OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled their first miniPCI-Express Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, the affordable flash-based storage option to significantly increase the capacity for netbooks. For on the go computing professionals and students looking for an ideal storage upgrade on their ultra-portable platforms, the OCZ miniPCI-E SSD is the cost effective alternative to traditional standard storage drives as a reliable upgrade on mobile systems.

A relatively unknown company, Triplex, has designed a Radeon HD 4830 graphics accelerator that does not require the 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. This is especially interesting for two reasons: that it is RV770, and that it runs at reference clock speeds despite shedding its traditional power design. Spotted on XtremeSystems, this engineering sample PCB features a 2+1 phase power design, that draws all its power from the PCI-Express slot.

Also featured are 512 MB of 256-bit GDDR3 memory, DVI-D, HDMI and D-Sub outputs, and a seemingly two-slot cooler design that is yet to be pictured. The card lacks CrossFireX fingers. The GPU has 640 stream processors, DirectX 10.1 compliance, and a 256-bit memory interface. It has AMD reference clock speeds of 575/900 MHz (core/memory). For reference the third picture shows a Radeon HD 4670 accelerator of the same make, and PCB length.

Adding to its now 6-strong lineup of motherboards for the Intel Core i7 processors, that includes the recently pictured X58M micro-ATX board, the company is preparing yet another full-sized motherboard, the X58Pro-E. This board is designed to be a notch above the X58Pro thanks to support for the GreenPower design. This is perhaps to compete with similar offerings from other manufacturers, under the $220 price-point.

MSI has taken care of the essentials with this one. A basic 4+1 phase VRM powers the CPU, which uses the company's proprietary Driver-MOSFET (DrMOS) technology. Six DDR3 memory, three PCI-Express x16 slots supporting ATI CrossFireX technology, seven SATA II ports (six routed to the ICH10R, with one on the board routed to an external controller, the same controller providing an eSATA port), several USB ports, IEEE-1394 and gigabit Ethernet, make for all of this board's feature set. We predict this board to be launched alongside the X58M. Many thanks to one of our readers for providing the pictures.

High-performance storage solutions vendor Fusion-io may have gone way ahead of setting a record, when during the Storage Networking World event, the company demonstrated its 640 GB PCI-Express ioSAN card to support as many as 768 simultaneous DVD-quality video streams. To do so, the engineers set up a storage network consisting of a host workstation for the ioSAN card, 12 disk-less servers with quad-socket, quad-core processors, using an InfiniBand backbone, two 10 gigabit Ethernet switches, and NVIDIA graphics cards to provide the video acceleration. The resulting display consisted of about a dozen 50-inch HD LCD TVs running to form a compound display panel, onto which the 768 video streams were played on.

Joshua Aune, Fusion-io systems architect, says that the ioSAN card could have stored 2,500 DVD-quality movies, and will further be able to support 1,024 video streams, which the company plans to demo in two weeks time at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, in Las Vegas USA. The ioSAN 320GB PCIe card boasts a 1.5GB/sec. read speed and 1.4GB/sec. write speed with 32k packets or 186,000 IOPS for reads and 167,000 IOPS for writes using 4k packets. The card used in this feat had 640GB of single-layer cell (SLC) NAND flash memory in two 320 GB modules. A video of the feat can be watched here.

Albatron today introduced a new graphics card touting compatibility with single-lane PCI-Express interface. The Albatron GeForce 9500GT PCI-E 1X, as the name suggests, is an entry-level graphics accelerator which is compliant with most of the current generation standards. It is based on the NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT, which gives it a fair chance to make it to HTPCs and multi-head display setups. Being based on PCI-E x1 bus, the card will fit into a PCI-Express slot of any length and generation.

The GeForce 9500 GT provides 32 stream processors, and is CUDA-supportive. The card packs 256 MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 1400 MHz. The core and shader domains are clocked at 550 MHz and 1375 MHz respectively. The card uses a half height PCB, and comes with a low-profile bracket. DVI and composite connectors are provided on the card, while a header extends out a D-Sub connector. HDMI is supported by means of a dongle. The card relays audio to the HDMI connector from an SPDIF source. Albatron will price this card well within the US $100 mark.

Yes, you read the title correctly, on their stand at CeBIT, ASUS has a motherboard on show featuring seven full length PCI-Express slots. Four operate at full x16 speed, whilst the remaining three are at 8x speed. This has been achieved through the use of Intel's X58 chipset and the addition of two NVIDIA NF200 chips. Dubbed the P6T7 WS Supercomputer, it has been said to be the, "best choice for intensive parallel computing demand." Although no details yet on availability or pricing, the board is confirmed to support up to 24 GB RAM through six DDR3 slots, six SATA ports, two SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and two eSATA ports and the usual 7.1 onboard sound and gigabit ethernet. The featured shot shows the board "naked" so to speak but due to this, you can see how ASUS have crammed the northbridge, southbridge and two NVIDIA chips into the bottom right corner of the board. This has given the space for the seven PCI-E slots, though it will require some sort of low profile cooling solution so as not to obstruct the installation of any graphics cards.

ECS showcased yet another upcoming motherboard during the ongoing CeBIT event: the LFH-A. Based on Intel's P55 chipset, the motherboard supports LGA-1156 socket. Featuring all the essentials the Ibex Peak platform provides, that includes two support for dual-channel DDR3 memory, six internal SATA ports, two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots and one PCI-E x4, the board also extensively supports Intel's Flexible Display Interface that links the IGP on the processor die to the connectors on the board: DVI, D-Sub and HDMI.

The P55 chipset is cooled by a small pre-production heatsink. It should also indicate that the P55 chip indeed runs cool enough to warrant a heatsink of that size, and that since most of the traditional chipset machinery has migrated to the CPU, there's very little the vendors need to do as far as chipset cooling goes. ECS LFH-A might feature in some of the first waves of motherboards to launch along with the launch of the platform itself.

Where invention pauses, innovation takes over. This seems to be the case with NVIDIA's initiative to release "Green Edition" products of some of its popular GPUs, which brandishes energy-efficiency. NVIDIA's move to release revisions of the G92 and G94 GPUs built on the newer 55 nm process, coupled with clock-speed and core voltage reductions, seems to have made it possible for manufacturers to redesign the cards in a way that they end up being not only energy efficient, but also cheaper to produce.

Palit seems to be one of the first to be out with a 9600 GT Green Edition accelerator that lacks a 6-pin PCI-Express power input. The card has reached retail channels in Japan, pictured by AKIBA. The card uses a core clock speed of 600 MHz, with its 512 MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 900 (1800 DDR) MHz. The card uses Palit's regular radial GPU cooler design. It draws all its power from the PCI-Express slot. It lacks an SLI connector. Output options include DVI, D-Sub and HDMI. It is priced at ¥ 7980 (around US $86.7).

ELSA Japan, a leading computer graphics solution provider and Lucidlogix (Kfar Netter, Israel, CEO - Moshe Steiner) announce an agreement to deploy Lucid's HYDRA based chip in ELSA Japan High Performance products.

The companies have teamed up to transform high performance computing in the Japanese marketplace. For the first time, a product based on Lucid's HYDRA technology will be used in a new line of ELSA Japan high performance systems for the HPC, broadcast and medical markets.

After AMD embraced the DDR3 memory standard, the eventuality always existed where motherboard vendors could release motherboards that supported both DDR2 and DDR3 memory standards, to support the complete spectrum of processors built for the AM2, AM2+ and AM3 sockets with appropriate memory modules installed. The Jetway MA3-79GDG COMBO will be one of the first in its kind.

Based on the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipset, the MA3-79GDG COMBO holds two DDR2 DIMM slots for DDR2-1066 MHz memory, and two slots to support DDR3-1066 MHz memory. Memory support is subject to the processor being used. The motherboard comes in the micro-ATX form-factor and goes ahead with providing support for the ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU standard apart from its Radeon HD 3300-class IGP. The rest of this motherboard consists of a standard feature-set, with single PCI and PCI-Express x1 slots, 8-channel audio with optical and co-axial SPDIF audio connectivity, IGP video output through DVI, HDMI and D-Sub connectors, gigabit Ethernet and eSATA. This motherboard will reach stores next month and hopes to cash-in on its biggest USP: upgrade-friendliness. Its price isn't known at this point.

Although presentations that are internal to companies never make it to the public scene, some of those presentations are interesting, to say the least. Computer hardware manufacturers spread around an area as saturated as Taiwan, China, Malaysia, etc., get so involved into aggressive competition that in more occassions than one they get carried away. Internal presentations are the ones manufacturers such as ASUSTek, MSI and Gigabyte share with their potential customers in channel vendors, OEMs, and the likes. One such presentation by MSI, a particular slide of which, has become an example of how far competition has taken the manufacturers.

Auzentech has unveiled the X-Fi Forte PCI-Express sound card. The Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 is the first Low Profile native PCI express audio card that Auzentech has designed especially for gamers and audiophiles. Compared to the X-Fi chipset reference design, the Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 has improved circuitry and components.
"A large percentage of our customers are both gamers and audiophiles," said Stephane Bae, president of Auzentech, Inc. "Increasingly, they are requesting a low-profile sound card with 'mind-blowing' audio playback for music, movies, and games. We created the Auzen X-Fi Forte with these customers in mind."

If you're still one of the few owners of an old AGP video card made by BFG Tech, here's what. As of today, BFG Tech is offering those AGP owners to trade in their current working AGP BFG graphics card for a BFG PCI Express graphics card. BFG only requires your BFG AGP card to come in good, working condition, and they'll send the PCI-E equivalent at no cost to you. If you want to upgrade to an even better performing card, add $50 and you have it. Please note, that the offer is for U.S. customers only. The chart below shows BFG AGP cards and their closest PCI Express equivalent. Find more information here.

The year 2008 so far, has been very eventful for the graphics card market. A reinvigorated GPU lineup by ATI, brought in some fierce competition to NVIDIA, which resulted in a tug-of-war with pricing graphics cards in the market, with either company refusing to lose on grounds of pricing. This event, coupled with the announcement of several game titles by game publishers, resulted in bumper-sales of graphics cards, giving the present state of the global economy little or no relevance.

The months to come hold the same amount of importance for both AMD and NVIDIA, where the next round of competition begins with successors to current high-end products being slated. NVIDIA is expected to continue with its monolithic high transistor-count GPU design methodology, while AMD could bring in a little change to the way it uses two efficient GPUs to build powerful products.

After flaunting the P6T Series motherboards, and the monstrous Rampage II Extreme, ASUS decided to expand its Bloomfield CPU-supportive motherboard lineup with its workstation-class offerings. ASUS is known for bringing in workstation boards on desktop platforms. They have had Intel 975P based workstation boards, just as they had nForce 590 SLI boards. These desktop-thru-worksation platforms are usually single CPU socket platforms, with certain workstation features, such as PCI-X interface, enterprise-grade storage controllers, among other features that make them durable and suitable for mission-critical environments. They don't sport enterprise chipsets, and hence carry batch-leading desktop chipsets.

With Nehalem and the new Socket 1366, ASUS did just that, with the inclusion of two single-socket workstation boards. These motherboards, at the outset support the upcoming Core i7 processors, and have the potential to support Xeon processors that use the same socket, or even the same core. There are two models lined-up: P6T6 WS Revolution and P6T6 WS Pro. The P6T6 WS Revolution is the flagship board. It features six full-length PCI-Express slots, which might have variable number of available PCI-Express lanes, depending on the number of PCI-E cards connected. It features a 16+2 phase CPU power circuit. The board features the Tylersburg X58 chipset, along with an ICH10 series southbridge. There is passive cooling for the VRM area, northbridge, and a large southbridge block, that could be possibly cooling a supplementary PCI-Express switch chip. Storage options include Serial-attached SCSI (SAS), SATA II and e-SATA ports.

Fusion-io, a company that's famous for its server SSD solutions, unveiled today at the E for All conference and expo its first consumer product, the ioXtreme. ioXtreme represents a PCI-Express based solid state drive with a capacity of 80GB. Fusion-IO promises that the ioXtreme PCI-E SSD card will be 20x faster than traditional hard drives and about 5x times faster than mainstream SSDs. In terms of transfer speeds it will be able to hit a data throughput of 500MB/s to 700MB/s. When released ioXtreme will power the world's fastest supercomputers and workstations.
"Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, unzipping and manipulating massive files even installing a new application-all at the same time," said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. "Suddenly, with the ioXtreme, tasks that would have brought your system to its knees are no longer limited by the disks spinning loudly inside your box."
The ioXtreme will be priced at under $1000 and be available for home and consumer use in Q1, 2009.

Creative has expanded its Sound Blaster (SB) X-Fi Lineup with two new entries. The Titanium series marked Creative's entry into true PCI-Express hardware-accelerated audio. The Titanium series cards are said to have a tweaked CA-20K audio processing core that has native PCI-Express interconnects to the rest of the system. It is also said to run a lot cooler than its older variant featured in some of the PCI versions of Sound Blaster X-Fi.

First up, is SB X-Fi Titanium. This vanilla version of the card features the same PCB as the other variants. It is best put as the successor to X-Fi Xtreme Gamer. It has the same audio processor, DAC and OPAMP circuit, just that the X-RAM buffer isn't provided. In its place, a low-capacity memory chip that keeps the CA-20K operational is present. That shouldn't in any way affect its function or quality, except that the X-RAM feature which will be lacking. The card lacks an EMI shield as well. This card has been put on sale for weeks now, on popular etailers such as Newegg. It carries a price tag of around US $100.

Next is the card we are interested in, the card is SB X-Fi Titanium Professional Audio. In many respects, the card is close to being identical to the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional. The card lacks the Fatal1ty branding, perhaps to give it an audiophile card's look. It bundles 3.5mm to RCA converter cables. The software bundle includes Creative Media Toolbox, a content creation software kit that takes advantage of the card's Audio Creation Mode. Other than that, nothing else advertised seems to differentiate it from the Fatal1ty card. It has been published on Creative's Hong Kong website here, and is priced at approximately US $154.

Following several companies coming up with nettop embedded platform boards based on the Intel Atom processor, Galaxy seems to have taken the initiative to build a ATX size board. This board features an Atom 230 processor aided by the i945GC + ICH7 chipset. It features a PCI-Express x16 slot along with five PCI slots. The i945GC provides integrated Graphics Media Accerator 950 to handle display, while the ICH7 provides four SATA ports. The board provides two DDR2 slots for 533 MHz or 667 MHz modules. The provision of a fan connector near the CPU suggests active cooling for the CPU.

The board provides only a D-Sub connector for display output though, several smaller form-factor boards even include DVI connectors, something that's lacking here. There's 8-channel audio provided, and the PCI-Express x16 provides the option of upgrading the graphics sub-system though don't expect to build a gaming machine out of this, it uses only an Atom 230 that isn't top of the line for Atom series either. Besides, Galaxy seems to building this for the OEMs, indications are this won't hit the retail market.

The HyperTransport Consortium released an updated specification, HT 3.1, that increases the base clock speed of the HyperTransport bus from its previous version 3.0 limit of 2600 MHz (5200 MT/s) to 3200 MHz (6400 MT/s). The upcoming 45nm processors will be given a host of architectural updates, one of them being a revised HT 3.1 system bus. Since AMD processors use a 32-bit wide HyperTransport link to the core logic, the aggregate bandwidth of the system but would be raised to 51.6 GB/s (25.8 GB/s in each direction).

This 10 GB/s increment is supposed to favour the upcoming AMD Fusion processors, where a graphics processor would be embedded into the CPU. That could also mean that the CPU could carry PCI-Express switches, effectively eradicating the northbridge. This would mean performance gains with the CPU communicating with PCI-E devices directly instead of through a northbridge-based PCI-E switch, much in the same way as integration of memory controllers five years ago helped AMD processors. It is expected that motherboard vendors have no problems implementing HT 3.1, the AMD 790GX and 790FX chipsets offer native support to HT 3.1 with 45 nm CPUs.

System component expansion interface PCI-Express could get its next major face-lift in 2009, following which products compatible with the interface could be out by 2010. The PCI Express Special Interest Group (SIG) is in the process of devising the new interface that provides devices with twice the amount of bandwidth as that of the current PCI-Express 2.0, that's 8 Giga-transfers per second (GT/s). it is said to be backwards compatible with older versions of the interface.

Changes in specifications are being made that allow this interface to support triple-slot, 300W (from the interface), 1.5 kg (roughly 3 lbs) graphics cards. Perhaps this is the ideal interface for 'heavier' products from NVIDIA, AMD, and soon Intel.

As of today, AMD is close to over a year and a half behind Intel with the implementation of the DDR3 system memory standard, and it doesn't look like we are going to see a DDR3 AMD platform only until late this year or early next year. Chilian website CHW.net published slides of the roadmaps for AMD chipsets in the months to come, also published are slides refering to the details of the next generation southbridge by AMD, even though the latest entry, the SB700 is only teething and only the latest motherboards with 7-Series chipsets feature this.

Creative, a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products, today announces the PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series and PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series sound cards, unleashing the full power of Creative X-Fi hardware audio processing for PCI Express-based PCs.

We all know the Inquirer isn't always right. However this story seems solid. The Inq is reporting of a new Asus s771 board. Of course nothing special, though next to Skulltrail this would be the only board with overclocking options in the BIOS.

SanDisk Corporation today unveiled a solid-state storage solution that works in conjunction with a PC's hard drive to store and launch the computer's operating system and software applications when needed. The new SanDisk Vaulter Disk, which is a flash-based PCI Express module, tag-teams with your laptop or desktop computers' hard drive to provide enhanced performance and lower load times. Both Vaulter and the hard drive are integrated into the PC and operate simultaneously, while maintaining a low cost per gigabyte. The SanDisk Vaulter Disk will be offered to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) early next year in capacities from 8GB to 16GB.

At this year's Games Convention ASUS is showing off their new RD780 M3A-MVP motherboard. It will feature the new Socket AM2+, but it will be able to handle any AM2 CPU along with the new Phenoms. It will also be able to run DDR2 up to 8500 (1066MHz) speeds, and it will feature two PCI-E 2.0 compliant x16 slots.