Mushkin Enhanced, a leading manufacturer of high performance PC - components, announces the immediate availability of the three best-selling 2x 2GB DDR2 memory kits of 2008 announced its PCB used a special feature. Instead of the familiar green PCBs, Mushkin has invented something special. Based on the slogan "Black is beautiful" is the new X-line 8 series using "Challenger 8" series PCBs. Casemodders and all others who lay emphasis on special details, will be pleased with the black 8 SKILLED "Challenger" PCB. The black PCB now fits perfectly with the other PC components in the interior life and evaluates the overall picture.

The X-Line modules are now available in the following specifications:

• 4096 MB, XP2-6400, 4-4-4-12 Dual Pack (2x 2048 MB), with EPP, Retail, X-Line (996580X)
• 4096 MB, XP2-6400, 4-4-4-12 Dual Pack (2x 2048 MB), with EPP, Retail, X-Line (996580wX)
• 4096 MB, XP2-8000, 5-5-5-15 Dual Pack (2x 2048 MB), REDLINE, with EPP, Retail, X-Line (996593X)

Images provided in the order 996580X, 996580wX and 996593X:

Choice is a wonderful thing. Informed Choice is even better, where you choose something after knowing its inside-outs. The very opposite of informed choice is dogma, where you rigidly oppose something and stick to your beliefs. Incidentally, dogma seems to be one of the significant factors keeping users away from embracing Windows Vista OS, of what can be inferred from an experiment by Microsoft in San Fransisco, United States. A group of Windows XP users having negative impressions on Windows Vista were introduced to a "new" operating system they referred to as "Mojave". User experiences on using this operating system were noted and feedback taken. A surprising 90 percent of these users gave positive feedback on this new OS. They were later told that the new OS was nothing else but Windows Vista.

Despite Microsoft releasing numerous updates and fixes to the Vista OS making it a fairly stable, reliable OS close to expectations if not exactly on par, it seems to be mass dogma that's keeping users away from adopting this new OS. Going back to that experiment, a user is reported to have exclaimed "Oh wow", something Microsoft expected users to do with the new OS originally, as portrayed in those numerous television and print commercials going with the tag line "wow". Following the recent announcement of a huge budget allocation towards propagating Vista (covered here) for home and enterprise segments, the message being sent out is that Microsoft is not only being aggressive but also proactive.

Source: CNET

Touted as Google's answer to Wikipedia, the current most sought after online information resource, The Knol opens to public. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, Google is making Knol available to everyone.

Unlike Wikipedia being based on a MediaWiki system where users cen edit pretty much every article, and in some cases even abuse the system, Knol's approach includes that the author of an article maintains control over changes to it, the author can accept or reject changes before they become visible to public.

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Here's another URL worth keeping handy: knol.google.com

Source: Official Google Blog

POINT OF VIEW, well known for its range of NVIDIA based Graphics cards, is launching today the GeForce 9800GTX+, an upgraded version of one of the fastest single GPU graphics card on the market, the GeForce 9800 GTX.

The GeForce 9800GTX+ has major improvements compared to its predecessor. The GPU has been down-sized to 55nm, which offering a major improvement to its power consumption efficiency, operating temperature and core speed. Its 512 MB DDR3 memory is running on 2200 MHz whilst the GPU core has a speed of 738 MHz. The speed of the internal processors has been increased with almost 250 MHz to an impressive speed of 1836 MHz.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced that the company has dramatically improved the write speeds of its MasterDrive DX, MasterDrive KX and MasterDrive MX solid state drives (SSDs).

These three series of SSDs already boast exceptionally fast read speeds of up to 120 MB/sec. But, fast write speeds are important in applications such as video editing and encoding, image processing, compressing and extracting files, installing applications and copying files to the drive. These newly revised SSDs categorically outpace the fastest hard drives in the world.

NZXT, a company built on realizing the dreams of gamers worldwide, is proud to announce the Guardian 921, a gaming chassis in the NZXT Crafted Series. Building off of the original Guardian’s success, the Guardian 921 features a robust set of features for the budget conscious PC Gamer.

The overclocking memory module specialist, Walton Chaintech Corporation, today debuts the APOGEE GT Blazer DDR3 1800 4GB Low Voltage Memory Module. Supporting EPP 2.0 as well, APOGEE GT Blazer DDR3 1800 4GB kit attains the lowest voltage of 1.8V compared with other memory modules of similar speed in current market place for more power saving operation, and longer product life.

Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media, today announced immediate availability of Crucial Ballistix® PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333MHz) and PC3-14400 (DDR3-1800MHz) high-performance memory modules. These new modules expand on the award-winning Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1600 and DDR3-2000MHz product offering. As part of its commitment to the PC enthusiast and gaming community, Lexar Media continually seeks to bring new memory offerings to market and enhance its product lines.

Chile Hardware (CHW) managed to take a snap of a screen reportedly showing a roadmap slide of NVIDIA drivers which shows an entry called "Big Bang II" under the September time-scale. There are markers which NVIDIA informally refers to as "Big Bang" when the drivers bring about something very significant in terms of features. To give you an idea, the first "Big Bang" brought about support for the SLI multi-GPU technology years ago.

Although the shot is fairly illegible, it shows Big Bang II to bring in features such as driver-level Display Port connectivity support, performance and quality improvements and support for OpenGL 3.0, which seem rather plain since NVIDIA didn't regard DirectX 10 compatible drivers under a "Big Bang" either, and performance and quality increments are a day to day affair with driver releases. It would be interesting to see how this pans out.


Source: CHW

Although the introduction of Intel Bloomfield, the next-generation processor from Intel was slated for November later this year, sources at motherboard companies report that Intel could prepone its launch to September along with the X58 system chipset platform. However it is known that motherboard vendors will not be in a position to bring LGA-1366 socket based motherboard into retail channels until early October. This might not cause internal-competition between Intel's products.

Source: DigiTimes

With wide-spread news about AMD integrating a graphics controller on a CPU, the AMD Fusion, the concept of "Small is Big" is being redefined. Fusion may look like a step in the right direction but is merely prelude to another computing methodology, the SoC (system on a chip). Fusion could be confined to consumer desktop/notebook central processing with graphics thrown in, but a concrete step taken by Intel into this which is more of targeted to the enterprise, embedded systems and consumer electronics is the EP80579 integrated processor. HotHardware spoke with Gadi Singer, Vice President of Intel’s Mobility Group, and Doug Davis, Vice President of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. Intel's brand new product line targeted at security, storage, communications, and industrial applications, basically embedded computing were discussed. The EP80579 integrated processor was central to this conversation. The need for this product came about by Intel as a preparation of the company for the impending onslaught of smart, Internet-connected devices and appliances predicted to arrive over the next few years.

WD announced today the WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM enterprise SATA hard drives in an enterprise-class 2.5-inch form factor for blade servers and 1U and 2U rack servers. The newest WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built for business-critical applications with enterprise-class mechanics and packs up to 300 GB of capacity into the enterprise small form factor bays, while consuming 35 percent less power than the previous-generation WD Raptor drive.

Reports by TG Daily suggest that NVIDIA could release a WHQL-certified stable release PhysX driver that supports all capable GPUs GeForce 8 series thru 9-series and GTX 200 series. The driver would expand driver-level support to all PhysX-based game titles including the likes of Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter, Warmonger and Cell Factor: Revolution.

It is expected that downloads of free games such as Warmonger and Cell Factor could spike in August since the user-base of PhysX substantially increase then. The driver is expected to be out on the 5th of August.

Source: TG Daily

BFG Technologies, Inc., the leading North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, announced today the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC 512MB PCI Express 2.0 graphics card.

Backed by free 24/7/365 world-class tech support and the best lifetime warranty in the industry, the BFG GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC graphics card is overclocked out of the box and pushes the limit in ultra realistic game play with NVIDIA PhysX technology, offering extreme HD gaming with 3-Way NVIDIA SLI. The BFG 9800 GTX+ OC provides optimal power management with HybridPower technology. Packing more performance than the standard BFG 9800 GTX, this graphics card offers a first-class entertainment experience.

Today the PC-K12 midi chassis is launched under the Lancool brand. This is a Midi-Tower case with 9x 5.25” bays giving you plenty of options and tonnes of room. The strength of the Lancool series lies not only in the structure, but also in the features, which include support for the modular patented anti-vibration HDD cage, supporting 3x HDD’s. Each HDD is mounted with a special thumbscrew and rubber grommet to ensure that HDD’s are secure and vibration free. The modular cage can be secured as you see fit within the roomy interior of the case. It has a120mm fan mounted into the bracket, making sure that the HDD’s are cooled and that air flow is optimal according to your needs. Incorporating outstanding quality and craftsmanship; the Lancool series have a steel inner-core, making them stronger than all-aluminum chassis, but also considerably cheaper.

Salient Features:

• Modular patented anti-vibration HDD cage (3xHDD’s)
• 9x 5.25” ODD bays
• PSU mounted high (back), supports large PSU’s
• 120mm intake (front-adjustable);
• 120mm exhaust (back-high)
• Door panel with lock and silent padding
• Aluminum shell, with steel core

While Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) still dominates the web-browser market and Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera among others catching up, a new browser is taking shape at a global level (read stable English version) called Sleipnir. This browser originates from Japan, made by Yasuyuki Kashiwagi that leads the company Fenrir Inc. This browser is popular among Japanese technophiles. The browser uses two rendering engines, Trident and Gecko. Trident is that which drives IE while Gecko runs a host of former Netscape-derivatives such as Firefox among others. A small button at the bottom-left corner of the browser window allows user to switch the render-engines since different pages display differently depending on the browser used, a functionality already achieved by Firefox when the popular add-on 'IE-tabs' is installed.

At this point the makers of this browser hope to capture at least 5% of the browser market share which looks steep but since Firefox was written off in the same way, who knows? Just that Firefox was something 'refreshing' when it came about. Following the success of Firefox, several browsers did mushroom before Sleipnir, FoxIe comes to mind, which used IE engine and a Firefox-like interface. Although Sleipnir doesn't have a rendering engine of its own, using Trident and Gecko helps with compatibility. You can visit the official website here.


Source: ComputerWorld

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) devised a SSD storage called the RamSan-440 that the company claims to have broken speed and capacity records. This 4U rack-mount device has a sustained speed of 600,000 IO/s with available storage capacities of 256GB and 512GB. The SSD also uses proprietary technology from Texas Memory called IO² (Instant-On Input-Output) that improves availability by making data requested from users or applications available instantly when the system is on.

The system uses DDR2-SDRAM, data backup is done instantly by transferring data to the internal flash memory with minimal system overhead. The device can be attached through SAN or using eight 4 Gbps fibre-channel ports.


Source: DailyTech

The newest fleet of quad-core desktop processors from AMD, the Deneb series is tested by Chinese website Zol to consume up to 12 per cent less power compared to equally clocked 65nm Agena parts, add to that, the fact that the 45nm Deneb comes with three times the amount of L3 cache, 6 MB.

The 45nm and 65nm parts were compared on a MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 card, a single 320 GB HDD, two modules of 1GB DDR2 1066 MHz memory, the test-bed was powered by a Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W PSU. Power consumption was calculated in idle and load (the CPUs were stressed using instances of Orthos).

With the prices of solid state drives (SSD) on the fall, this gadget comes a tad late, but if you're (still) looking for an inexpensive SSD-like solution, Taiwanese manufacturer RAIDON unveiled an SSD enclosure, a device that holds up to two Compact Flash (CF) cards in either RAID 1 or NRAID (capacity increment) modes. Another demerit is that while the prices of SSDs are on a fall, the prices of CF cards aren't. 16 GB cards are selling for prices which make buying two 16 GB CF cards pointless compared to 32 GB MLC SSDs. What looks like the a 2.5 inch SSD with the hood closed, clearly isn't. The enclosure has the same exact dimensions of a 2.5 inch drive with mount-holes. The device supports both IDE and SATA host interfaces.


Source: Hexus.net

Art Lebedev has presented a new member of the Optimus family, Optimus Pultius. This gadget like its older full-featured cousin the Optimus Maximus, uses 15 OLED embedded keys that make them fully-programmable. The Optimus Maximus did go on sale with a price tag as much as US $1900. The Pultius can be used with the Maximus for expansion of programmable keys or a side-kick to your existing keyboard. This product launches sometime end of 2008 thru early 2009.


Source: Live Journal

Microsoft has released a handful of details about DirectX 11, the latest version of the company's API.

• Full support (including all DX11 hardware features) on Windows Vista as well as future versions of Windows
• Compatibility with DirectX 10 and 10.1 hardware, as well as support for new DirectX 11 hardware
• New compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor
• Multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines
• Support for tessellation, which blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time, allowing game developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close

Source: Shacknews

Rudimentary software-level protection for IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6), a network protocol which comes pre-installed with several operating systems (OS) but poorly implemented in the real-world makes it a protocol ignored by security providers, and effectively a soft-target for hackers to compromise a system.

Several OSes including Linux 2.6 upwards, Windows Vista, Solaris, Mac OS X and mobile OSes such as Windows Mobile 5 and 6 come with IPv6 enabled by default, though the user would probably not use the protocol in a year 2008 setting where the networks haven't embraced the protocol to level that makes it an explicit requirement for all internet-enabled computers the way IPv4 is. Keeping this in mind, software level protection for IPv6 is close to non-existent, having strong intrusion detection-enabled protection might keep you safe at an IPv4 level that's still standard, but with IPv6 enabled and with protection that doesn't cover IPv6, the PC is as vulnerable as one without any firewall at all. With IPv6 'listeners' (programs that open ports and allow incoming connections) in place the PC becomes vulnerable to intrusions. All it takes is for a hacker to create an IPv6 listener program (malware) and plant it on a PC.

During a conference of the company's second quarter earnings, the CEO Eli Harari of Sandisk, a significant player in the solid state drive (SSD) industry said that Windows Vista would present a special challenge for solid state drive (SSD) makers. Says Harari: "As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,". He hints at the design of Vista as a cause for performance not being upto the mark, adding that Sandisk's next generation drive controllers should aim to "basically compensate for Vista shortfalls".

"Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year," said Harari. Ironically, he has also been quoted saying that such issues didn't affect the "very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs" (read ULPCs), where existing controller technologies could handle 8 ~ 32 GB drive capacities. Clever choice of words since that's the segment that has drive manufacturers, both SSD and HDD, eying at since it's an emerging segment.

Source: CNET

Following price-cuts for some of the desktop offerings (covered here) , Intel has cut the prices of some models of the enterprise-segment Xeon processor, reports industry observer DigiTimes.

The Xeon X3220, X3210 and E3110 get a roughly 12% cut with the X3220 and X3210 both dropping from an original price of US $224 to US $198 with the E3110 price dropping from US $188 to US $167, according to the company.

Source: DigiTimes

Intel Atom, the 'small wonder' of the computing industry, may have been making a mark with ULPC notebooks and inexpensive ITX solutions, but the UK-based web-hosting company Bytemark found a new application of this chip, dedicated servers. The Atom processors have sufficient computing power to handle web server processes. In Bytemark's words, they're "pushing the boundaries of what Intel Atom was intended to do". Although for now the design is simplistic, ITX based, Bytemark plans to take this concept to a large-scale, making inexpensive, energy-efficient servers. A dedicated server with a 1.60 GHz Atom, 2 GB memory, 2x 100 GB HDDs in RAID 1 (that's 100 GB of available storage), for £495 (US $992) per annum.


Source: Hexus.net

This fall, Xbox 360 gaming console could be given capabilities to stream content from providers such as Netflix. Microsoft announced a tech partnership with the popular movie rental company Netflix at the E3 video game convention in Los Angeles, United States. That gives you access to the thousands of movies and TV shows Netfilx has in store for rental viewing. It's a good deal for Netflix as it adds to its market media, even more so for Microsoft since its squeezing in all the value-added-services it can for the Xbox 360 which already seems to be threatened by the Japanese Nintendo Wii on home-turf, and the Sony Playstation 3 which comes with capabilities to play Blu-Ray discs, the next big physical content medium.

Source: Popular Science

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and PC components, today announced the first memory modules available in their Fatal1ty Series after the partnership was announced last month. These high-performance memory kits were co-developed with the expertise of Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, 12-time World champion, to meet the specific needs of fellow gamers. OCZ Fatal1ty Professional Series kits are the official memory modules of Championship Gaming Series (CGS), and feature incredible performance to power through the latest PC titles and contribute to the success of professionals and everyday gamers.

“OCZ worked closely with Fatal1ty and his team to design new memory kits that pair perfectly with the top selling motherboards for a superior gaming experience,” commented Alex Mei, Chief Marketing Officer of the OCZ Technology Group. “Fatal1ty knows what it takes to win at the highest level of eSports, and these new kits deliver superior stability and performance to gamers whether you are a professional player on the Championship Gaming Series, or a weekend warrior looking to dominate when playing the latest titles.”

AMD released stable versions of the ATI Catalyst driver package for the Radeon series graphics accelerators. According to the release notes document (located here), improvements on both the features and performance fronts have been brought about. The drivers specific to your version of Windows, Linux, Windows on Macintosh (Bootcamp), Mac OS and on your model of Radeon accelerator can be found on the company website here.

NVIDIA has released two lines of high performance graphics processors (GPU) for the notebook PC market, the GeForce 9800M series and the 9700M series. These are sub-classified into GT and GTS for the 9700M and GT, GTS and GTX for the 9800M. These new GPUs provide a wide range of options for manufacturers to choose from and design high-performance gaming and multimedia notebooks.

These 9800M GTX GPU is based on the same G92 core, and will outperform its previous generation 8800M GTX that also happens to be based on the same core. The rest are based on the G94 and the newer G96 cores. These GPUs are CUDA compliant and will be able to accelerate game physics using the PhysX API. They support NVIDIA Hybrid Power technology. Simply put, on notebooks with integrated graphics processors (IGP) along with these GPUs, the system will be able to switch over to the IGP when not gaming, and switch over to the GPU when heavy graphics tasks are running (such as gaming, 3D rendering, HD Video acceleration, etc.). Speaking of video, these GPUs support Powervideo HD technology, includes VP2 acceleration. There's no information on these GPUs' fabrication technology yet. Specifications provided below.


Source: Notebook Italia

Shuttle Inc., market leader in the mini-PC segment and manufacturer of Multi-Form-Factor solutions, today unveils a new XPC Barebone from the P2 model series building on Intel's X48 Express chipset. Specially designed for high performance systems, the XPC Barebone SX48P2 Deluxe is ideally suited for Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors with up to four cores.

The XPC Barebone SX48P2 Deluxe is the first mini PC barebone ready to be equipped with DDR3 memory modules. A maximum capacity of eight Gigabytes on four sockets can be installed into this model. "The pioneering DDR3 memory technology promises more performance with less energy consumption and reduces heat development which is ideal for mini PCs," explains Tom Seiffert, Head of Marketing & PR at Shuttle Computer Handels GmbH. Two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots enable the use of high-end graphics cards with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 being supported as well.

A relatively unknown brand, Cherrypal introduced a PC module dubbed 'cloud computer'. It carries a price tag of US $250. Sure you do find pre-owned full-size PCs for that price, but just think of it: this PC consumes a mere 2W of power when idle (excludes the consumption of monitor and other peripherals).

On the features front, there's enough computing power to get you onto the internet, it is driven by a 400 MHz Freescale MPC5121e mobileGT triple-core processor, 256 MB DDR2 memory and 4 GB of NAND flash memory to store the OS, a Debian-derived Linux OS, Mozilla Firefox as the core internet application (supports all add-ons and Linux media plugins). 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, VGA out, and stereo audio out. It beats the $929 VidaBox PC convincingly at its price-point. Sure, such devices are mere toys for average users like us sitting cozy with powerful gaming PCs, but such devices are a step in the right direction, towards Cloud Computing.

Cloud computing, a new buzzword in the computing industry, is the computing methodology where software is thin and light, and streamed onto a computer. A user accesses software either freely or on a subscription basis. All you need is a standards compiant web-browser, OS isn't a factor. This has gotten players such as Microsoft, Google, Adobe and others looking up to it as the next big thing. You don't need to buy those installation discs and throw gigabytes of hard-drive space at applications anymore.


Source: TG Daily

MSI has launched the GX620 a Centrino 2-based notebook with the company's exclusive Turbo Drive Engine technology to enhance the speed of CPU. The GX620 includes the new ECO Engine power saving technology to extend battery running time. The ECO quick launch touch sensor allows consumers to switch among five different modes including Gaming, Movie, Presentation, Office, and Turbo Battery.

GX620 features a 15.4-inch LCD display, NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 3D graphics card and MSI's exclusive vivid image enhancement technology. GX620 also features Digital/Analog 5.1 Channel headphone output and SPDIF connection. The GX620 features Intel Centrino 2 processor technology, including Core 2 Duo processor and PM45 Express chipset, to deliver mobile solutions and provide HD capabilities, wireless connectivity, and long battery life for Blu-ray movie playback, highlighted MSI.


Source: MSI

Pentium developer Intel, today slashed the prices of several Core 2 Duo processors, and most notably has slashed the price of its 65nm Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU. The price of Core 2 Quad Q6600 drops 14%, from $224 to $193 in 1000 units tray quantity. In addition to making its most popular quad-core CPU cheaper, Intel has also slashed the prices of three 45nm dual-core Core 2 Duos. The Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 is now 31% cheaper, from $266 to $183. Intel's Core 2 Duo E8400 and E7200 CPUs are now 11% and 15% cheaper, fixed at $163 and $113 respectively.

Source: TechConnect Magazine