NVIDIA released its latest "Game Ready" driver, this one being marked Beta, instead of WHQL. The new GeForce 347.09 Beta introduces performance optimizations for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, and Elite: Dangerous. It adds a GeForce Experience application profile for Project: Cars; and tags along PhysX System Software version 9.14.0702, and GeForce Experience 16.18.9.0. Grab the driver from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 347.09 Beta for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, and Windows XP 64-bit

AMD today announced a multi-year agreement with Mentor Graphics Corporation to expand availability of open-source embedded Linux development for heterogeneous and multi-core processors from AMD. Dedicated to providing embedded developers with a more manageable and focused open source framework, the agreement will provide embedded developers with more supported processor options, robust development tools, and greater speed in open platform development.

As a Yocto Project compatible product, Mentor Embedded Linux will now bring standardized features and tools, and ensure quick access to the latest Board Support Packages (BSPs) for AMD 64-bit x86 architecture beginning with the upcoming AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC) (codenamed: "Steppe Eagle") and AMD Embedded R-Series APU/CPU (codenamed: "Bald Eagle").

ADATA Technology has announced the release of its proprietary software for monitoring the status and maintaining the performance of ADATA solid state drives. The new software, named ADATA SSD Toolbox, will enable users to quickly and conveniently configure, optimize, and monitor the overall health of their solid state drives.

ADATA SSD Toolbox allows for the monitoring of drive health and remaining life through Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) attributes. It also lets the user keep track of the current operating temperature, capacity, and total space used. The drive utilities include SSD security erase, which wipes all data from the drive and restores the drive to its factory default, firmware update, and SSD Toolbox update. For achieving best performance with the drive and the operating system, the software supports both system (SSD) and OS optimization functions. Supported operating systems include Windows 7 (32 & 64-bit), Windows 8 (32 & 64-bit), and Windows 8.1 (32 & 64-bit) versions.

AMD kicked off its 2013 Developer Summit (APU13) today, announcing a new unified Software Development Kit (SDK,) an improved CodeXL tool suite with added features and support for the latest AMD hardware, and added heterogeneous acceleration in popular Open Source libraries. Together, these tools provide a substantial step forward in productivity and ease-of-use for developers wishing to harness the full power of modern heterogeneous platforms spanning form servers to PCs to handheld devices.

"Developers are essential to our mission of realizing the full potential of modern computing technologies," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions, AMD. "Enriching the developer experience by harnessing these technologies is a critical part of AMD's mission to accelerate developer adoption."

AMD today announced it is enabling its accelerated processing units (APU) for next-generation servers through important advancements in software tools developed by AMD and in collaboration with technology partners and the open source community. In his keynote address at APU13, AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers highlighted the significant progress AMD has made in both developing software internally and empowering others to develop software to take advantage of the capabilities of AMD APU technology, which combines industry leading AMD Radeon graphics processing engines with x86 computational processing on a single chip.

"Servers must be efficient, scalable and adaptable to meet the compute characteristics of new and changing workloads. Software applications that leverage server APUs are designed to drive highly efficient, low-power, dense server solutions optimized for highly parallel and multimedia workloads," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. "We have evolved our processor roadmap to support this opportunity, and now we are showcasing how the APU software ecosystem is gaining momentum and what developers can do to participate."

According to IDC, the CAGR of the storage market for enterprises will continue to grow by 3.9% in the future. By 2020, the global data volume will increase by 50 folds than that of today. Thus, how to manage such large volume of data is bound to be the significant task for IT managers, which includes a vital issue of hard disk real-time monitoring and diagnosis.

Currently, most traditional hard drives and Solid State Drives (SSDs) adopt S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), which is the optimal early warning tool for single PC, to check the drive's status at any time, such as temperature, usage time, erase times, charging times, for analyzing and predicting the timing to replace the drive. However, with the coming of cloud computing era, 3A management (Any time, Any where, Any device) are required for managers to monitor cloud storage device, while S.M.A.R.T. still functions for monitoring single PC only. Once the user is not at the scene, the "golden hour" for data rescue would slip away especially in situations such as unexpected tampering, power supply abnormality, interface destruction.

IBM today announced it has acquired Daeja Image Systems Ltd., a leading provider of software that makes it easier for business and IT professionals to view large documents and images. Daeja is a privately held software company with headquarters in Milton Keynes, UK. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As unstructured business data continues to grow exponentially, business users need not only access to information, but a compelling user experience as well. By putting content in the context of how people work every day, professionals can solve problems and make decisions that deliver better outcomes, faster.

With the travel season just around the corner, the Scandinavian browser-maker Opera Software today released the final version of its all-new Opera for Windows and Mac, debuting with a fresh look and completely new features.

If you were to visit every website in the web for just one second each, you would need over 20 years of non-stop browsing to see them all. It's pretty much the same amount of time you would need to spend a week in every city with more than half a million habitants worldwide. You may never get to visit all of these cool places, but, with the new Opera browser, surfing through an ocean of inspiring web content is now easier than ever.

AMD Super Pi History To Be Rewritten, Courtesy Of The Stilt

AMD's typically underwhelming Super PI performance, that was usually attributed to architectural limitations when it comes to the X87 instruction set, appears to have been nothing more than a blunder on the part of the developers responsible with BIOS development and optimization for AMD platforms. Finnish overclocker, The Stilt, figured out how to considerably improve performance by going through the BIOS developers guides. The exact same guides available to the BIOS R&D teams of motherboard vendors, a surprising fact considering a single man managed to outdo an entire industry. Here is the download link to the patch: click

The Stilt posted a video in which he showed a 4.1GHz A10-6800K completing SuperPI in 17 minutes and 34 seconds. The fastest 5GHz Richland SuperPI 32M is around 18 minutes and 15 seconds. A lot faster! For more information, check out the thread in the HWBot forums.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components, today announced two new solid-state drive (SSD) related products. The first, the SSD & Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit, enables users to easily duplicate and transfer data between drives. The kit, which includes a cable and software, is ideal for users upgrading from traditional hard disk drives (HDD) to faster, more rugged Corsair SSDs. In addition, the company announced the Corsair SSD Toolbox, a free software utility which enables users to configure, optimize and monitor their Corsair SSDs.

The SSD & Hard Disk Drive Cloning Kit enables users to move data between a hard drive and SSD by simply selecting the source drive and destination drives and then clicking a button. Designed for users migrating their data to newly installed SSDs, the kit includes data migration software, a USB-to-SATA cable, and Quick Start Guide. The cable supports USB 3.0 and 2.0 delivering transfer rates up to 180 MB/s with USB 3.0 ports, 4 times faster than USB 2.0.

Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia technologies company, is now shipping its Caustic Series2 PC boards, the R2500 and R2100, which accelerate PowerVR OpenRL applications including the Caustic Visualizer viewport plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max and the Neon viewport in Rhinoceros 5 from Robert McNeel and Associates.

The Caustic Series2 is the first family of high performance ray tracing accelerator PC boards using Imagination's unique ray tracing technologies in the world's first chipset dedicated to high performance, fully interactive ray tracing in a workstation environment.

McAfee and Intel today announced their commitment to lead in delivering innovative security solutions aimed at protecting a consumer's entire digital life, reflecting the broad adoption and usage of personal devices. Together with Intel, McAfee is redefining the consumer security experience with a focus on safeguarding consumer devices, securing personal data and protecting identities online. This user-centric approach will deliver a comprehensive and valuable service offering that helps meet the evolving needs of consumers as they enjoy their digital lives, anywhere, from any device. The first of these personalized security offerings from McAfee is available in beta to partners, with a consumer version of the product available mid-year 2013.

The explosion in connected devices and the availability of online content and services has consumers spending more of their lives online. Always-connected consumers who are shopping, banking, and sharing information online have an unprecedented amount of their personal and financial information at risk to increasingly sophisticated attacks and scams. Because of these new usages and the resulting distribution of personal information, a more comprehensive approach to security is required to protect consumers.

Kaspersky Lab's CEO and co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, has been voted Technology Hero of the Year in the third annual V3 technology awards. This is considered a massive achievement due to the award being presented to no other than the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs in 2011.
Voted for by V3 readers, this prestigious award recognises Eugene's huge impact on the security industry over the past 15 years since Kaspersky Lab was founded. From Flame to Madi, inspiring leader Eugene has been at the fore-front of all of the company's ground-breaking malware discoveries and offered his expert advice to businesses and consumers alike.

"Our malware discoveries are dedicated to making the online world a safer place, so it's great to see the appreciation by winning this award", explains Eugene Kaspersky. "Being recognised as Technology Hero of the Year is an amazing achievement for not just myself, but Kaspersky Lab as a company due to the time and commitment spent on fighting cybercrime both before it occurs and during."

Presenting NextPowerUp, our sister tech-publication in the works, designed with a bigger canvas. TechPowerUp established itself as one of the top PC hardware publications thanks to our pursuit for quality reviews and relentless news delivery. We decided it was time to put these core ideals to use, in addressing the much larger consumer electronics and gadgets markets, without disturbing TechPowerUp's focus on PC enthusiast content, one of its hallmarks.

NextPowerUp is designed to keep you up to speed on the latest in over 20 markets (and growing), each with its own content channel, and editors hand-picked for them. These include Audio (personal, home, professional, concert), Business, Cinema (filming, production, exhibition), Desktops (pre-built desktop PCs), Displays (signage, projectors), Gadgets, Gaming (games, game development, gaming industry, consoles), Internet (the business of WWW), Networking (social networking), Notebooks (notebooks, Ultrabooks, netbooks), Phones (of all shapes and sizes), Photo & Video (cameras of all shapes and sizes), Politics (industry soap-opera), Robots (outside assembly lines), Science (popular science, space exploration), Software, Storage, Tablets, Televisions (TVs and technologies built around them), Transportation (wheels that don't run on fossil fuels), and Wireless (Cellular carriers, commercial WiFi).

Club 3D offers a wide range of graphic cards. But which one will you choose ? Perhaps the games which you will get when purchasing your graphic card will help you decide. This page summarizes the games that are available with Club 3D's graphic card line. The page is divided into three sections. The first section,"The games", will lead you through the available games, and will point to the graphic cards that have this game included in the bundle. The second section, "the graphic cards and the bundles", starts with the graphic cards and will point out which game or even multiple games that are included, and the third section identifies the software that is included with which graphic cards.

Apple today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company's world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

"We are in one of the most prolific periods of innovation and new products in Apple's history," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "The amazing products that we've introduced in September and October, iPhone 5, iOS 6, iPad mini, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPod nano and many of our applications, could only have been created at Apple and are the direct result of our relentless focus on tightly integrating world-class hardware, software and services."

HP today announced HP Service Anywhere, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT service management (ITSM) solution that delivers a simple-to-use, modern experience that enables IT professionals to increase productivity while managing and delivering high-quality services.

HP Service Anywhere integrates key technologies, such as the market-leading HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB), which manages services, applications and hardware across the IT environment. It is populated and maintained with HP Universal Discovery software, which automates discovery and dependency mapping of relevant IT elements.

Steam Greenlight has been updated today, adding the ability for developers to post non-gaming software for consideration by the Community. Software in Steam Greenlight will work just like games, where we are looking to the community to provide data on what they would like to see made available via Steam.

Additionally, developers of games or software that are early in their development or creative process can now post their early work to start building a community and getting feedback from prospective customers. Concepts can be posted for free, but the voting on these items serves only to give the developer data and feedback and does not lead toward getting the game distributed on Steam.

EVGA's NEX 1500W PSU has been in the news for some time now, and we've known all through, that EVGA is giving it some software features, such as direct monitoring and fan-control. The first screenshots of the said software, called SuperNOVA, were released over the weekend, and they can blow you away.

The NEX 1500W ships with complex monitoring circuitry that interface with your PC over USB. The first two screenshots below reveal the real-time monitoring features of SuperNOVA, covering intricate details such as current output power (power drawn by the system), voltage and current readings for the +12V, +5V rails, efficiency measurement, temperatures, and fan-speeds. The measurements can be plotted on line-graphs to study patterns/history. The third screenshot shows couple of tweakable features, such as +12V rail voltage, fan-speed, fan-speed curve (vs. load and vs. temperature), and binding/splitting the +12V rails. The software can also be used to enable an "OC mode," which pushes maximum power output to 1650W, provided the input is 230V AC, and not 120V AC.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced second-quarter 2012 diluted earnings of $3.34 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $3.00 per share in the second quarter of 2011, an increase of 11 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings were $3.51 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $3.09 per share in the second quarter of 2011, an increase of 14 percent.

Second-quarter net income was $3.9 billion compared with $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011, an increase of 6 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $4.1 billion compared with $3.8 billion in the second quarter of 2011, an increase of 8 percent.

Dell today announced the immediate availability of new displays that combine performance and value to enable customers amazing viewing experiences. The six new displays join Dell's industry-leading portfolio of solutions, which has once again ranked #1 in flat-panel display market share in North Americai, and #2 in flat-panel shipments worldwideii, according to DisplaySearch.

The newest additions to Dell's industry-leading portfolio of displays, the new P and E displays offer customers diverse solutions that help them get the most out of every environment.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced the acquisition of Schooner Information Technology, Inc., an enterprise software company located in Silicon Valley that develops flash-optimized database and data store solutions. Schooner's products complement SanDisk's growing portfolio of enterprise solid state disk (SSD) and flash-optimized software offerings that enable customers to accelerate the performance of data-intensive applications and reduce overall cost of ownership. Schooner's team of database and flash optimization experts have joined SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions (ESS) team. Schooner's products will be optimized for SanDisk's enterprise SSD portfolio as well as for enterprise SSDs from third parties.

Schooner's products are currently deployed by U.S. and international customers, including several Fortune 500 companies. Designed to fill the gap between stock do-it-yourself open source solutions and expensive high-end database deployments, Schooner's products deliver enterprise-grade performance, powering data center consolidation at a lower cost. Engineered for flash acceleration and enhanced with enterprise features, Schooner's products deliver up to five times the throughput of competing configurations. In addition, they deliver near in-memory response times to mission critical applications along with enterprise-grade replication and failover capabilities. In-memory database solutions are enabling breakthroughs in database and Business Intelligence applications that are only possible with solid state memories. Schooner's ability to combine DRAM and flash memory seamlessly in a single solution offers near DRAM performance at a lower cost.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient computing platforms, today announced the VIA ARM DS (Digital Signage) system.

Developed for the Android operating system, the VIA ARM DS is an all-in-one system-ready solution for managing dynamic displays for cost sensitive high volume segments where high performance video and connectivity are paramount for enhanced customer engagement. Applications range from kiosks, POS systems, video walls, and menu boards to TVOIP, cloud streaming, and Out of Home Advertising across a broad spectrum of retail, hospitality, education, and entertainment environments.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced a suite of USB flash drives that includes SanDisk's fastest, thinnest and highest-capacity USB products ever. The drives offer consumers the storage they need to carry libraries of digital content with them wherever they go, transfer their files quickly and do so with style.

"Whether consumers are seeking super-fast transfer speeds, maximum storage capacity or a stylish fashion statement, we offer a drive to meet their needs," said Bob O'Keefe, vice president, retail marketing, SanDisk. "SanDisk pioneered the USB drive and now offers one of the broadest lineups in the industry, with a wide range of form factors and reliability that consumers can count on to store their important files."

Intel Corporation Senior Vice President Tom Kilroy officially introduced the next wave of Ultrabook systems during a keynote address at Computex Taipei 2012. Making a bold statement around the importance of touch technology, Kilroy also announced that Intel has signed agreements with several leading touch panel manufacturers to ensure adequate capacity to meet the expected demand for touch-enabled Ultrabook experiences over the next several years.

He also highlighted the company's efforts to deliver user-centric experiences across a range of mobile devices from the Ultrabook to smartphones and tablets, pointing to momentum across all three.