two USB connectors to make sure there's always enough power for your keyboard and the iPod. Also included is a line-out so you can play music from your iPod directly on your home audio system.
Some of you may know that Fujitsu wants in on the small-form-factor market. Fujitsu makes 3.5" hard disks for desktops, 2.5" hard disks for laptops, and is planning on making 1.8" hard drives for ultra-portable computers and music players. Fujitsu has decided to put those plans on hold. Instead, Fujitsu will be focusing on making an entry into the SSD (Solid State Disk) market. We'll have more details as Fujitsu makes them.
Wow, who was expecting this? Microsoft has decided to make the classic Halo 2 cartoons available for purchase on Xbox Live Marketplace. Currently, you can get the first 5 episodes for 80 Xbox Live points (about $1 USD) each. There are no combo deals as of yet. As more episodes come to Xbox Live Marketplace, we may start to see combo deals, allowing you to get a bulk quantity of Red vs. Blue for a discount price.
However, Microsoft may have a bit of competition from the actual author of Red vs. Blue. $20 will get you an entire
season on DVD.
Anyone played the original Fallout game, which was released in 1997? While the original was quite good, we've only seen one sequel (and a Fallout Tactics game) in the past 10 years. There are going to be more sequels, but they're not going to be done by the original studio (Interplay). Instead, Bethesda is going to purchase the entire franchise from Interplay for roughly $5.7 million USD. The exact terms of this deal are still a secret. However, Interplay definitely still has the right to create a Fallout MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game, assuming Bethesda gets 12% of the revenue. There are no details as to when we can expect a Fallout 3.
So HP decided to build another computer. What makes this computer so special though is what's under the hood. In a conscious effort to increase performance/watt while decreasing price and environmental impact, HP built a computer based entirely off of VIA chipsets. Featuring a VIA C7-D processor, and VIA UniChrome Pro II graphics, along with an unknown chipset, this computer promises to be one of the most energy efficient computers (that still packs some horsepower) in a while. Too bad it'll only be available in China.
The crew from Gear Live slipped through the doors of AMD's performance testing labs and recorded their latest show of
The Bleeding Edge over there. Mark Welker, who is the chief of the Client Analysis Performance Management department, explained in-depth what he and his team are doing. They showcase a
Quad FX system running several applications and games at the same time, explain what you need a dual or multi core CPU for, how to properly benchmark a system and what will change if you switch from a single to a multi core CPU. Welker further adds details about the purpose of such a department, thorough testing of current hardware, the latest applications and games and as a conclusion the monthly summaries he has to deliver which you can find over here for example:
AMD Processor Performance Evaluation Guide.
During such an investigating on Supreme Commander, one of the first few games that is stated to use four cores, they found out that it is not utilizing more than two cores at the moment in their labs. It remains to be seen if it's the fault of the AMD guys or a software glitch which has to be fixed by Gas Powered Games.
While you might think I am joking to bother you with a 40 minute video I can guarantee you it's worth every single one of it. The best thing is that you can download it in several formats in order to get a compatible file for your mobile video player:
iPod-formatted H.264 (M4V) | Apple Quicktime TV High Resolution (MOV) | DivX (AVI) | MPEG-4 (MP4)Anyone who owns old video games and tries to sell them usually gets a nasty surprise. Amazon/E-bay/retailers all buy used games at depressingly low prices, and there's little or nothing gamers can do about this. Enter 'Infinite Continues'. This start-up site promises to be the E-bay of games. A user, who registers for free, posts a list of all the games they have available for trade, and a wish-list of games they want. Infinite Continues then helps other users find those games, and lets the two users set up a trade. Shipping is taken care of by the traders. Like virtually all trade/auction sites, traders are rated based on how good they are at trading. The site has been in beta testing for over six months. Please
check it out, you might find a way to get all those new games you want while getting rid of all the old ones you never play anymore.
NVIDIA plans to play a "trick" on us all - to compete with ATI's R600 chip, which is hopefully getting closer by the minute, NVIDIA should launch a GeForce 8800 Ultra card. The Inquirer, which we all have a problem trusting now and then, brings shocking news: the 8800 Ultra will be a revamped 8800 GTX card (it will use the same PCB, but a different cooler), and instead of being mass produced, it will be manufactured in "tens of units, not tens of thousands". This should therefore be a swift marketing move: NVIDIA will perhaps be able to claim the crown of performance king, yet us, end users, will not have access to the powerful cards.
It will be difficult to find one card, yet alone two for SLI.
This is a brand new Crytek CryENGINE 2 trailer seen at Game Developers Conference 2007. The resolution is 1280x720 pixels and has no watermarks. It's another stunning trailer that really shows what CryENGINE 2 is capable of. Download the 126MB archived file from
here.
Intel plans to further strengthen its leadership by releasing 1333MHz FSB Kentsfield Quad-Core processors. The new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor will operate at 3.00GHz/1333MHz FSB with 2x4MB L2 cache and 130W TDP. Coupled with the upcoming X38 chipset, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 will provide the most powerful Core 2 platform up to date. The QX6850 is set to cost US$999 when released. At the same time the QX6800 CPUs will cost US$999 as well.
Saturday, April 14th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Portable Storage
The Vizo Uranus looks quite different than most other HDD enclosures. The shape clearly dictates the use of the stand and the rounded corners, thick aluminum, blue color and modern label will surely look good on your desk. Vizo includes everything from eSATA bracket to special screws and screw drivers, as well as software to use with the backup function of the Uranus. We benchmark it and take a quick look at the included software, to find out if it has what it takes under that shiny aluminum shell.
Seoul, Korea - April 13, 2007 - Samsung Electronics Co., LTD., a leader in consumer electronics and digital media technologies, and the first company to introduce a Blu-ray disc player will introduce a dual format High-Definition (HD) optical disc player in time for the holidays.
Samsung's Duo HD player (BD-UP5000) will fully support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats and their interactive technologies, HDi and BD-Java. With the Duo HD consumers can enjoy additional studio content such as trailers, director's comments, more elaborate interactive menus and behind the scene footage. The new Duo HD joins Samsung's next generation DVD line-up which includes Samsung's second generation Blu-ray player available at retail this month. Together, these two models offer the consumer a strong line of High-Definition players to match Samsung's award winning, and best selling, line of HDTVs.
More Radeon HD2900XT benchmarks - Crysis demo and 3DMark06 again - Update
Another day another benchmark score and this time
again from a Turkish website.
BilgiUstam got some results for 3DMark06 and for the first time from another application: a Crysis demo. They compared the Radeon HD2900XT to a GeForce 8800GTX on the same test platform.
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800
Asus P5W DH
2×1GB PC2-6400 (5-5-5-12)
Western Digital Raptor 150
To sum it up: While the G80 card was faster in the theoretical benchmark 3DMark06, the R600XT outperformed the G80 card everytime by a slight margin in the Crysis tests.
Update: Here we have some more screenshots from
PCINLIFE showing how the R600 card performs in 3DMark06 using 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 as resolution. This time the test platform was powered using an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2x 2.40GHz) and 2GB of RAM. OS was Vista Ultimate together with the ATI Driver 8.351. The whole system managed to get
9685 3DMarks at the
1280x1024 res and 8756 3DMarks at 1600x1200. Not that bad considering the rather slow CPU.
The last shot is from the same setup now with 8x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering enabled. Sadly you can only guess the whole score because the first digit was painted over.
I hope that everyone who is reading this and the other news posts regarding the R600 performance numbers is judging on it with a good portion of common sense. The final cards aren't on the market and the Non Disclosure Agreement wasn't lifted yet.
As we all know, Mothers Day is rapidly approaching. Microsoft has decided to take this annual holiday, and add a fun-filled contest to it. Microsoft is offering flowers and an Xbox360 Elite to anyone who can write a 250-500 word essay explaining how awesome their mother is, and more importantly, how she affects the gaming community. The contest will close May 6th, 2007. Contest entries will be judged based on creativity, originality, appeal to Xbox.com readers, and how well it conveys the feelings you have toward your mother/female legal guardian. If your mother frequently has helped you through those levels you just can't seem to pass, leads World of Warcraft charges, or simply supports your addiction to video games, please write an ode to your mother
here.
With all the recent and not-so-recent processor releases Intel has made, and all the recent-but-buggy NVIDIA graphics card releases, it's no wonder that AMD (which owns ATI) is losing some of its market share. All AMD can do to try and maintain market share in the USA is to continue to cut prices of existing products, while Intel and NVIDIA enjoy the performance crowns. However, all this is bound to change when AMD unleashes Barcelona. AMD told TGDaily that the Barcelona processor core is on schedule. However, to ensure enough stock at launch, we may not see the Barcelona core until Q4 2007, or maybe even Q1 2008. AMD is likely to regain some graphics card market share back with the HD 2x00 series.
The Sony PlayStation3, along with other Sony electronics, have seen a sharp sales increase. This surge in sales forced a re-calculation of Sony's expected profits. While Sony was expecting "only" 60 billion Yen, new calculations indicate that Sony could stand to make as much as 400 billion Yen ($3.4 billion USD, £1.7 billion) this year. If Sony really does make 400 billion Yen this year, they will more than make up for the little hole the PS3 made in Sony's profits (200 billion Yen). Sony's stock is now selling for 6,510 Yen in the Japanese stock market.
Intel Corporation today announced the availability of new versions of its Intel Thread Checker, Intel Thread Profiler, Intel VTune Performance Analyzer and Intel Threading Building Blocks. These software development products enable developers to create more reliable, scalable applications, and have now been enhanced for the latest multi-core processors - Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 and Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - and newest operating systems - Microsoft Vista*, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise*, Red Hat Enterprise Linux* and Fedora Core*.
"Our Intel Core 2 processors have essential new profiling capabilities we're taking advantage of for the first time in our VTune Analyzer 9.0. Since nearly all systems shipping with Windows Vista will be multi-core systems, developers targeting Vista have been asking us for these parallelism tools," said James Reinders, director of marketing for Intel's Developer Products Division. "Developers on all operating systems want their move to parallelism well supported by development tools and we're committed to keeping up with our aggressive pace of supporting developers in as many ways as possible."
While we already reported that the X2900 got a
name change to the HD 2900 series, The Inquirer sought to find out what happened to the rest of the Radeon line-up. Here are the latest R6x0 rumors, along with their new names.
- RV610LE will be called the HD 2400 Pro. This can support HD playback in 720P (1280x720) resolutions, and comes with up to 256MB of 64-bit DDR2 RAM clocked at 800MHz.
- RV610PRO will be known as the HD 2400 XT. It should come with 128-bit GDDR3 RAM, and support full 1080P (1920x1080) HD playback.
- RV630PRO will be known as the HD 2600 Pro. It is basically an RV610LE with a fancy memory controller, higher clock speeds, and the ability to play 1080P HD content.
- RV630XT will be known as the HD 2600 XT. It is a higher-clocked version of the RV630PRO, with the ability to support higher-clocked and more memory.
All of these cards should come with a native HDMI port, can be ported to AGP, and have HD audio codecs.
The new ASUS EN8600GTS/HTDP/256M is a high-end graphics card that will be released and bundled with the much anticipated first person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadows of Chernobyl. Equipped with 256MB of DDR3 memory and able to support NVIDIA's SLI technology, the EN8600GTS is designed with the gamer's graphics expectations in mind. With such high-end specifications, this graphics card has earned the accolade of being the official global bundle partner of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In line with this, ASUS's G1 gaming series notebook - testament to its gaming-oriented design, also features in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R game itself.
Friday, April 13th 2007
Review
Other
The Microsoft Razer Reclusa is the second product to be released from the two companies. While it may look quite out of this world, it's functions are well placed and the Razer software rounds up the package. We take a close look at all the additional keys as well as the program behind the device and let you know if it is a steal for $60, or if we rather want to go back to our normal keyboards.
Review
USB Sticks
In the past A-DATA has been making USB sticks with an official Disney license that were themed like the movie Cars, The Incredibles or Mickey. Now they added a flash drive with a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. Pirates of the Caribbean has been the best-selling movie in 2006. In addition to just the flash drive, buyers will get a set of MSN display pictures and wallpapers.
Google Inc. announced today a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services, for $3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco-based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity and management. The acquisition will combine DoubleClick's expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google's leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.
Do you feel confident in your photo-editing skills? How about your photo-doctoring skills? If so, you'll enjoy competing in the TechPowerUp!
Image Editing Contest. Sponsored by forum members, who co-operate in a club known as the "Photoshop User Clubhouse", the prizes are quite impressive. You could win the professional version of Futuremark's latest benchmarking suite, 3Dmark06. Or, if you're
really good at image editing/doctoring, you could win a full legal copy of "TuneUp Utilities 2007". Please have all entries in by April 21st, 2007. You must be a registered techPowerUp! forum member to participate in this contest. There is no cost to register for techPowerUp! forums or this contest.
As The Inquirer so eloquently puts it, "only in LA". After answering a Best Buy Geek Squad call, technician Hao Kuo Chi was accused of hiding a camera phone in the shower of Sarah Vasquez. Sarah Vasquez got suspicious when she saw a little red blinking light in her shower. Thinking quickly, she found the camera phone, disabled it, and ripped out the memory card. Taking the thing to her local Verizon store, they quickly discovered all the steamy shower footage. However, in a move that Hao Kuo Chi will probably regret later, he left footage of himself setting up the camera phone on the camera phone. The Best Buy store knew absolutely nothing about this camera being hidden in one of their customer's showers, so this is going to get very interesting very quickly.
The Inquirer also points out that if this had happened in the UK, it would have been quite embarrassing, since the Carphone Warehouse is promoting Geek Squad heavily.
As some of you know, there are already plenty of things out there that can harm a computer through Word 2007. Microsoft already thought through this, and added some software that automatically detects when Microsoft Word 2007 is being exploited, and shuts it down. However, this software also will shut down Word 2007 if it detects a Word document that it cannot read. While your computer is safer at the end of the day, there certainly is irony in how Word 2007 stops itself from crashing by, well, crashing.
All over the interweb, there are intermittent forum posts with a strange topic: how similar S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks to Half Life 2 and Doom 3. These claims certainly do not go unfounded. Someone,
with way too much free time, went through and manually compared the texture directories of Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll see the results in the first two pictures below. A particular texture, lights_impflash.dds, has the exact same name of the Doom 3 version, excluding the extension. Half Life 2 has also been allegedly stolen from. Not only are the file names nearly identical (except for the extension), the images are extremely similar as well. Whether or not anything comes out of this depends on what ID Software and Valve decide to do. Do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R textures are stolen?
Besides the usual R600 and K10/Barcelona talk that keeps us busy all day long there is another side of AMD that many people don't seem to realize: the financial part. If you are interested on being reading some well written thoughts I would suggest a recent two-part article at Overclockers.com. There Ed Stroligo explains AMDs actual financial situation with all the losses of revenue during the last quarter and gives some forecasts on how AMD will react to this.
Get to the
first part here and don't miss the
second part.
Btw.: There are several other interesting articles about various subjects of the computer sector at their
front page.
Bennett Ring and Patch Kolan from IGN Australia had Keita Iida, Director of Content Management at NVIDIA, as their guest yesterday and he answered a couple of interesting questions. Iida is not a sales person and was quite communicative during the whole interview. The subjects discussed vary from DirectX 10 and rough performance expectations for Crysis and Microsofts Flight Simulator X over crippled Vista drivers to game development for the PS3 and PC from the performance perspective.
Get to the interview right
here.
Apple plans to launch new iPods featuring Wi-Fi in the second half of 2007. USI will produce the Wi-Fi modules and Foxconn will perform as the OEM system assembler. USI will begin shipments later in April, while Foxconn may do so in the third quarter. Wi-Fi equipped players stand a chance of becoming the mainstream for all portable music models.
Our
last findings on how fast R600 cards perform in 3DMark06 caused a lot of buzz. Let's see how the following
tidbit shapes up:
The VR-Zone has some numbers they couldn't keep for themselves regarding a Radeon X (sorry...), HD 2900 XT coupled with a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (quad core) processor. They say with the latest 8.361-RC4 drivers they got around
12K with that R600XT card which is faster 2000 points higher than the scores from
FX57.net. They price of this card will be 399USD which would be quite a bargain.
We reported a while back that ASUS isn't the only one developing a solution for external graphic cards -
ATI is in the game too, with its Lasso technology.
Fudzilla has more information regarding Lasso. It will be supported by the external version of the R600, and will allow you to link more than 2 cards for mindblowing graphics performance. Even odd numbers of cards should be supported - connecting five R600 GPUs should pose no problems.
The external R600, codenamed Lasso, connects to the computer via an external PCIe port.
Apple's latest version of OS X, known as 'Leopard', has now officially been delayed until October - with Apple's reason being that they've had to borrow some OS X software engineers to work on the iPhone. Although Apple previously denied rumours relating to a
Leopard delay, it appears they've now been forced to admit they're behind schedule, albeit for different reasons than first suspected.
Apple Statement
Phone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price - we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.
IRVINE, Calif. - April 12, 2007 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for its second BlizzCon gaming convention. BlizzCon is a celebration of the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises and the players who have helped make them so popular around the world. This year's event will take place at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California on August 3 and 4, and will feature various activities for attendees to take part in.
Starcraft: Nearly ten years old but still fun to play and the game has a huge community in Southeast Asia. But let's face it, it's time for a sequel.
And it seems like there is a Starcraft 2 on the horizon. A Korean website called
Fighter Forum mentioned an interview with someone out of the eSports industry and this person said.
"...there will be a beta version of SC2 coming out end of the year..."
He adds there will be a fourth race and every race get's a couple of new units to play with. Get all the details from the direct translation at
Team Liquid.
Sunnyvale, CA-April 12, 2007 - OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and components, today announced the ModXStream Series, a new line of power supplies designed to offer consumers a combination of OCZ's legendary PSU architecture and an efficient modular cable management system. Available in 780W and 900W models, the high efficiency ModXStream offers the industry's highest performing modular power supplies on the market.
Thursday, April 12th 2007
Today's Reviews
According to Sony's chief technical officer
Masa Chatani, the PS3's idle power could soon be put to commercial use in a similar way to the Folding@Home project. Due to its enormous processing power, whilst the console is not in use it can be used to tackle the complex calculations behind the Folding@Home project which simulates protein folding, therefore allowing scientists to better understand many diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as a number of cancers. The PS3 has proved very successful in this area, accounting for
367 TFLOPS in the recent Folding@Home statistics. But now, Sony may be about to expand this project to new, more profitable areas. "This kind of computing model could be used in a commercial application...for example, a start-up or a pharmaceutical company that lacks a super-computer could utilise this kind of infrastructure. We are discussing various options with companies and exploring commercial applications," Chatani said. Such a deal could well see businesses either offering free products or subsidising the price of the PS3 in return for the use of PS3 owners' idle processing power, although Sony has not yet revealed which companies having discussions with.
The Turkish website
FX57.net spilled the beans today. They allegedly tested the R600XT and XTX model on a Conroe 2.93Ghz with 2GB DDR2-800 RAM together with an Intel i975x motherboard. They came up with the following results in 3DMark 06:
Radeon HD 2900 XTX: 12k | GeForce 8800GTX: 10.5k
Radeon HD 2900 XT: 10k | GeForce 8800GTS: 9k
The operating system used was Windows Vista. They used the Catalyst 7.1 (8.33) which seems rather strange, other reviewers report about issues with drivers, so newer ones should be more likely to be used for testing/benchmarking. That could mean the results are not that meaningful at all. Either the scores are made up or there's a little bit of headroom for newer drivers. Decide for yourself...
A few days ago we
reported about a demo that shows the special DirectX 10 effects the R600 will support. Now I came across a forums entry at
Beyond 3D which says this demo would look like Call of Juarez, a Western-themed first-person shooter from the Polish game developer
Techland. Just out of pure curiosity I looked for some reference material and it turns out to be a correct statement. Just look at the attached screenshots from
IGN PC the wooden hut in Fudzillas shot (first picture) looks exactly like the one in the IGN PC shot (second picture). The fence in the tech demo looks exactly like the fence in the other IGN PC screeny. Though the lighting and the details on the stones in front and the steep hill on the far side look different because these are the enhancements made in order to show the beef-up using the DX10 routines. After all, if this is a tech demo it's made of content out of Call of Juarez.
With Toshiba developing the
world's largest OLED display, Sony has now revealed that it is set to begin production of its first OLED TV later this year. At just 11" and 1024 x 600 pixels, the screen size and resolution don't seem too impressive, but this screen will have 8-bits of colour per channel as well as a amazing 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio - not mentioning that it's only
3mm thick. Obviously this means it won't be the ultimate home cinema screen, but it still looks promising for future OLED products once the technology moves forwards. Pricing and availability are still unclear, but this should hit the shelves sometime in 2007.
After successfully releasing
version 9.20 of its popular browser yesterday, Opera Software has now released the final version of the internet browser for Nintendo's Wii console. The new 'Internet Channel', as it is known, boasts a faster start-up speed, better text clarity, improved navigation, the ability to hide the toolbar, improved security options and a built in search feature with a choice of Google or Yahoo!, as well as other minor improvements. To update to this new browser, Wii owners first need to download the latest firmware update and then visit the Shopping Channel to download/update the browser. It will be free to all Wii owners until the end of June, and anyone who has not downloaded it by them will need to purchase it using 500 Wii points - Wii owners that have already downloaded it will be able to continue using it free of charge.
File sharing could become a lot faster in the near future as a team of researchers has developed a new technology which could see speed increases of up to 500%. Current technologies such as BitTorrent are limited by the number of people sharing a certain file, however the new research will allow software to spot chunks of data from a different download that contain identical or very similar data, therefore allowing more download locations. For example, if a song were being shared from a number of locations, it may have different information in the ID tags for various reasons and therefore conventional sharing methods would not recognise it as being the same data. But Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET) would spot these other songs and allow the user to download from these locations as well. The system basically assigns a rank based on how similar files are, and will then allow chunks of the file to be shared based on this.techPowerUp! does not support the use of file sharing software for illegal purposes. The above is just an example.
According to a Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station, Bill Gates could be planning a trip to space sometime in the near future. Fyodor Yurchikhin, currently hosting former Microsoft engineer Charles Simonyi on the station, is claiming his present guest has told him Gates is also preparing to go to space, possibly on one of the $25 million trips to the space station provided by Space Adventures - although Microsoft officials are yet to comment on whether their chairman is arranging to leave the planet any time soon. Gates, who is the world's richest man with an estimated $56 billion, has never been best known for high-risk endeavours, but perhaps he needs a new 'Wow' in his life now that Vista has been released?
Toshiba is attempting to sue 17 companies, mostly Hong Kong and China based, due to alleged infringement regarding some of Toshiba's DVD patents. The company is demanding monetary damages from companies including Daewoo Electronics America, Dongguan GVG and Star Light Electronics claiming that they are illegally selling DVD products in the USA because they do not have any licensing agreements with Toshiba. "The infringement of Toshiba's patents by these companies has damaged Toshiba's DVD-related business, and also caused damage to the legitimate and licensed DVD product manufacturing and distribution and business as a whole," Tokyo-based Toshiba said in a statement. No comments have been made by the companies mentioned above, but Toshiba has also filed a complaint to the US International Trade Commission demanding that the 17 companies accused stop importing their products to the US.
IBM Moves Moore's Law into the Third-Dimension
Armonk, NY - 12 Apr 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore's Law beyond its expected limits. The technology - called "through-silicon vias" -- allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.
The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.
Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) released in Europe the new GSA-H55N, the company's first 20x Multi DVD burner drive with Security Function. Showcased last month at CeBIT, the new drive features the SecurDisc technology, which enables secure data protection and content access control when writing data on CD and DVD formats. SecurDisc protects user data against unauthorized access through password protection, applies a digital signature to all data to allow recipients to verify data authenticity, while it also detects altered data through checksums to verify data integrity and readability. The ATAPI drive supports 20x writing on DVD±R. Other writing speeds include 12x for DVD-RAM, 10x for DVD±R DL, 8x for DVD+RW and 6x for DVD-RW. The new LG GSA-H55N retails in Europe now for 59 euro. A lightscribe version of the drive (LG GSA-H55L) will be also available at the same time.
Fudzilla was the most hasty again in disclosing the name of the new high end Radeon branded cards. There won't be a X2000... card, but instead, the name will be HD 2900.... So the first one off the line, that will make it to the market, will be the Radeon HD 2900XT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory.
Taipei, Taiwan, April 11, 2007 - Walton Chaintech, the world's renowned memory module and graphic cards maker, introduces its new APOGEE GT DDRII 1066 memory module. Designed to fulfill the speed and performance requirements of extreme gamers and computer enthusiasts, APOGEE GT DDRII 1066 module is believed as an innovative addition to the GT line up. Featuring high performance, lower latency, and lower power consumption, the DDRII 1066 is the best choice for high-end platforms based on the Intel Core 2 Duo/Extreme/Quad series or AMD Athlon 64 series processors.
HEXUS.tv was invited to Bungie and record what's going on there with the shaping up of the multi-player game Halo 3. It's really a shame that it will be exclusively released for the Xbox 360.
Anyway, if you are in the mood of more Halo 3 besides the
HEXUS vblog then watch the
Multiplayer Vidoc from Bungie.net. Halo 3 will hit your box' harddrive using the Xbox Live service
on May 16th.
Chief Architect Douglas Carmean, responsible for Intels rather new Visual Computing Group (VCG), is on a tour to universities looking for new recruits supporting Intel in the upcoming GPGPU war. The article is made of several slides out of Carmeans "Future CPU Architectures - The Shift from Traditional Models" presentation with additional notes and estimations on the part of Beyond3D. Carmean pictures Intels approach on a GPGPU design, consisting of an in-order 4-thread 'throughput' core that draws a mere 6.25W and a super-wide Vec16 FPU attached to it. If you look at such a single GPGPU processor it doesn't look promising, but that quickly changes if you take the great scalability of this object into account. It is small (and therefore cheap to produce) and somewhat fast and you can attach literally thousands of them together. At this point one usually expect some kind of a drawback of this design, which I won't deny here: It seems as this core doesn't support x86 instructions at all. In the article you will find enough speculation about it so I won't spoil anything more now. Further you will see what Intel thinks of where CPUs and GPUs are heading for, which type of application processings they will be best in and so on.
It is particularly interesting to note that they place video processing firmly in the CPU camp, and yet all current premium video solutions for high-end codecs rely on GPU power to accelerate this function smoothly.
IGN PC got the opportunity to play a few rounds of Team Fortress 2 in between two interviews with Valve's Engineer Robin Walker, Project Lead Charlie Brown, and Marketing Director Doug Lombardi. While the the interviews start with why they made substantial changes to the classes and map designs, the more interesting answers follow later. Technical things like why they used Phong Shading and the PS3 and Xbox network interaction and of course the debate about the release date (which is probably in September).
IGN: So you're actually playing now on Xbox 360s connected to PCs?
Doug Lombardi: Technically it's done.
...
Chances are the PS3 version will only play other PS3s. There's zero chance of them talking to 360s.
The One Laptop Per Child project set itself the target of delivering not only a laptops to children in poor countries. The non-profit organization wants to provide a window to the world and a sees its XO computer as the right tool for exploring and learning.
ZDNet now has a story online that covers the introduction of the XO laptop in a small Nigerian village. Before that happened the only computer the small school had was a PC painted onto a wall. The teacher didn't have a computer, neither did he have access to one in his life before. You might imagine how eager the kids were to hold their first personal computer in their own hands. I really hope that this project will be successful and the governments who already promised to buy several thousand XOs will keep their word.
If you are keen on how the user interface of the aforementioned XO looks like then head directly to
Engadget.com who have plenty of screenshots of it.
Computer makers have been told they'll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems. By early 2008, Microsoft's contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. "The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January," said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. "At that point, they'll have no choice". Despite Microsoft's constant promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the SOHO market. Click
here to read the full story.
As we pointed out
earlier AMD in close collaboration with Microsoft and many other companies holds a tech tour this year which started in Tampa, Florida, on April 10th. The tour will stop by in several cities around the United States and you can register for it at the official
AMD/Microsoft Tech Tour website.
Luckily for all the people who won't attend the tour the guys from
Techware Labs are hosting a comprehensive summary about the show in Tampa. Read how they managed to get an 'impressive' AMD Athlon 64 4000+ and what they were bothered most with.
The website
PCINLIFE got hold of more pictures of the OEM R600 yesterday. Thanks go out to
Flint who was kind enough to alarm us.
Btw.: The pictures are still there at PCINLIFE but its a real pain to create an account if you can't cope with Chinese symbols.
Wednesday, April 11th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Headphones
The Saitek GH50 may look quite normal at first glance and even though it is very light, the headset packs quite a punch. As soon as the SRS is turned on, you may never want to go back to using those normal stereo variants. We try the GH50 with games, movies and music after taking a close look and let you know if it really fares as good as it sounds.
In response to earlier reports of the increasing market rarity of the 20GB PlayStation 3, Sony Computer Entertainment of America has officially confirmed that the less expensive variant of its console will no longer be offered in North America.
Due to the overwhelming demand for the 60GB model from both retailers and consumers, we have ceased offering the 20GB model here in North America
said Dave Karraker, senior director of corporate communications for SCEA. Sony has also indicated that the 20GB model, while discontinued, will still be supported by software and services, such as warranty.
Paris - 11 April 2007 - Today, Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game publishers, announces that it has concluded an agreement to acquire SunFlowers, owner of the Anno brand, one of the most successful strategy games with 5 million units sold worldwide and one of the best-selling games in the German market.
Through the transaction, Ubisoft will acquire a 30% stake in Related Designs, which developed Anno 1701, the latest entry in the Anno series and is currently working on a future Anno title.
The agreement between the two companies is subject to normal closing conditions. The acquisition is expected to close in Ubisoft's fiscal year 2007-08 first quarter.
The last time TheInquirer sent out Dean Pullen to
Akihabara he barely survived his quest. This time Theo Valich got the task to retrieve some Black Pearls from the reefs around EVGA. Will there remain enough air in his lungs for him to emerge alive from the deep, unknown, watery labs of EVGA? Head on in and find out for yourself
here.
The folks from Zune Scene have managed to gather some rather interesting info about Microsoft's upcoming additions to the Zune family: namely, Zune 2, as well as a flash-based Zune. They are both scheduled to hit the market this year.
Apparently, the hard drive version looks like the generation 1 Zune, but is thinner. It has a larger hard drive and still uses the doubleshot (read
here). The flash based player is about "3 by 1 1/4 by 1/4 inches" in size. It is video capable and the screen covers about 75% of the front, similar to the hard drive Zune. The flash player has Wi-Fi and also uses doubleshot.
Buffalo Japan is out with the DVSM-H55N/B, a DVD±RW drive burning DVD's at 20X. Available in black and white it records DVD±R DL at 10X, DVD+RW at 8X, DVD-RAM at 12X, CD-R at 48X and CD-RW at 32X. It comes with a generous software bundle for data back up, easy CD burning and data encryption. The drive goes on sale in Japan by late April for 8925 Yen ($ 75).
Fudzilla has managed to snap a picture of the R600 card - this time, with the cooler off. By the looks of it, pictures of the core found on the web a few months ago didn't lie:
The card above has 1024 MB of memory and "some dodgy drivers". It is interesting to see the core tilted the way it is. This will disable all current water cooling blocks (and perhaps air heatsinks) from being compatible with the card. An adapter, or a different retention mechanism, could perhaps fix this. Also note that ATI's R600 does not use a heatspreader on the core.
In addition, the card uses 2 power connectors: 1 standard 6-pin PCI Express, and 1 8-pin connector:
All of the pictures are from the 12 inch card, which should be identical to the smaller version (except for the heatsink).
Seoul, Korea - April 11, 2007 : Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced its new 160GB hard drive using 2.5" disks. Capacity of the single-disk platform ranges between 60 and 160GB, while a dual-disk model is under development that will provide up to 250GB of storage space. Samsung has already shipped test samples of the SpinPoint M5 Series to OEM vendors and plans to begin mass production in mid-April.
The SpinPoint M5 series utilizes perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, and the disk drive design has been optimized to allow ultra-precision adjustment of the head parking ramp position for high-density recording.
Seoul, Korea - April 11, 2007 : Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced development of its 7200rpm premium 2.5" hard drive series, SpinPoint MP1. Samsung's SpinPoint MP1 Series provides the industry's highest storage density of 200 gigabyte (GB) at 7200rpm on a 2.5inch disk base with SATA interface. The MP1 series is designed for enterprise applications such as workstations, RAID (redundant array of independent drives) servers, and blade servers.
The SpinPoint MP1 Series utilize perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), a serial ATA 3.0 Gbps interface, and feature native command queuing (NCQ) for high performance. To protect the disk drive from vibration and shock, a rotary vibration controller (RVC) and an optional digital free-fall sensor (FFS) have been implemented.
We told about NVIDIAs latest driversuite
yesterday but people who actually used these new drivers report about stability problems of some sort. So be careful when installing the 101.70 with it's new control panel. It's needless to say that this is actually a leaked beta.
ForceWare 101.70 for Vista 64bit and ForceWare 101.70 for Vista 32bit
Thanks to Guru3D for hosting!Samsung Electronics today announced it will begin producing a 24-inch LCD panel with an LED backlight. The LED-backlit monitor panel has an color saturation level of 111% (of NTSC standard), compared to a saturation level of only 72% of NTSC for conventional monitors and will satisfy consumers used to the crisp colors prevalent in high-definition (HD) broadcasting, according to Samsung. The new monitor display also features Samsung's S-PVA (Super Patterned-ITO Vertical Alignment) technology that provides the widest viewing angle possible -180 degrees - at high contrast ratio over 1000:1. It also supports 1920x1200 WUXGA resolution, which is the computer equivalent to full HD resolution.
SINGAPORE - April 11, 2007 - Creative (NASDAQ: CREAF), a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products, today announced a new lineup of state-of-the-art docking speakers for iPod players with the Creative
X-Fi Sound System i600, Creative
PlayDock i500 and Creative
TravelSound i docking speakers. Combining elegant designs with exhilarating acoustic performance, these audio solutions allow users to get seriously creative about entertainment and unleash the fullest potential of their iPod players.
Incorporating the critically-acclaimed X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity technology that restores all the vitality, definition and bass of MP3 music to the X-Fi standard, the Creative X-Fi Sound System i600 features a powerful 2.1 docking speaker system and uncompromising X-Fi audio quality that is sure to impress any music enthusiasts. The multi-purpose Creative PlayDock i500 and Creative TravelSound i docking speakers will instantly transform iPod players into vibrant entertainment hubs in homes or outdoor environments.
The AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is the standard of decrypting HD content of HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The implementation of AACS into both HD disc formats is the target of hackers throughout the whole world and it seems the HD DVD is not that secure as it's inventors wanted it to be. Its encryption got hacked utilizing a flawed mechanism inside a special WinDVD version by members of the well known
Doom9 Forums some time ago. When the company behind AACS, the AACS LA, reacted and prohibited the playback of HD DVDs using the aforementioned WinDVD version, the hackers found another way to get to the important data.
This time a hacker called 'xt5' took advantage of a common unmodified Xbox 360 HD DVD drive (Toshiba SD-S802A). He was somehow able to get a so called Volume ID out of the disc using this drive. With this Volume ID one could get access to all the neccessary keys needed to play a HD DVD movie. You won't need a software like WinDVD anymore. In order to fix this problem the AACS LA could add all external Xbox 360 HD DVD drives to their black list (Revocation List), no owner of such a drive would be able to play back a HD movie with it - except hackers of with above stated knowledge of course. Another solution would be to release a new firmware update for the Xbox HD DVDs but it would be only a matter of time until the next clever chap finds a solution for that.
Opera Software just finished the version 9.20 of its popular browser. The new main feature is Speed Dial, the fastest and easiest way to access your favorite sites. Speed Dial allows you to transform your top nine sites into visual favorites that are immediately available in any new tab. Of course the new version comes with the famous BitTorrent downloading support, the possibility to customize your own search engine and the Widgets, Small Web applications (multimedia, newsfeeds, games and more) that make your desktop experience more fun.
Download your version over here:
Opera Download WebsiteThe soon to be released next CPU architecture named K10 was
x-rayed a while ago. We know that the K10 won't hit the 3GHz mark, it will come in all flavors from 2.1GHz all the way up to 2.9GHz. What we missed there, and what AMD didn't let out of their labs yet, was a corresponding heat dissipation figure. Now as
Fudzilla.com acts like their silent megaphone they tell the public that 95W will be the maximum TDP for Barcelona and Agena FX. That is quite low for a real quad-core CPU, and sounds very promising in terms of overclocking achievements.
Tuesday, April 10th 2007
Today's Files
Today's Reviews
Review
USB Sticks
The Verbatim Store 'n' Go memory sticks occupy the budget end of the entire Store 'n' Go series. They offer size and quality over performance and features, but have a smaller price tag than the other Store 'n' Go variants. 4GB at $30-35 may not sound bad, so we take a close look the USB stick and see if the savings are worth it.
Review
Cases
The Lanbox Lite is geared toward the budget minded user, while still giving you all the benefits of its more expensive Lanbox brethren. With a large price difference of around 30-40 USD and no major differences, besides the front of the case, this is an easy choice for anyone wanting an affordable small form factor case. We try it out and let you know if it is just as good as the bigger, more expensive variant.
Dell has begun offering 250 GB 2.5" hard drives with perpendicular magnetic recording technology in two portable computers. The first mobile computers to offer either single or dual 5400 rpm 250 GB drives are the
Alienware Aurora m9700 notebook and Dell's fancy
XPS M2010 portable computer. For the Alienware model, the high-capacity drive is offered as a $300 upgrade over the standard 80GB hard drive, while the extra 250GB of space in the XPS M2010 will cost $250 over the standard 80GB model. A two disc configuration of 500GB lists for $500, while the RAID option is priced at $525. The Alienware Aurora m9700 is available from about $1600 while the XPS 2010 price starts from $3000.
Crucial Technology today announced the immediate availability of 1066MHz Ballistix and Ballistix Tracer DDR2 modules. The new DDR2 PC2-8500 modules broaden Crucial's high-performance memory product lines and are optimized to provide excellent performance on newer, cutting-edge motherboards. Along with Ballistix PC2-6400 and PC2-8000 modules, these new 1066MHz modules utilize Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPP) memory technology by simplifying overclocking in EPP-supported systems. Both the Ballistix and Ballistix Tracer sticks work at CL5-5-5-15 with 2.2V stock voltage. Crucial Ballistix and Ballistix Tracer DDR2 PC2-8500 memory is available now in 1GB modules, as well as in 2GB kits, at
www.crucial.com/ballistix.
DirectX 9.0c has now been updated for April to fix minor issues - this isn't a vital update, but it's recommended for those who are keen to keep their Windows install up-to-date or for those experiencing any problems with 3D applications.
Download:
DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer [45 KB - 36.6 MB]
Download:
DirectX Redist Runtimes [48.9 MB]
Download:
DirectX SDK [441 MB]
Download:
DirectX SDK: Symbol Files [36.1 MB]
Most users will only need to use the web installer, but any Vista users updating DirectX will need to download the redistributable (it isn't listed as being supported by the web installer) - it's unclear whether any DirectX 10 updates are included.
Graphics Card Tidbits Part V - Update
Today in a week we will be enlightened on what NVIDIA was working on during the last few months. Will there be a
GeForce 8800 Ultra or a 8850 GTX or a dual GPU card very likely named
8850 GX2? The names put aside, NVIDIA will give AMD/ATI again a run for their money, though things could change very likely another week later. It's all over town already that
Tunisia will be the birthplace for AMD's first product troika (
K10 CPUs,
RD790 Chipset and R6x0 GPU family) on April 23rd. The invited crowd, most of them being journalists, will among other things, get shown
Techdemo which Fuad got a screenshot from. He's got a second file as well, probably out of an official Powerpoint presentation, that finally solves the naming scheme riddle of the R600 high end cards. AMD's upcoming high end boards will be called X2900-Series.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has started to ship its 1TB hard disk drives (HDDs)
introduced earlier this year commercially. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 HDS721010KLA330 model features five 200GB platters and ten heads, has 7200rpm motor as well as 32MB data buffer. The manufacturer claims that the drive has 8.5ms read seek time, 9.2ms write seek time and 133.75MB/s maximum media transfer rate. Currently the company ships 1TB hard disk drive with Serial ATA-300 interface, but a model with Parallel ATA interface is also expected to be available. At present Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard disk drives with 1TB capacity are available in Japan for ¥51 500 - ¥55980 ($433 - $470). The recommended price of the 1TB drive from Hitachi for the U.S. is $399.
Sony is now adding an SSD option to its featherweight VAIO G ultra-portable notebook. The latest Sony VAIO G uses a 32GB SSD drive instead of the traditional 40GB hard disk. The weight of the notebook drops from 1.97 pounds to 1.89 pounds. Battery life is also extended 30 minutes bringing average run time to 6.5 hours with the standard battery and 13 hours with the extended battery. The Sony VAIO G features a carbon fiber shell, 12.1" XGA screen an Intel 945GMS Express chipset and is available with Celeron M, and ULV Core Solo processors. Other features include 802.11a/b/g wireless, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, PCMCIA slot, multi-card media reader and a fingerprint reader. When the Sony VAIO G was first announced in November for the Japanese market, prices ranged $1,800 USD to $2,100 USD. The SSD option will cost an additional $545 USD.
Popular free antivirus provider GRISOFT has today launched the first non-beta version of its AVG Anti-Rootkit software, which is free to all home users. Unfortunately GRISOFT does not offer support for this new product so you'll have to rely on their
forums if you run into any problems, but you should certainly consider adding this software to your PC security arsenal. Rootkits are among the newest and most difficult to detect forms of malware being circulated at present, and most standard virus scanners will have either no rootkit detecting abilities or be very limited in their effectiveness, so at present the best way to combat them is by using these standalone rootkit-detectors. Other free anti-rootkit software to look at includes
RootkitRevealer,
Rootkit Unhooker,
Rootkit Buster,
IceSword and
Sophos Anti-Rootkit, although some are difficult to use and may not remove the rootkits for you - as rootkits are still relatively new and different software will be better at detecting different exploits, it is a good idea to use multiple scanners to complement each other. AVG Anti-Rootkit will work on the 32-bit versions of both Windows 2000 and Windows XP, although Windows Vista support is not mentioned.
REDMOND, Wash. - April 10, 2007 - Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie Studios today confirmed the multiplayer beta of "Halo 3" will debut to audiences worldwide via Xbox LIVE on May 16 at 5 a.m. PDT and run through June 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Coming exclusively to the Xbox 360 console this fall, "Halo 3" is the highly anticipated third chapter in the groundbreaking "Halo" trilogy from legendary developers Bungie. "Halo 3" lets gamers experience Master Chief's greatest battle as he launches an epic mission to stop the Covenant, destroy the impending Flood threat and ultimately save mankind.
CUPERTINO, California-April 9, 2007-Apple today announced that the 100 millionth iPod has been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years ago, in November 2001, and since then Apple has introduced more than 10 new iPod models, including five generations of iPod, two generations of iPod mini, two generations of iPod nano and two generations of iPod shuffle. Along with iTunes and the iTunes online music store, the iPod has transformed how tens of millions of music lovers acquire, manage and listen to their music.
Toshiba Matsushita Display (TMD) has developed the world's largest 20.8-inch low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display panel to advance to the next-generation of flat-screen TV sets and monitors. The new 20.8-inch OLED display has been developed based on LTPS technology, which TMD has been continually refining, and an electroluminescent coating process, which is advantageous for larger display screen sizes. The three (RGB) color-emitting layers use polymer organic electroluminescent materials, and an ink-jet type coating process is adopted for coating of each color. These have contributed to achieving a large screen size of 20.8-inch and would enable the expansion of potential applications of large-size OLED panels, which have been conventionally limited to smaller size screens. The newly developed panel will be exhibited in TMD's booth at the 3rd International FPD Expo (Display 2007) at Tokyo Big Sight from April 11 through April 13, 2007.
OCZ Technology Group, today introduced a new line of SDHC flash memory cards to their high performance Secure Digital family. OCZ SD High Capacity (SDHC) cards comply with the new SDA 2.00 specification to support capacities over 2GB. Available in 4GB and 8GB configurations, OCZ SDHC cards are ideal for the latest digital cameras and electronics.
Monday, April 9th 2007
THQ has announced that the sequel to last year's Company of Heroes will be DirectX 10 ready. The proprietary Essence Engine of the original Company of Heroes series, developed in-house by Relic, will be upgraded in COH2 to support a dynamic weather system and more realistic physics, as well as the graphical joys of Shader Model 4.0. Since the game will be DirectX 10 ready, it will be playable only with Windows Vista OS. The game will be out in Q3 2007, until then enjoy the newly released Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts expansion pack.
After 5 years and generally very innovative PDAs at great prices, Dell has quietly removed the last Axim - the x51v from their website. The Axim is still a very high end product, featuring a VGA display, 3D system, 624MHz CPU as well as WiFI and Bluetooth. I had the pleasure of testing on such a device and am rather dissapointed to see them discontinued.
Western Digital Corp. today announced a new family of hard drives for audio and video recording products, one of today's fastest growing digital storage markets. Drawing on its expertise as a leading supplier to major consumer electronics and surveillance manufacturers worldwide, WD has designed its new 3.5-inch
WD AV hard drives with technologies that provide the increased reliability, cooler and quieter operation and low power consumption required for these demanding environments. The WD AV drives in capacities ranging from 80 GB to 500 GB are available through the company's distribution network.
Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of Windows Live Messenger on Xbox 360, connecting friends across Xbox 360 consoles, Microsoft Windows-based PCs and Windows Mobile-powered devices. With this update to Xbox 360, friends and families can easily connect and chat directly from their television using Windows Live Messenger, a network of more than 20 billion relationships and more than 260 million active accounts.
AMD has published price cuts for its desktop processor range with prices falling up to US$200 for high-end Athlon 64 FX-70 series processors. Several products have also been discontinued including the socket AM2-based Athlon 64 FX-64, and the socket 745-based Sempron 3400+ and 3000+. AMD's official website still shows processor pricing effective 20th February 2007, while DigiTimes has the new price cuts chart
here.
The Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany will be held from the 23rd of August until the 26th this year. The available floor will be raised by a whooping 28 percent to 115.000m². In addition, the exterior between buildings will be used as well. Visitors will also have two additional hours to take a look at everything, as the it will be open until 8 pm on Friday the 24th of August.
Intel today bumped the clock speeds of its quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors with the addition of the QX6800. The new
Core 2 Extreme QX6800 clocks in at 2.93 GHz, matching last summer's dual-core flagship X6800. Intel's new Core 2 Extreme QX6800 features 8MB of total L2 cache and an unlocked upper multiplier for overclocking goodness. As with the previous Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and Core 2 Quad Q6600, the new QX6800 shares the 65nm Kentsfield core. Intel prices the Core 2 Extreme QX6800 at $1199, however, aggressive
Q3'07 price cuts will drop the QX6800 down to $999.
Intel has given the official name "Turbo Memory" to the flash memory addon to future notebooks. The technology, called Robson in the past, works as a cache to speed up every day tasks and booting of computer. A recent video shows a Turbo Memory enabled laptop finishing a series of tasks in just under 100 seconds while an identical notebook without the flash memory takes much longer to do the same task.
A member of the OCWorkbench forum has posted a picture of a GeForce 8300GT. The card is rather small and comes with active cooling. The cooler itself looks very old fashion. Odds are that it will retail with a larger, passive heatsink instead. No further details were given, but here is the picture:
UPDATE: Seems like this is actually a Diablotek 7100 card, as they use the same PCB. So this is not a 8300GT. Thanks to Crucible1001 for finding the real card.
The biggest shortcoming of notebooks has been the limited upgradability. ASUS is looking to change all that with the C90, which lets you upgrade all the major parts: CPU, memory, graphic card, hard drive & optical drive. While you may think, that some of these can already be upgraded in todays notebooks, ASUS will make it really simple to do with the new C90. Click on "Read full story" for the detailed specs.
There have been rumors of an Xbox keyboard, with confirmation today. Microsoft will be launching a thumb keyboard addon, which plugs into the audio/data port of your controller. The features in short are:
- The thumb keyboard plugs into the headphone / data jack on the bottom of the controller. It comes bundled with its own headset, since it doesn't pass the signal through, and cannot work with current peripherals.
- The keyboard is backlit; the chat bubble icon in the photos will be an MSN icon.
- It will be released in the summer. No word on how much, though.
- We got a chance to check it out. The tactility is nice, but it's a bit heavy with all the rest of the weight of the 360 controller.
Sunday, April 8th 2007
Fastmac today announced the first & only Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade for Apple's PowerBook, iBook & MacBook Pro computers. The new slimline, slot loading drive uses one of the fastest & most compatible Blu-ray mechanisms to provide up to 50 Gb of storage on 1 disk, without sacrificing compatibility with standard DVD & CD recordable media. Fastmac's Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade is scheduled to ship within 10 days and is available for pre-order from
www.fastmac.com for a special introductory price of $799.95. Each drive carries a 1 year warranty and a 30 day money back guarantee .
A rumor has it that the publishing company behind Tom's Hardware was sold for a whopping $15 million to $20 million US dollars. All the site's CEO, Omid Rahmat, confirms at the moment is that the company has been sold and they will make an official announcement soon.
LAVAL, CANADA (April 5, 2007) - Lavalys today announced the general availability of version 4.00 of its EVEREST family of products which include the widely used PC diagnostic and benchmarking tool
EVEREST Ultimate Edition and the increasingly popular IT asset management solution
EVEREST Corporate Edition. This release brings powerful new features as well as several improvements and bug fixes in direct response to customer feedbacks.
Microsoft has released an updated version of its MS07-017 patch that fixes some incompatibility problems with the animated cursor vulnerability patch. Early installers of the original 925902(MS07-017) patch that was issued on Tuesday reported seeing error messages with their Realtek HD Audio Control panel. In addition to Realtek, users of three lesser known programs could be affected. Those programs are ElsterFormular, TUGZip and CD-Tag. Microsoft says the problem appears because of the user32.dll and the hhctrl.ocx files have the same memory address after the patch. You can download the updated 935448 patch from
here.
Saturday, April 7th 2007
Transformers lovers everywhere will love this. Frank Welker and Peter Cullen, the original Optimus Prime and Megatron, will be doing the voices in the new Transformers game. The game will come to the PS2, PS3, PSP, Xbox360, DS, Wii, and PC on July 4, 2007.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs for short) have recently gained a lot of momentum. Games such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars continue to suck in subscribers, who enjoy the games so much they sometimes lose almost all traces of a social life to play these games. The maker of Guild Wars has shown interest in getting their MMORPG onto consoles, which would greatly expand their market. However, one of the makers of Guild Wars also says that their current focus is for the PC platform, and they currently have no plans on getting the original Guild Wars onto a console. Perhaps the sequel will find it's way onto Microsoft and Sony gaming consoles.
Regardless of whether or not Guild Wars actually follows through, they do show a market trend of moving games towards consoles to tap their rather large market share.
As most of you already know, EMI has
liberated it's music from the DRM (Digital Rights Management) monster, and Apple is the first company to support it. Apple will be distributing DRM-free music through iTunes right as soon as they settle their problems
with the EU. However, some people don't like being forced into low-quality encoding (128 KB/s AAC) just so they can listen to DRM free music. Microsoft may be the answer to this problem. They are trying to get DRM-free EMI music into their Zune Marketplace, and negotiations are looking hopeful. There is no word as to what encoding this DRM free music will be in.
Despite all the whining over Windows Vista, the next version of Windows, it seems like Windows Vista is doing pretty well for itself. Figuratively speaking, of course. Windows Vista now accounts for 2.04% of all operating systems installed. This is more than double last month's figure, which was .93%. In direct contrast, despite all the pro-Macintosh advertisements and Macintosh "fanboys", Mac OS X has lost .3% of it's market share, and now accounts for 6.08% of all operating systems installed.
In related news, Mozilla Firefox is gaining market momentum. 15.1% of all internet users access it through Mozilla Firefox, while Internet Explorer users account for 78.6% of all internet users. Apple Safari usage dropped to around 4.51%
Friday, April 6th 2007
Review
Mouse Pads
The Nuke-Z mouse pads come packaged in a black plastic tube, making it look like it houses some radioactive material. The N-2000 has the same logo printed on it. It is thick and features a smooth surface. The pad is constructed exactly like the Nuke-Z Z8 we had the pleasure of testing, thus only differs in size as it is geared toward the high sensitivity gamer. We take our mice for a spin on the N-2000 and let you know if its performance and proportions result in some great gaming performance.
Kaspersky Labs announced Thursday that it had discovered the first iPod specific virus. When executed the virus searches the hard disk for any .elf files. After infection if a user attempts to run a .elf file the virus displays a message which says, "'You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus."
Fortunately for most iPod users you actually have to put the virus on your iPod-and your iPod needs to have Linux installed on it. Kaspersky labs stresses that the virus is not malicious and only a proof of concept.
That is, on their legitimate movie and music delivery service, not the extremely-misused data transfer protocol. Some of you may have heard of a BitTorrent store. BitTorent has caught onto the idea that people are used to BitTorrent being associated with free content. And so, to keep themselves out of legal trouble while still offering free movies/music, the legal version of BitTorrent will support an advertising plan similar to YouTube's. BitTorrent will post the free content as soon as it's done testing their advertising scheme, which is done with the help of YuMe networks.
It's been two weeks since Apple released the Apple TV. Unfortunately, it's been getting a lot of criticism. It runs Mac OS X, yet it is very limited. The Inquirer boldly claims that the Apple TV is "limited and produces poor quality video content". A bunch of hackers seemed to think so, hence, they decided to fix Apple TV the only way they knew how; crack the thing like an egg. They first managed to install a full version of OS X, and then went on to figure out how to install a bigger hard drive, enable SSH/Apache (big for server people), start a remote desktop service, and plug in a full keyboard/mouse. The main reason that these guys are able to do so much is because the Apple TV is a lot more of a PC than Apple would like us to think. The hackers are busy working on more hacks, and
their site gets over 500,000 hits a day.
According to market analyst iSupply, Acer is doing quite well for themselves. A while back, they decided that they were going to try and nab third place in global laptop sales rankings. During Q4 2006, Acer did just that. Thanks to aggressive pricing, the lackluster sales of just about everyone else, and problems with some competitor's hardware (battery recall, anyone?), Acer achieved it's goals. The only companies selling more laptops than Acer are Dell and HP. Overall, the laptop market is looking up. Analyst firm iSupply forecasts over 98.3 million laptop sales this year, up 23.5% from last year.
If you trust the prosecution, Microsoft is guilty of labeling computers as "Windows Vista Capable" when they really can only run the basic edition of Windows Vista. While this sounds like an absolutely ridiculous reason to sue Microsoft, it is a very legitimate case. Microsoft labels almost all new computers as "Windows Vista Capable", which makes users think they are buying all the cool stuff that's advertised in the "Windows Vista Experience", such as Aero. In truth, users can only run the basic edition of Windows Vista, which comes with no such luxuries. The defense (aka Microsoft) claims that this is really not the case, and that "Windows Vista Premium Certified" is just one way to prove that Microsoft "conducted a very broad and unprecedented effort" to educate everyone on the latest version of Windows.
Addonics Technologies has announced a family of CF Hard Drive Adapters, which allow users to replace 2.5-inch IDE/SATA hard drives with one or two less power-hungry compact flash(CF) cards. The low power and shock resistant CF media can be used on any desktop PC or notebook. Once installed, the CF appears as an ordinary hard drive to the system BIOS and operating system and can also be configured as a boot device. No special device drivers are required. The adapters are compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris Operating Systems. The primary products in the Addonics CF adapter family include the IDE/CF Hard Drive Adapter and the SATA/CF Hard Drive Adapter. The IDE version comes with choice of single slot($24.99 MSRP) or dual slots($29.99 MSRP) to accommodate up to two CFs. The SATA version has a single CF slot and MSRP price of $35.99. The products will be available in April directly from
Addonics.
NVIDIA has updated the display drivers for users with GeForce 8800 series cards running on Windows XP. Some minor issues have been fixed issues including the media player hanging when playing MPEG2 HD video clips using overlay in 1080i and then switching to full screen mode, system crashes after four or more suspend/resume cycles and screen corruption when running Company of Heroes in SLI mode. You can download these drivers
here.
Thursday, April 5th 2007
Today's Reviews
Hardcore Windows XP fans will claim that Vista is currently buggy and bloated. Hardcore Mac OS X fans will claim that at least half of Vista is inspired by Mac OS X. Hardcore Linux fans laugh at all of this, and simply install the free Beryl user interface on the latest free distro of Ubuntu (or some other *nix distro). However, The Register has found some compelling reasons to move from whatever you're using to Windows Vista. The following is a shortened list, please click the source link for the full version of the list.
- UAC- It really makes the OS more secure, and despite how annoyed you may get with it, you have to admit it's a step in the right direction.
- Windows Aero- It's pretty and easy. Enough said.
- It comes with better bundled software- All the programs that come pre-loaded with Windows are either old favorites, or very new programs with great features.
- Vista Live = Xbox Live for the PC. Really.
- Halo 2- What Halo fans have been waiting for over the years is finally coming to the PC. And it looks better than most of us imagined.
- DirectX10 API- All new games/ graphics cards will eventually be exclusively for DX10 and Vista, so we better get used to it.
- Windows Vista search functions- Windows indexing the everything really helps when you misplace something.
- Windows Firewall- It's pretty good this time around, if you need a firewall.
- Lots of pretty hardware/laptops are coming out that are designed just for Vista.
- Microsoft is pushing for a complete move to Windows Vista, hence, they'll drop support for everything older just like they did for Windows 9x and ME.
Harmonix, known for it's adventures in making the Guitar Hero game, is making a new game. This game, called "Rock Band" hopes to cash in on people's want to become superstars, and lack of ability to. Instead of limiting the band-members to lead guitar, the members of the rock band can play drums, sing, or play the guitar (maybe just like Guitar Hero?). The "Rock Band" game is
officially in development, but that's about all we know. Harmonix has recently shot down rumored prices of this new game, which you can look at
here. We'll post more news on this game as it becomes more complete, but until then, it sure sounds like fun.
If you judge by the title of this story alone, you might think that the European Commission (EU) is punishing Apple and EMI for getting ready to offer music sans DRM's (Digital Right Management). The EU's complaint is much simpler than that. Apparently, Apple would only be applying these costs in some parts of the iTunes store. So, a song can cost less in one European country than another. This violates a very important article of the EU, and so Apple may incur a 10% fine if they do not change things soon.
For those of you curious about the shenanigans going on between EMI and Apple: The two companies have proudly announced a strategic partnership, and EMI will be sending Apple all their music without DRMs, which is a bold move. It is risky from a business standpoint, but very welcomed from a customer standpoint. Proof that EMI will be pioneering DRM free music can be found
here in their press release.
You may have heard some things about the very interesting unfinished
802.11N wireless standard. D-Link can officially claim that they are the first to release a device compatible with a wireless standard that isn't even released yet. Anyone with at least an ExpressCard 34 can plug this card in an access 802.11N networks, assuming they're running Windows XP or later. The device only works on 802.11B/G/N networks on the 2.4GHz band, instead of the much less crowded 5GHz band. We can expect to see the DWA-643 in America sometime in May for $120 USD. There is no word as to when we can see this in the UK or elsewhere.
Nintendo expected to make 900 billion yen in Fiscal Year (FY) 2006 (March 31, 2006 to March 31, 2007). Fortunately for Nintendo, they exceeded their own expectations. FY2006 earned Nintendo a whopping 966 billion yen (roughly $8.1 billion USD) in raw profit. This is thanks to the smashing success of the Nintendo Wii, and the Nintendo DS' strange way of being a "giant money pot". And so, in response to these incredible profits, Nintendo has increased their expected profits by a considerable margin. We should see this, along with a more detailed report of Nintendo's FY2006 performance, later.
Boot Daily been able to confirm pricing on ATI's upcoming R600-series GPUs. The R600, R630XT, R630Pro and R610 will cost $499, $199, $179 and $99 respectively.
Intel has added two ultra low voltage Core 2 Duo processors to its product portfolio. The new 1.06GHz U7500 and the 1.2GHz U7600 models, are based on the Merom core with 533MHz FSB and 2MB L2 cache. Both CPUs will be targeting mini notebooks, tablet PCs and ultra-portable notebooks. The U7500 and U7600 are introduced as part of the currently shipping "Napa refresh" platform, but will also be available for the upcoming Santa Rosa platform with a slight change in pinout. The new Merom ULV CPUs will be replacing the Core Duo U2500 processor over the coming months. One of the first manufacturers offering the U7500/U7600 will be Gateway who said that its E-100M notebook will be available with the two processors beginning on May 3 of this year.
AMD plans to release two more dual-core Opterons in order to compete with Intel's latest Xeon processors. Server makers and channel sellers will gain access to the 3GHz(120W) Model 2222 SE and Model 8222 SE chips, which will slot in just above the already shipping 2.8GHz Model 2220 SE and 8220 SE processors. The 2000 Series products cater to servers with two-sockets, while the 8000 Series feed systems with four or more sockets. A similar 95W version of the new 3.0GHz chip for the 1000 Series line should also arrive in a few weeks. AMD has yet to release pricing for the 2222 SE and 8222 SE 3.0GHz models, as it does not plan to formally announce the product for two more weeks. These may be the last Opterons before the four-core Barcelona arrives.
New information regarding the formerly named Unreal Tournament 2007 multiplayer game are next to inexistent these days. Midway, the publisher of UT 3 which ought to come this year to PCs and consoles, revealed a single 'screenshot' this week. Rumor has it the pictures are rendered and not actual in-game shots so keep that in mind when judging on the very detailed characters and surroundings.
Greenpeace has produced a new report in which it ranks Chinese-based computer manufacturer
Lenovo as the world's most eco-friendly electronics firm, beating other environmentally friendly companies such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Dell and Samsung. Out of the fourteen different companies detailed in the report, Apple Inc. came last. The companies are ranked according to the amount of toxic chemicals that are used when producing their electronics, not how energy efficient the devices themselves are, something that is beginning to become a major problem in countries such as China where many of these electronic devices are manufactured. Unsurprisingly, Apple responded by saying "We disagree with Greenpeace's rating and the criteria" as part of a statement.
Peter Molyneux, co-founder of the legendary Bullfrog Productions and founder of Lionhead Studios, has lately been entitled 'Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et de Lettres' by the French government. This Fench knight title was given to him for his significant contributions to the arts and literature.
"I see this as a credit for everyone at Lionhead Studios, all our games are a team effort. I am just the figurehead. It is fantastic to see videogames honoured in this way,"
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has approved version 1.1 of the DisplayPort interface standard for use in new designs of flat panel displays, projectors, PCs and CE devices. DisplayPort 1.1 gives manufacturers of LCD panels, monitors, graphics cards, PC chipsets, projectors, peripherals, components, and consumer electronics a next generation digital interface that is designed to replace LVDS, DVI, and eventually VGA. DisplayPort 1.1 adds support for High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) version 1.3. HDCP support enables viewing of protected content from Blu-ray and HD-DVD optical media over DisplayPort 1.1 connections. Significant advantages over DVI and VGA include a small USB-sized connector with available latching, two-way display connectivity, optional audio support, higher performance than dual link DVI at 10.8 Gigabits per second, and a unique micro-packet architecture that enables new display features. Available throughout the industry as a free to use, open and extensible standard, DisplayPort is expected to accelerate adoption of secure digital outputs on PCs, enable higher levels of display performance, and introduce high volume digital displays that are simpler, thinner, and easier to use than VGA.
Under a new brand called Intel Centrino Pro processor technology, Intel Corporation today announced it will extend its innovative and popular features designed for desktop business PCs called Intel vPro processor technology into its forthcoming high-performance laptop offering. IT departments will be able to reliably manage both desktops and notebooks and deal with what plagues them most - security threats, cost of ownership, resource allocation, and asset management -- and do so wirelessly.
Four cores running at 2.93GHz on a 1066FSB will be the base for Intel's upcoming Core 2 Extreme QX6800. Advanced cooling will be required in order to get rid of the 150W this beast will most likely dissipate. This CPU was thought to be released later this month but
TheInq doesn't say so. Instead this new Intel flagship will be shown world wide on this Easter Monday - at least the NDA will go up by then. Furthermore don't expect them at your local dealers so soon, even big First Tier OEMs won't get it in substantial quantities the sources say. This all sounds like a paper launch without a real threat for Intel to continue their push-strategy. Or is the upcoming K10 architecture so much better performance wise?
Wednesday, April 4th 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
The Antec Fusion is a fully featured HTPC case that includes a 430W power supply. The case looks more like a A/V receiver than a case. This fact makes it by far the best fitting HTPC we had the pleasure of testing so far. It completely blends in with the big volume knob, VFD and beautiful white LED. But not only the outsides of the case are unique, the inside is divided in compartments for the mainboard, power supply and hard drives. We fill the case with hardware and take a close look at all the features, hoping it delivers more than just beautiful looks at a great price point.
Review
Cases
3R System offers a full range of cases and quite a few HTPC variants. The newest such case is the HT-4000, which is a mid tower. This may be quite unusual for high quality HTPC cases, but everything found in such cases can also be found here - including the LCD, card reader and remote control. 3R System has managed to create a great, fully featured, beautiful and rock solid home theater case.
Australian professors at the University of NSW have done some significant PowerPoint research. If you ever get bored watching a PowerPoint presentation while someone is talking, then you're not alone, and there's a scientific reason behind this. Scientists have discovered that people learn best when given media on paper
or verbal media. A combination of the two tends to cause a brain overload, mixes the two forms of information, and can hurt a lot more than it can help. This is due to the fact that the brain can only handle two or three tasks at once, and otherwise will start to budget time away from some tasks to help others Professor Sweller says that "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."
AMD's ATI has a fancy name for their graphics card computing solution (Stream computing), so why doesn't NVIDIA? Since the CUDA name isn't exactly very appealing to the consumer market, NVIDIA is planning on renaming the CUDA incentive when it has something more ready for public release (such as a Folding@Home client). Rumor has it that NVIDIA will call their GPU-accelerated computing solution "GPU Computing", but we will see when NVIDIA actually releases clients to the average user.
For those of you that don't know, CUDA is a C compiler that compiles software so that it can be run/accelerated using an NVIDIA GPU as a processor.
Anyone hoping to plug in a 120GB hard drive into their Xbox is going to have to pay a figurative pretty penny for the privilege. To replace your 20GB Xbox360 hard drive with a 120GB version will cost the end user roughly $180 USD. Most people would argue that this is an absolutely ridiculous price, considering you can get a small enclosed external hard drive with the
same capacity for less than $100 USD ($120 USD when it's not on sale). Microsoft said in
a podcast exactly why they are making a 120GB hard drive a $180 attachment. Microsoft claims that everything in their hard drive is designed specifically for the Xbox 360. This means that you don't have to configure anything when you install this new hard drive, it's just plug-and-play. Microsoft has also put their Xbox360 hard drives through rigorous tests several times, a claim upon which other manufacturers aren't "able to deliver" according to Microsoft.
Most of you have probably heard by now the story of Mrs. Jennifer Strange. She participated in a radio contest in an attempt to win a Nintendo Wii for her children. The contest determined a winner based on who could drink the most water. Unfortunately, a few hours after Mrs.Strange participated, she died of water intoxication.
Anyways, there was almost a court case to file criminal charges against the radio station. The would-be prosecution determined that the whole event was one tragic accident, and that there was no way the radio station could have prevented the death of Jennifer Strange. This is because Mrs.Strange did not show any signs of water intoxication at the event. The radio station has fired 10 employees since the tragic incident. A wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Strange family against the radio station remains in court.
With the recent launch of Microsofts
Xbox 360 Elite and the release its HD-DVD drive last November the hopes were high it will support the latest HDMI profile. But obviously Microsoft decided not to stay on the same step as Sony with their HDMI 1.3 compatible PlayStation 3. For the end-user it means there is no support for:
· non-interlaced fps higher then 60 at 1920x1080 (1080p/xx) and 1280x720 (720p/xx); up to 120fps is possible with HDMI 1.3
· no Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD or TrueHD audio bitstreams (specifically for the Xbox 360 and Elite: no 5.1 PCM output in general, just Stereo)
· lower maximum bandwidth: 4.95 GBit/s vs. 10.2 GBit/s
· lower maximum resolution: 1920x1080 vs. 2560x1440
· lower maximum color depth: 24 bit sRGB or YCbCr vs. 48-bit xvYCC (1.8 times the amount of colors)
· no advanced audio syncing (Lip-Sync) function
· no support for the newly developed mini connector
In general that makes the Xbox 360 far less attractive for the cineasts among us who intended to use console as their favorite HD-DVD player.
Forum users at Broadband Reports have posted some problems with Microsoft's new patch for Vista. The KB925902 patch, which was supposed to fix vulnerabilities including the cursor exploit, is reportedly creating issues including stopping antivirus software such as AVG and F-Secure loading correctly, causing false positives of a Trojan, and even preventing users booting entirely. Although this isn't yet a widely documented problem, it may be best to delay patching Vista until the matter becomes a little clearer. Apparently the news poster at neowin.net also experienced this problem, with one of the two computers he installed the patch on failing to boot.
Stylish and Versatile Home Studio Monitoring Headphones For Pure Music Enjoyment
SINGAPORE - 4 April, 2007 -- Creative Technology Ltd. (NASDAQ: CREAF), a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products, today announced the Creative
Aurvana DJ Headphones. Sophistically designed with brushed metal and diamond-cut finishing, these powerful headphones offer precise audio reproduction for discerning music listeners, DJ mixes and home studio monitoring use. Built for ultra-comfort using high-grade acoustic components, the Creative Aurvana DJ Headphones are ideal companion products for any MP3 or portable media players with a regular headphone jack. It also perfectly complements Creative's latest range of X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio systems, offering a truly remarkable listening experience.
There's a lot to be told about the latest graphics card news. At first Sanjin Radoš from Fudzilla wrote a small preview about the
Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual. This card, as the name already implies, is powered by two Radeon X1950 Pro chips attached to each other using a special bridge chip. Every GPU (clocked at 580 MHz) has 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1400 Mhz at its disposal, using the right motherboard (ATI or Intel chipset) you will be able to get a 2GB CrossFire setup that probably outperforms even NVIDIA's 8800GTX card. In the article are some 3DMark06 scores that might get your wallet fear you again - the cards price will be around 500 Euros. The previewed sample was made by Sapphire and this will be earlier on the market than
ASUS' design.
The next card in the row is another X1950 Pro card, this time a single chip one. It's from
Jetway and it comes with GDDR4 memory clocked at 2200 MHz. Though price is still unknown but the more expensive GDDR4 memory will definitely improve the overall performance of the card.
Razer Pro|Type actually combines the Razer Tarantula with an iPod dock and comes in the appropriate white color. It will be available staring April 6th and will set you back $130 USD. It has media buttons, 10 programmable keys with backlights, two USB ports and a line-out jack, and 10 customizable "profiles" for setup switching.
Microsoft is beginning to get a reputation for having its console ads banned, with the latest advertisement being banned because of the image created over dangerous driving. The ad featured a street car chase but has been withdrawn from the air in the UK after a statement by the Advertising Standards Agency. "We were concerned that the ad gave the impression that reckless street car racing was exciting and fun, and considered that was compounded by the congratulations offered to the other driver at the end of the race by the other young men involved," said the ASA, and although Microsoft argued that the ad gave a note at the end informing watchers that the stunts were performed in a controlled environment, this wasn't enough for the ASA. This other banned Xbox ads, including the recent "Jump In" advert for the 360 with the invisible guns, and the "Life is Short" advert for the first Xbox which most people should remember with the flight to the coffin.
A new technology called Laser TV could soon be in stores competing against plasma and LCD televisions if California based company
Novalux has its way with things. The new laser TVs is designed to be used for either front/rear projection and because it can be used in current rear-projection cabinets it should be cheaper to produce. Not only will it cost less than LCD and plasma, it also boasts double the colour range and uses three-quarters less power, which should attract those who are after the best image quality available. However, the downside of laser technology remains in the design of rear-projection TVs: because of the way they work, they have a much deeper profile than LCD or Plasma TVs, so they are not ideal for hanging on walls. Sony's prototype laser TV (shown below on the left) is estimated to have a depth of between 8" and 10", whilst even large LCD displays are under 5". Novalux already has four designs ready and is in discussions with numerous OEMs, with the company hoping to see the technology go on sale in 2008.
In the second half of this year Intel plans to cut prices of its Viiv platform chipsets in order broaden its market presence. The ICH8-DH did cost round about 5 US$ in the first and only 3 US$ in the second quarter. Its upcoming successor, the ICH9-DH will start with a 1 US$ price tag - the tag will be almost more expensive itself then.
After all Intel got some serious competition with AMD's Live! solution and won't be as successful as with the Centrino platform motherboard makers think.
The DVD+RW Alliance industry group announced the release of the faster 12x/16x Double Layer DVD+R recording specifications on April 2nd. This new v1.2 standard covers burning speeds of up to 16x (around 21MB/s) which results in a writing time of only 9 minutes for a 8.5GB disc. It will take some time for the usual suspects like Plextor, Pioneer or LiteOn to come up with compatible drives. And let's not forget the media manufacturers who also need their time to improve their recordable discs.
Let's imagine you are planning a huge LAN party right in the middle of nowhere with nearly no infrastructure. Or you are company whose data center needs a temporary upgrade. Or imagine you want to serve a place, that suffers from a natural disaster, with computational power. What do you think might help you out on that? Exactly - Sun's Blackbox, a complete data center designed for rapid redeployment, unmatched flexibility and breakthrough economics stuffed into a 20-foot shipping container.
Introduced last year, in October, the Blackbox is still in a prototype stage, but Sun already decided to turn it into a commercial product. While this prototype is on a
tour through the U.S. the guys from
Ars Technica attended a guided tour at its stop-off in Seattle, Washington. The detailed review of the Blackbox, and its different compartments, makes the article a very interesting read.
After impressive initial sales figures, it looks as though Sony's new console isn't quite such a hit in the UK as it first appeared it would be. Using data collected from 7000 UK retailers which account for 90% of the software market, Chart Track today announced that PS3 hardware sales fell by an enormous 82% compared to the first week, with sales of Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm falling by over 60%. Unsurprisingly, SCEE is yet to comment on these disappointing figures. Meanwhile, the PS3 also seems to be struggling in Japan alongside Nintendo's new Wii. Since the PS3 and Wii were launched on November 11th and December 2nd respectively, the PS3 has notched 812,000 sales - only around half of the Wii's 1.95 million units, quite a significant gap considering the PS3 had a month's head start.
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), the technology used to secure many wireless networks around the world, has been demonstrated to be extremely insecure in new research by a team of cryptographic researchers at the University of Darmstadt in Germany. Using information collected by previous studies that demonstrated correlations in the encryption used by WEP, the team found that they could recover a 104-bit WEP key 50% of the time using just 40,000 captured packets, increasing to a 95% success rate with 85,000 packets. To put it into perspective, 40,000 packets can be captured in under a minute, and a 1.7GHz Pentium M can them work out the WEP key in about three seconds. WEP has been known to have security flaws since 2001, but this latest research demonstrates how weak the technology has become in recent years - if your hardware supports WPA or WPA2 it is highly recommended that you shift to that if you are worried about keeping hackers out of your wireless network.
Source:University of Darmstadt via The InquirerLast month, techPowerUp reported that Apple had
accidentally listed an 8-core Mac Pro on its website, and although it was quickly removed, the new machine genuinely has been launched now. The new Mac Pro comes with either two quad-core 3.0GHz "Clovertown" Xeons or two dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeons running at up to 3.0GHz, and it will also accommodate up to 3 terabytes of storage with up to 16GB of RAM. When it comes to graphics cards you can chose between an NVIDA GeForce 7300GT (up to four of those actually), an ATI Radeon X1900XT or an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500. The most basic model starts at $2,200, but if you want the 8-core version with 3TB hard drive space and 16GB of RAM you'll be spending at least $10,292 - and even then you only have a 256MB GeForce 7300GT. At least the shipping's free.
This comes just after the release of Adobe's new Photoshop CS 3, which is likely in an effort to attract any professional image editors who are looking to upgrade with the new software, although it could quite expensive if you like to have the best machine available.
AMD's sales chief, Henri Richard, has announced that ATI's flagship DirectX 10 graphics card could be ready to ship today, and has given an interesting new reason for its long delay. Here's what he had to say:
"The R600 will be out in the second quarter. The reason we decided to delay the launch was that we wanted to have a complete DX10-enabled solutions top-to-bottom. A lot of people wrote that the reason it is delayed is because of a problem with the silicon, but there is no problem with the silicon. We are demonstrating it. We can ship it today. But if you think about it, looking at where the market is at, the volumes are going to be in the RV610 and RV630, so it makes sense for us to do a one time launch of the entire family of DX10 enabled products."
So apparently there weren't any technical problems, ATI just wanted to release the entire range at once - interesting when you consider this has let NVIDIA get a lengthy head start with its 8800 cards. Sounds like a poor excuse to me.
Consumers are already torn between choosing Blu-ray and HD DVD for their high definition format, but that's only the surface competition. If you dig a little deeper, you can find that there is another battle commencing between HDMI and DisplayPort, two different interface standards. Although HDMI seemed to the main choice among manufacturers, DisplayPort 1.1 has now been approved which could reignite the competition, giving yet more trouble for people moving to high definition. The main improvement of 1.1 is that it boasts High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) version 1.3, however groups backing HDMI still argue that HDMI can still do everything that DisplayPort can and more, urging manufacturers to stick to HDMI. But with the backing of large companies such as AMD, NVIDIA, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, DisplayPort won't be defeated too easily, and consumers could have some more HD headaches still to come. DisplayPort could well become the replacement for DVI among graphics card companies, whilst HDMI looks to have control of the TV based market.
Plextor LLC today announced the availability of the TurboPlex PX-800A DVD Super Multi Drive, which is compatible with the Windows Vista operating system. The Plextor PX-800A drive features an E-IDE ATAPI interface for easy connectivity with personal computers running the Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems. The PX-800A internal multi-drive delivers fast DVD recording speeds of 18X DVD±R on single-layer media, 8X DVD±R on Double-Layer and Dual-Layer (DL) media, and 12X DVD-RAM. The drive also supports 8X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, 16X max DVD-ROM, 48X CD-R/RW/ROM, 12X DVD-RAM. The PX-800A multi-drive features a 2MB buffer and Buffer Underrun Proof Technology to prevent buffer underrun errors and allow multi-tasking. Plextor's PX-800A drive ships to distributors in North and South America in April 2007, with a MSRP of $79.00 USD. All retail packages include one-year full warranty and unlimited toll-free technical support.
As AMD
launched the 690G and 690V chipsets at the beginning of this March manufacturers were upset with their long postponement. Today all all the fuss is forgotten and Gigabyte introduced three mainboards based on those chipsets. Two of them are micro ATX sized boards(GA-MA69VM-S2, AMD690V; GA-MA69GM-S2H, AMD690G), the third is a full ATX sized one (GA-MA69G-S3H, AMD690G). The mentioned motherboards support DDR2-800, all have four memory slots, of course the Socket AM2 for the CPU, a single PCIe x16 slot, at least a single PCIe x1 slot, two PCI ports, four SATA II connectors, one PATA port and Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel audio.
The difference between the two µATX boards besides the different chipsets used is the support for HDCP (over HDMI) and an IEEE1394a port featured by the 690G based Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2.
The ATX sized Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H features a single PCIe x4 slot (CrossFire ready) and three PCIe x1 slots in total.
I came across a funny mistake on Gigabyte's German website. There it reads the GA-MA69VM-S2 I was just writing about is actually powered by an Intel 975X chipset. Look at the last picture or if you don't trust me follow
this link.
Update: If you would like to see real life pictures of the AMD 690 board, check out our
Gigabyte coverage during the CeBIT.
Samsung Electronics, today announced its new SpinPoint S166 Series of ultra silent and high-speed hard disk drives. The new SpinPoint S Series of hard drives offer upgraded versions of Samsung's proprietary SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to accelerate operational speed while reducing noise. The new drives are fifteen percent quieter than other competing 80GB and 160GB models currently in the market. The S166 Series has a spin speed of 7,200rpm and provides an 8MB buffer. The Series features the SATA 3.0Gbps interface and includes Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The drives are also available with a PATA interface for customers who require this application. The 3.5" SpinPoint S166 hard drives are currently shipping in 80GB and 160GB capacities and will be available worldwide in April. Pricing and market availability information will be provided on a regional basis.
Scythe Co., Ltd (Tokyo, Japan) announces the Katana 2 CPU Cooler, the 2nd generation of the former value-for-money CPU Cooler, Katana CPU Cooler, to the market. This version "2" comes with total 3 heatpipes, unique sloping shaped heatsink fins to provide a better performance than the previous model. Installation is much easier than the previous model, and the default fan is the Scythe original "Kaze Jyu 100mm Fan" to maximize the cooling performance yet maintain the high level of silence. Try this improved version of Katana CPU Cooler to fight against your CPU heat!
New D-Tek FuZion GFX GPU Block Available
The all-new D-Tek FuZion GFX CPU block will bring a new level to GPU cooling with its direct impingement design, appearance, and high quality manufacturing. Unique to the FuZion GFX is the mid chamber design that provides good flowrates while utilizing direct impingement to the GPU core that puts this block at the level we normally see only in CPU cooling designs. The GFX is the perfect match for the newly released FuZion CPU waterblock. The baseplate of the block is 100% copper and features dense rounded pins. The low profile design of the FuZion GFX allows installation with Nvidia SLI and ATI's CrossFire systems. The D-TEK FuZion GFX comes with all the necessary mounting hardware for the following video cards: all ATI Radeon X1000 series, NVIDIA 8000 / 6800 / 7800 and 7900 series. An optional mounting kit will be available in the future to mount older video cards such as ATI Radeon 9800 series. The D-Tek FuZion GFX CPU block is available now with a MSRP of $49.99 directly from
dtekcustoms.com.
After the recent FCC approval for a new wireless keyboard/mouse combination called "Cordless Desktop Wave", Logitech is now preparing Windows Vista keyboard. The new device will be Logitech's first keyboard tailored for use with Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system. Compared to the currently available "Cordless Desktop Comfort laser" keyboard, there are now a few dedicated buttons that directly correspond to Vista features. There are four additional buttons that allow access to Vista Gadgets, the Photo Gallery, the Windows Media Player and the Media Center. The Wave also offers keys for Vista's Flip3D feature and a function to put the PC into sleep mode. The enclosed mouse also supports Flip3D by clicking and the scroll wheel. Pricing has not been announced but it should remain around $100.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., today announced a high-speed version of the new OCZ Reaper HPC memory line, a PC2-9200(CL 5-5-5-18 at 2.3V) rated kit, making it the world's fastest memory that takes advantages of the heatpipe design to effectively offload heat and increase performance and stability. This unique Reaper HPC (Heat Pipe Conduit) heatspreader is engineered to deliver superior silent heat dissipation over traditional heatspreaders.
Tuesday, April 3rd 2007
Today's Reviews
Review
Mouse Pads
The Nuke-Z mouse pads come packaged in a black plastic tube, making it look like it houses some radioactive material. The Z8 has the same logo printed on it. It it thick and features a smooth surface. The 270g weight and 3.9 mm thickness may not be liked by some and loved by others. We take our mice for a spin on the Z8 and let you know if it makes us glow green with joy.
Review
Keyboards
The Saitek GK200 may look like a normal keyboard, but it is geared toward gamers, who are on a budget and would like a normal sized input device. The gaming keys are a great feature while the Audio and USB 2.0 connector round up for a well balanced gaming keyboard - all for the price of a normal one.
Marking the next step in Intel's "tick-tock" product strategy and cadence to deliver a new process technology with an enhanced microarchitecture or entirely new microarchitecture every year, Intel Corporation will begin producing its next-generation Penryn family of processors in the second half of this year. These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitecture and also Intel's industry-leading 45nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.
It looks like that DFI Corp. has released new motherboard featuring NVIDIA's nForce 680i LT SLI chipset and NVIDIA MCP55P southbridge. The LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R mainboard supports all Intel Core2 Duo/Quad/Extreme, Pentium D and Intel Pentium 4 processors with 1333/1066/800MHz FSB. There are also 3x PCI Express x16 slots: two x16 slots for SLI and one x8 for future physics cards. Click
here to read the full motherboard specs.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is a great game, but the developers missed bugs in the initial version and had to rush out a patch. This patch did some good, and some bad, because one could not use the old saved games to carry on the adventures of "The Marked One". For all those people who feared to start all over again there is a solution, in form of a tool, on the horizon that will convert older saved games to make them playable with patched game versions. Though such a converter sounds very promising it remains to be seen if this converter applies for the initial version's saved games, or to already patched ones as details of this tool are really sparse.
Transcend announced today its brand-new ExpressCard/34 SSD series. The ExpressCard/34 SSD (Solid State Disk) has a capacity of up to 16GB and low power consumption, which makes it perfect for use as a mobile storage solution in notebook computers with ExpressCard slot. This type of slot is a new standard developed by PCMCIA to carry forward the benefits of "plug-in" I/O cards to the next generation of personal computing devices. Transcend's ExpressCard/34 SSD is a smaller and faster plug-in module solution that supports USB 2.0 and PCI Express Applications, and perfectly matches mobile and desktop systems. The ExpressCard/34 SSD is compatible with Windows Vista and supports ReadyBoost function. Moreover, Transcend's ExpressCard/34 SSD comes bundled with a portable USB adapter, which makes it work as a regular USB flash drive.
It took nearly ages to get finished but on this past April Fools Day the standalone version of 'World of Padman' was released at last and it's all but a lousy joke! What originally started as a series of comic strips with Padman being the main actor turned into a map project for Quake 3 Arena (that I stumbled on around six years ago) with a very rich, unique color set. As this wouldn't be enough work the
team behind decided to go a step further and develop a whole modification around the Batman-like, gnomish character. And after that was done they worked hard on a standalone version in order to get away from the antique, rusty Quake 3 image. So what awaits you with 'World of Padman'?
A cool fun shooter, in liliput style, that including 12 maps, along with new crazy weapons, colourful player models, and new game types. ... The "World of Padman" is a multiplayer game, in which you can fight your opponent online or have some fun at home playing with some friends and bots.
If you want to take a look at the game without wanting to install it take a look at the
'World of Padman' Trailer @ YouTube. Or, if you want a high resolution version get yourself the 95MB file
over here or
here.
In order to download the game head directly to the
'World of Padman' WebsiteThis week Lite-On IT Corporation and Royal Philips Electronics announced that the joint venture between the two companies will officially take shape on May 1 of this year. The joint venture between the two companies will focus on the manufacturing and marketing of optical storage drives. Under the new agreement between Lite-On and Philips, the new venture will be called Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions (PLDS). The European Commission has fully approved of the new venture as of April 2.
PLDS will be effective in Europe from 1st of May 2007. Lite-On IT BV, the European head office of Lite-On IT Corporation, will continue to provide the same service to its customers under the new flag of PLDS. The company will handle sales, marketing, service, finance and logistics of Optical Disc Drives (ODD). PLDS will continue to sell ODD under the brand names Lite-On and HP
Piracy does have its good sides as well. Funcom, the makers of the two famous 'The Longest Journey' games, recently announced to stop producing traditional offline PC games because of too many illegal copies. Instead they are concentrating on their online game portfolio that will get another finished entry among Anarchy Online soon: Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.
If you want to be one of the first in the World of Hyborian then I suggest you to apply for the soon to be started Beta Test of Age of Conan over
here. The "the most brutal Massively Multiplayer Online game ever created" is scheduled for the end of October 2007 and will run on Windows XP/Vista PCs and the Xbox 360. If you want to get more information about the game and the world where it takes place I recommend to take a look at the corresponding Wikipedia entry found
here.
Dean Pullen from our lovely Internet news rumor mill TheInquirer just finished a three part story about his trip to Tokyo. On that trip he took a lot of pictures from all the places where the very latest high tech computer parts usually spawn first: Akihabara.
Get yourself relaxed and enjoy plenty of pictures of this unique place in our technophile world.
Part I | Part II | Part IIIElmsford, NY (PRWEB) April 2, 2007 -- Turtle Beach, a pioneer in digital audio and multi-channel headphone technology, today announced its next generation Ear Force HPA2 gaming headphones. Designed for the serious PC gamer to better discriminate from where audio cues originate, the HPA2 feature true 5.1 surround sound with front, center, surround and subwoofer speaker drivers in each ear cup, powered by a multi-channel in-line amplifier.
While most high-quality stereo headphones only contain a single 40mm driver, the HPA2 feature a 40mm front, a 40mm surround, a 30mm center, and a discrete subwoofer driver in each ear cup. These high-quality and large diameter drivers dramatically improve the positional cues that are crucially important during serious gaming.
New Dual SLi Video Core 2 Duo Laptop exceeds capability of most desktops and all prior laptops.
Cranford, NJ (PRWEB) April 2, 2007 --
CompAmerica's new ORCA EXTREME laptop can do anything an extreme gaming or CAD CAM workstation can do. Hence, CompAmerica has dubbed ORCA EXTREME: "the most powerful laptop on earth."
New ORCA EXTREME Laptops sport amazing new dual video adapter "as one" SLi technology based on up to two NVIDIA 7950GTX series Video Adapters with up to 1G Video Ram. This remarkable combining of two video adapters into a single display, achieves unequaled video performance for gaming, cad cam, multimedia and graphics applications.
The unit ships with a choice of Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs up to the Extreme 2.93GHz X6800, and up to 3 Mobil Hard Drives of up to 200GB each supporting Raid 0, 1 and 5. The Raid support insures that data integrity is maintained despite single drive failure. The new Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 achieves extreme performance, and despite being a so-called "desktop Core 2 Duo" also has amazing ability to conserve energy usage.
A broad range of integrated peripherals including USB 2 ports, firewire, gigabit lan, and integrated Super 108MBPS wireless 802.11 G/B and Bluetooth, deliver remarkable connectivity.
As I don't use Linux at all I found
this article to be pretty informative for the penguin people among us. Its all about overclocking graphics cards with ATI chips and the new tool the people at Phoronix are using:
ATIpower. It is compatible to the X1000 chip family where the older Rovclock still capitulates.
A Sony spokesperson confirmed to
GamesInsdustry.biz that the price for Sony's PlayStation Portable Core package (includes a PSP, the battery and an AC adaptor) was cut to 169.99 US$. Last week the official retail price for the same bundle was 199.99 US$.
Asked for a similar European action the Sony Official said there is nothing like this planned yet.
Though the NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra MCP was launched at the end of last year it took NVIDIA some time to come up with an actual reference design. Again
ChileHardware were the first in the business to show some facts. The 650i ultra is the least feature-packed chipset out of the 600i family, with the absence of SLI being the biggest drawback. But if you don't intend to go for a SLI setup then the board will please you with full Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad support. Furthermore we are talking about dual-channel DDR2-800 (four DIMM sockets), a single PCIe x16, two PCIe x1 and three PCI (32bit/33MHz) slots, four SATA II ports and a single PATA port (HDD or optical drive).
The ATX I/O panel is not that crowded either, besides the obligatory PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports there are four USB 2.0 ports, the Gigabit Ethernet connector and the eight-channel audio connectors.
The mentioned Gigabit port supports NVIDIAs FirstPacket prioritizing technology in order to deliver the lowest pings possible while gaming. The SATA ports support Raid arrays (Raid 0, 1, 0+1 and 5) and onboard you will find four additional USB2.0 pinouts to be used with a USB bracket. Its price will be in the 50-100 US$ range, companies like EVGA, XFX, ECS, Biostar will soon adopt this design to their product family. All in all very nice budget solution mainboard that has its strengths.
It looks like Microsoft has decided against the major service packs given to Windows XP, instead deciding to stick with much smaller fixes where necessary. According to a senior Microsoft official, one of the reasons for this is because Vista is "high quality right out of the gate" (is that an admission that XP wasn't?), but the more likely reasons include the improved automatic updates and the improved bug-reporting technology. Although there will be 'lite' service packs for Vista, they won't be on the same scale as those that were released for XP. Dropping the large service packs is likely to be welcomed by many IT managers after SP1 for XP caused problems including slow-downs and crashes. There is still no date for the first service pack for Vista, but users on slower internet connections will certainly prefer the changes.
Although Blu-ray is still quite fresh on the shelves, owners of Blu-ray players may be concerned about news that the Blu-ray specifications are set to change this autumn. Although these players should remain adequate for general viewing, changes to BD-Java specifications mean that current devices may not be able to take full advantage of interactive features, including picture-in-picture. Unlike HD DVD players, many of the Blu-ray players don't all have Ethernet ports to let users upgrade the firmware, so users could be left stranded - it isn't even clear if those that can take advantage of firmware upgrades will be compatible with the new specifications. Manufactures have confirmed that new disks will still play in first generation players, but early adopters may still be disappointed that their expensive hardware has become out-dated so quickly.
Monday, April 2nd 2007
At the CeBIT the guys from the PC Games magazin interviewed ATIs Vijay Sharma and because of their tight schedule just focused on a single story first. Sharma said the
R600 will be compatible to the AGP to PCIe bridge called Rialto, which means that Add-In-Board (AIB) Partners could manufacture AGP cards based on the R600 family (R600/RV610/RV630).
Now the complete interview was released to the public which is none the less a very informativ read. Head over
here if you want to know more about the upcoming R600 family, DX10 and drivers, new Antialiasing modes, memory interfaces and stuff like that.
Today it's all about highest end stuff, nearly. And as usual one of our main sources is
Fuad Abazovic who is still very close to ATI it seems. Anyway, let's start:
The R600 powered cards will come in two flavours, one equipped with GDDR3 and the faster one with GDDR4 memory. The news is that the GDDR4 memory will be clocked at 2100MHz which is 100MHz faster than previously reported. The GPU core clock will remain at around 800MHz. But if you are keen on the GDDR4 board you will get a premium waiting time besides the premium price and performance - the GDDR3 card will be introduced first, a 'couple' of weeks earlier. As both GPU coolers for the two R600 variants will be the same its quite interesting to know that this advanced 2-slot air cooler is not louder than the Radeon X1950XTX cooling solution.
Thermaltake today announced the latest addition to their popular Small Form Factor chassis, LANBOX HT. Based on the proven structural design of LANBOX Series chassis, LANBOX HT exhibits a more contemporary and sophisticated aluminum front bezel design that can be easily integrated into today's home theater environment.
Apples newest offering - the Apple TV, costs a mere $299 US Dollars with a better graphic card than the Mac Mini and is actually a Intel based PC. Some talented coders have now managed to run the current OS X version on the hardware. There are also clear instructions, if you want to do so yourself.
Asus uses the Lamborghini brand, while Acer snapped up Ferrari. Now HP has teamed up with Maybach to offer their own brand such notebooks. Configuration is not certain but the new model is supplied with Intel Core 2 Duo processor, built in SSD-store 64Gb and video adapter (presumably GeForce Go 7ххх or 8ххх), Bluetooth mouse as well as some form of exclusive carrying bag and an additional battery. Prices should be around $4000 USD.
Most of us know the kanine units from Airports, which are suppose to sniff out illegal substances. Lucky and Flo are trained to find pirated DVDs. The Malaysian authorities managed to bust a three million USD pirating ring in the recent past and now have managed to uncover another 430,000 USD pirating operation after the police did not find anything during the first search. It would be interesting to see the success if the dogs are used in Airports on flights from Asian countries to the US.
Digital Rights Management is famous for frustrating numerous people that chose to download music legally when it comes to sharing between devices, whilst the illegal file sharers sit there laughing at them. But now it seems one of the major record labels, EMI, could be listening to customers at last. Rumours are flying around the internet claiming that Steve Jobs' visit to London to speak with EMI could be to negotiate a deal that will see significant amounts of EMI's music catalogue being available to download on iTunes without anti-piracy software, something music fans have been begging for since the start of the legal music downloads. If this is true, then it might not take long for the other major record labels to respond with DRM-free music, a move which would make it much easier for music downloaders to play their music on different MP3 players. There will be a live audio webcast of the press conference at 1pm London time on
EMI's website, which is when the deal is supposed to be announced.
Update: it's official, EMI has launched DRM-free downloads across its
entire music catalogue (although iTunes will get it first) - read on for the press release.
NVIDIA has investigated end user reports of high performance DIMM failures on the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI-based platforms. During this process we have been in close contact with DIMM manufacturers and the DRAM manufacturers they rely on to understand the failure scenario. By working with our community, we believe that the observed failure is a breakdown of the silicon in the DRAM caused by the prolonged application of 2.4V on the voltage rails of the DIMMs. NVIDIA's own internal testing has observed this failure on multiple motherboards using different chipsets (both NVIDIA and non-NVIDIA chipsets). This issue is not directly related to motherboards using the NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI MCP or other chipsets. If you are using this type of memory and are experiencing this issue, NVIDIA recommends contacting your memory manufacturer or system manufacturer for additional information and warranty information.
Dell said it is now providing buyers of the XPS M1210, 1710 and the M2010 computers access to
LoJack's one year of theft protection service free of charge. After the first year, users will have to subscribe to the regular LoJack service, which currently goes for $50 per year. The LoJack for Laptops service does not require GPS functionality, but works with a relatively simple call-home software. Computers with the LoJack contact the monitoring center of the company when connected to the Internet. If a notebook is reported stolen, the device is placed on "high-alert" and it will try to call home every 15 minutes, allowing the LoJack recovery team to track down its position. The company claims that it can recover three out of four stolen laptops.
Microsoft is planning to release a new range of Zunes, according to
Browserden.co.uk. Called the Zune 360, the new device will look a lot more like Apple's iPhone. The Zune's screen will be extended to the full size of the device and controlled by a touch screen or with buttons on its side. It will have a stylus and handwriting recognition which you can use to search for music in your online library. It will not be able to make a call and will come with two disk sizes 40GB and 80GB. The default brown color will be changed to white. Microsoft also plans to capture the iPod Nano and cellphone market in one go, with the release of Zune 180. The machine will be based around Sony Ericson's Walkman W880 phone and will be able to make mobile calls as well as holding up to 2 GB of removable flash based storage. Microsoft will customize it with a Zune interface and the ability to play Zune Marketplace DRM encoded files. The new Zune players are planned to be released in June 2007.
Sunday, April 1st 2007
For several years, people have used the cliche "Turbocharge your PC" when referring to upgrading it. Raktron Inc., which has both PC and car enthusiasts, had enough of this nonsense and decided to literally turbocharge their PC. They took a turbocharger out of a 1990 Mitsubishi Eclipse, and hooked what would be the intake manifold to the front of the case, and set the turbocharger fan to run at 3500rpm. Raktron then proceeded to put headlights on the case, gave it an incredible paint job, and licensed it through Ohio (could just be a novelty plate, though).
For more details of this project, please see the source link below.
When we first heard confirmation of a black Xbox360 with a 120GB hard drive and HDMI from Microsoft, we nearly forgot about our gaming friends in Europe. Europe is also promised the Elite version of Microsoft's latest console. Unfortunately, Europe will be seeing the Xbox360 Elite a lot later than the Americans will. While the USA will get Xbox360 Elite's on April 29th, Europe may not see the Xbox 360 Elite until at least "late summer". This is thanks to some insiders information from European retailer HMV. HMV will have more Xbox 360 Elite details for European customers as they come.
A news post at
Heise online caught my attention earlier today. Linked below is a picture out of the first tab patent (
patent # 1,435,664) from 1922. Over 70 years Later this patent merged into a patent (
# 5,160,296) owned by the father of an opera developer which was the first web browser utilizing tabbed browsing. The developer later on switched to the Mozilla team and so they were allowed to implement tabbed browsing. As Microsoft introduced the internet explorer 7 it was time for the Mozilla foundation to strike back.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA) , a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.
If you'd like to learn how to install TiSP, please read the instructions
here.
It seems that you can overclock way more than just your computer. A man in Kentucky has managed to overclock everything in his house, simply by increasing the frequency in his electric current. Inspired by the "measly" performance of all his electronics, Lance Hatler decided that 60Hz was not enough for his house. After a lot of trial and error, along with several trips to the emergency room, Hatler has managed to overclock his electrical current to 900MHz. Increasing this frequency any further caused minor fires and structural instability (no his house didn't bluescreen :p). A mere example of all this extra power is Hatler's newfound ability to shred 2x4's (large pieces of wood) in his garbage disposal. Unfortunately, due to the extreme heat output of this overclock, Hatler had to put a gigantic CPU cooler on top of his house. His house maintains a balmy 115 degrees Fahrenheit. When asked what Hatler plans to do next, he claims he will break the 1GHz barrier with the help of liquid cooling.
Relating to
Firingsquad.com, NVIDIA will release a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R. optimized graphics driver for the GeForce 8 series next week. The new optimized driver should increase the performance especially on GeForce 8800GTX cards, because these cards aren't much faster than their "little brother", the 8800GTS, when playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with current available drivers. Additionally the new driver should provide the missing SLI-functionality in the game.
Seems like Game Informer struck a deal with Rockstar Games to exclusively publish a ten-page long article on what seems to be one of the biggest games of this year: GTA IV. Accordingly they revealed the cover of their May issue, which will feature the exclusive article. It's definitely something worth looking forward to.
Saturday, March 31st 2007
Today's Reviews
Or so a study of 600 Americans claims. When given a newspaper article, the average American will read 75% of it if it is on a website. This isn't too bad, especially when compared to the 62% of an article in the average reliable newspaper (like The Boston Globe) the average American will read. The same American will read about 57% of an article published in a tabloid-style newspaper, such as The Weekly World News. These numbers are surprising, especially considering how much effort people will put into putting a news story in print. However, if you consider how much longer the average newspaper article is, maybe newspaper-readers do have longer attention spans after all.
People who want the right to rip their own DVD movies onto their computers have just won a major battle. The DVD Copy Control Association was trying to stop a California-based startup company from selling their only product, which ripped DVD's onto computers. When the DVD Copy Control Association brought this to court, the judge and jury took one look at the license and declared that not letting this company do their thing would violate the DVD Copy Control Association's own license. The judge says that "This (the license) is a product of a committee of lawyers". Basically, the license that tried to enforce copy-protection laws really just ended up shooting the copy-protectors in the foot (figuratively speaking, of course).
Some of you have heard of plans for a .XXX domain name. Like .com, .gov, .org, and .net, .xxx would indicate a certain type of material associated with the domain. Namely, pornography. The .xxx domain name would be wonderful for parents who want to ensure their children aren't scarred for life from pornographic material. And so, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who manages all the domain names for the internet, had a big debate over what they should do about .xxx. In the end, they decided that making the .xxx domain name would be similar to censoring the internet, which is not what they want to do. Obviously, advocates for this domain will work hard to make ICANN reconsider their decision.
Some people are worried that the superior technology in flash-based solid-state-drives (SSD's) might make a serious dent in the hard disk drive (HDD) market. However, according to market analysis firm TrendFocus, the hard drive industry is actually looking at a projected growth. Thanks to perpendicular recording technology, which reduces the cost to shove more data on a disk, the hard drive market is expected to grow an impressive $33 billion USD. The enormous growth projection is also due to the growing IT markets in India and China.
On February 16th of this year, NVIDIA went ahead and announced their new GPU computing client,
CUDA. Over seven weeks later, we have yet to see so much as a beta of CUDA. And so, this means that NVIDIA, similar to the G80 Vista driver fiasco, has yet to deliver a product that they promised we'd see. The part about this that NVIDIA users probably hate the most is the lack of a GPU-based Folding@Home client. It seems that these days, everything except an NVIDIA system (even the PS3) can run a Folding@Home GPU client. This is an extreme opposite to ATI's GPU processing client, called "Stream", which has a large list of
clients that can be used to accelerate programs using the GPU.
