News Archive
Wednesday, November 30th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Power Supplies
After testing its bigger brother with 600W capacity, it's high time for the PC P&C Silencer MK3S400 to prove its worth. The new Silencer units pose a big change for PC Power & Cooling since they are the first ever modular PSUs that this company introduces to the market. Along with the top mounted 120 mm fan all PC P&C traditions are broken in these new units.
Review
Cases
There are a few cube chassis manufacturers out there, but CaseLabs guns for the ultimate chassis with their MAGNUM M8 and M10, right out of the gates. Will it come out guns blazing and mowing down everything in its path or end up shooting nothing but blanks? We aim to find out!
Inno3D is among the select few with a limited-edition GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 CUDA cores, the Hong Kong-based company launched its GTX 560 Ti 448SP HyperCore graphics card. The card features an in-house GF110 board design by Inno3D, and a new custom design single-fan cooler. Based on the 40 nm GF110 GPU, it features 448 CUDA cores, and 1280 MB of GDDR5 memory over a 320-bit memory interface. It features slightly overclocked speeds over reference speeds; 760 MHz core, 1520 MHz CUDA cores, against reference speeds of 732/1464 MHz. The memory clock sticks to specifications, at 950 MHz (3.80 GHz effective). Like every other GTX 560 Ti 448, this card will be available in limited quantities, and only in select North American and European markets.
Antec is proud to announce the P280, the newest member of the award-winning Performance One Series. The P280 reflects the sophisticated appearance and Quiet Computing engineering of its Performance One predecessors, while offering a new set of features at an attractive price for users building with current- and next-gen hardware.
Continuing the legacy of Performance One enclosures, the P280 integrates quiet technologies such as sound-dampening steel / polycarbonate side panels, a triple-layer front door and hard drive trays with preinstalled vibration-reducing silicone grommets. Its understated aesthetics will appeal to gamers and enthusiasts who prefer a stylish, functional appearance.
Enlarging its portfolio of premium quality quiet fans, Noctua today announced PWM versions of its renowned NF-P12, NF-B9 and NF-R8 fans. Having received more than hundred awards and recommendations from the international press, the classic NF-P12, NF-B9 and NF-R8 fans helped to found Noctua's reputation as a top-tier manufacturer of premium grade quiet cooling components. The new PWM versions build on the proven designs and feature Noctua's novel NE-FD1 IC for fully automatic control and ultra-low power consumption.
"Our customers have been asking us for PWM versions of our fans for a long time, but the available PWM fan driver ICs simply weren't up to our quality standards", explains Mag. Roland Mossig, Noctua CEO. "With our NE-FD1, we've now got our custom-designed IC that allows us to build PWM fans that consume less power and remain quieter at low speeds."
Thermaltake, the leader and pioneer brand in PC thermal solutions, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, with "delivering the perfect user experiences" as our mission. This winter, Thermaltake has prepared Commander MS-I Snow Edition to take on a gratitude mission of thanking our fans for the support throughout the year of 2011 as well as with a new suit to blend into the snowy battlefield for e-Sports enthusiasts.
Creative Technology Ltd today announced the new Creative HN-900 noise-canceling headphones, a set of full-size active noise-canceling headphones that can reduce ambient noise by up to 85% and comes with a detachable cable with in-line microphone for voice communication on the iPhone.
Shut out the din in the air cabin or make clear voice calls on the iPhone with the Creative HN-900 noise-canceling headphones. The concealed microphones in the ear-cups pick up surrounding noises and these are electronically negated, effectively reducing the noise by up to 85%. With the absence of unwanted sound, the finely-tuned 40mm Neodymium drivers allow details of music or entertainment to be revealed.
EVGA kicked off its limited edition GeForce GTX 560 448 cores graphics card lineup with a bang, with models boasting of two of its top-end brand markers, Classified and FTW. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified (model: 012-P3-2068-KR) features a premium design that makes use of a dual-fan cooler by EVGA, and high clock speeds of 792 MHz core, 1584 MHz CUDA cores, and 975 MHz (3.90 GHz effective) memory. Its display outputs include two DVI and a mini-HDMI.
The next card is the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW (model: 012-P3-2066-KR). It makes use of a more cost-effective non-reference card design that has been used on the EVGA GTX 570 HD, but features the same exact clock speeds out of the box as the Classified (792/1584/975 MHz). Its display outputs include two DVI, and one each of HDMI and DisplayPort, both standard sized. Both cards are 3-way SLI capable. The EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Classified is priced at US $299.99, while the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW goes for $289.99.
TRENDnet, a best-in-class wired and wireless networking hardware brand, today announces the availability of the 200 Mbps Powerline AV Adapter with Bonus Plug, model TPL-307E, and the 200Mbps Powerline AV Adapter Kit with Bonus Plug, model TPL-307E2K, which comes with two TPL-307E adapters. These high performance Powerline adapters network computers, televisions, and other devices using existing home or office electrical lines.
The TPL-307E replaces the bulkier TPL-304E series and features a compact product housing, built in electrical outlet, embedded power saving technology, and an advanced electrical noise filter which boosts performance by reducing background electrical signal interference.
Tuesday, November 29th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Graphics Cards
ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores comes with some of the highest overclocks out of the box, compared to other GTX 560 Ti 448 cards released today. The card also uses a more compact form factor, which should help it fit smaller cases or compact media PCs.
Review
Graphics Cards
The ASUS GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores DCII is the only GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores released today that comes with a massive triple slot cooling solution. It promises less noise, lower temperatures and better overclocking potential.
Review
Graphics Cards
MSI's GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Twin Frozr III uses the company's well established TF III cooler which we have seen on other products before. The two fans and the massive heatsink easily keep the card cool. MSI's card is also overclocked out of the box for that little extra performance boost.
IPv6 routers have existed for some time now, but there are currently very few models available. These are also very expensive at over £100 / $156 approx. However, the
Technicolor TG582n router promises to be the first home router that's affordably priced and suitable for the home market. It's not quite on general sale yet, but is being provided as a "free with the service" router from business and techy-oriented Andrews & Arnold ISP -
www.aaisp.net - preconfigured to work with their service straight out of the box. AAISP Director, Adrian Kennard had this to say about the new router:
Well, it looks like Big Content finally got to them, because Australia's five major ISPs (Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Optus, iPrimus and Internode) are all ganging up together in a group called The Communications Alliance to screw over their customers in the name of Big Content. They are going to start sending out warning letters to their customers on mere
accusations of copyright infringement, as part of an 18-month trial. These warning letters, termed "educational notices" to spin them as some sort of favour to their customers, would be sent on apparent evidence of infringement, based on IP address - that same method that has
proven to be so unreliable, especially against home users, many times over. If their customer still doesn't get it, after three of these "educational notices", the copyright holder gets to enjoy pursuing the "offender" through the courts. The real tragedy, is the way that all this is based on an
assumption that file sharing causes lost sales, as they state themselves that the effect is impossible to prove and hence rely on statutory damages. Big Content has never proved it and indeed several studies have shown that file sharing doesn't actually hurt sales and often has a positive effect, as we reported
here. The big surprise out of this lot, is to see plucky ISP iiNet in this hall of shame since they were the ISP who'd fought the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) who had argued
"that the ISP infringed copyright by failing to take reasonable steps - including enforcing its own terms and conditions - to prevent customers from copying films and TV shows over its network." - and actually won.
It looks like the Bulldozer disaster might have been too much of a setback for AMD to recover from. After 30 years of competing with Intel in the x86 processor market, AMD is about to give up, even with the 2009 1.25bn antitrust settlement they extracted from them. Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman said,
"We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore." He was vague on the exact strategy that AMD intends to pursue from now on, though. However, the company is widely expected to make a concerted effort to break into the smartphones and tablets market. The big problem with this strategy unfortunately, is that this arena is currently dominated by many other competitors. On top of that, their arch enemy Intel is also trying to muscle in on this space, hence AMD could find themselves back at square one, or likely even further back. AMD's graphics cards are doing well at the moment though and are quite competitive, so it looks like their expensive purchase of ATI back in 2006, might yet save the company from extinction. If they become primarily a graphics card company, they will inevitably end up a lot smaller than they are now though and that's a lot of lost jobs and personal hardship, along with a monopoly x86 market remaining and all of its negative effects on the market.
According to a NordicHardware report, December 5 is pin-pointed as the day AMD will unveil its some of its new Radeon HD 7000 graphics processors. It is indicated that products launched on that day will be based on GPUs built on the 28 nanometer fabrication process. The new products will be unveiled in London. It's likely that these are
mobile parts based on the "Thames" and "Seymour" silicons. An alternate theory is that AMD could unveil some of its next-generation GPUs based on the GCN architecture, AMD's biggest leap in GPU architecture since Radeon HD 2000 series.
GIGABYTE unveiled its GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores graphics card offering, the GV-N560448-13I. This card is based on Gigabyte's in-house GF110 Ultra Durable VGA PCB, and is cooled by its own Windforce 3X Vapor-Chamber cooler. The card sticks to NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 732/1464/950(3800) MHz core/CUDA cores/memory(effective). It packs 448 CUDA cores, and 1280 MB of memory across a 320-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.
The Ultra Durable VGA PCB makes use of a 2 oz copper layer to improve cooling and electrical stability, ferrite core chokes, Japanese solid-state capacitors, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, and tier-1 Samsung GDDR5 memory chips. The Windforce 3X Vapor-Chamber cooler makes use of a large vapor-chamber base from which heat is conveyed to aluminum fin stacks. These are ventilated by three outward-inclined 80 mm fans. Like every other GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores, this card will be available in limited quantities, in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Russia, and the Nordics. It will be priced under US $300.
Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announces a new line of high speed, quad-channel Registered DDR3 RDIMM modules for servers running at 1600 MHz.
Super Talent is committed to bringing our customers the very the latest in technology. Today's new motherboards that support the new 16 core processors, now require a new type of RDIMMs, quad-channel DDR3. Super Talent is pleased to announce that theses new modules have passed extensive qualification testing and can support full speed at full loading.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, announces the Talos 2 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD Series, the follow-up to the high performance, high capacity Talos Series previously available only in a 3.5 inch form factor.
With capacities up to 1TB now available in a compact 2.5-inch form factor, Talos 2 offers increased I/O performance and scalability in enterprise storage environments. Talos 2 leverages OCZ Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 technology which implements an intelligent complex command queuing structure with unique queue balancing algorithms to provide exceptional performance. Talos 2 SSDs deliver superior random transactional performance at up to 70,000 4K IOPS and features improved mixed workload (75% read; 25% write) performance with up to 42,000 8K IOPS.
Leading global motherboard and graphics card maker MSI today announces the release of the N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC and N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition graphics cards. The two graphics cards feature the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti chipset with 448 CUDA cores and 1280MB of 320-bit GDDR5 high-speed graphics memory. The N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition graphics card supports MSI's exclusive Triple Overvoltage and 6+1 Phase PWM design. The greatly improved overclocking potential and stability increases overclocking performance by up to 29%.
The acclaimed Twin Frozr III system is used for cooling and features not only twin 8cm Propeller Blade fans for 20% more air flow but also 8mm SuperPipe technology. Fan noise of just 30dB at full load provides gamers with the quietest user experience, while MSI Military Class II components are used to guarantee the highest quality and stability. For gamers seeking overclocking potential, cooling and stability, the N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition graphics card offers the perfect choice.
ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and a channel manufacturer, today unleashes the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores Limited Edition graphics card geared for the latest stunning Microsoft DirectX 11-enabled titles.
The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores Limited Edition graphics card delivers the performance and visual details gamers crave for an unmatched immersive gaming experience. Equipped with 448 lightning-fast shaders and 1280MB of GDDR5 memory, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores Limited Edition graphics card packs a performance punch.
NVIDIA released its newest graphics card model specifically for the winter shopping season, the limited edition GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores. Not only is this a limited edition launch, but also targeting only specific markets in North America and Europe. This includes the United States and Canada in North America; and the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and the Nordics in Europe. The new card is based on the 40 nanometer GF110 GPU instead of the GF114 that the regular GTX 560 Ti is based on. This allows NVIDIA to add 64 more CUDA cores (448 vs. 384), 25% more memory (1280 MB vs. 1024), and a 25% wider memory bus (320 bit vs. 256).
The new limited edition GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores features clock speeds identical to those on the GeForce GTX 570, at 732 MHz core, 1464 MHz CUDA cores, and 950 MHz (3.80 GHz effective) GDDR5 memory. Since it's based on the GF110 board, this new card is also capable of 3-way SLI, something the regular GTX 560 Ti isn't. The card draws power from two 6-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs typically include two DVI and a mini-HDMI. Add-in card vendors are free to design their own graphics cards based on this chip, and so expect most GTX 560 Ti 448 core cards to look similar to non-reference GTX 570 ones. ZOTAC, Inno3D, EVGA, Palit, Gainward, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI will have graphics cards based on this chip. Prices should typically start at US $289.
German brand EOLIZE announcing a new Mini-ITX Case. New EOLIZE SVD-NC12-02 Chassis comes from a upgraded SVD-NC11-02 Mini-ATX Case. EOLIZE improved the SVD-NC12-02 by adding a 120 mm axial fan and reworked flat front panel. It furthermore aims for private and corporate customers who are looking for solid and reliable NAS as well as Home Server chassis. It has much in common with a Barebone chassis and can be used as such but offers additional features such as Hot Swap Modules.
Both Hot Swap Modules are located behind the decently designed front door which are able to fit two either 3,5 inch (8,89 cm) or 2,5 inch (6,35 cm) drives such as HDD or SSD. One further 2,5 inch sized HDD/SSD may be mounted inside the SVD-NC12-02 Mini-ITX chassis. This drive can be used as a system drive to install an appropriate Operating System and additional Software. Additionally one 5,25 inch (13,3 cm) bay is located in the front giving enough space for a DVD, CD or Blu-ray drive as well as other commonly used bay accessory. SVD-NC12-02 Mini-ITX Chassis is furthermore equipped with an I/O panel in the front offering two USB 2.0 connectors, one Mic and one Audio-out connector.
Seagate is now shipping the second generation of Momentus XT, its groundbreaking solid state hybrid drive for consumer and commercial laptops and the company's fastest drive ever for personal computers. With a simple drive upgrade, users can boost boot-up speed and overall performance to turbo-charge their laptop PC. Seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops powered by the Momentus XT drive. The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.
Powering the Momentus XT drive are Seagate's Adaptive Memory and FAST Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed.
Platimax continues the row of path-breaking power supplies from Enermax. It is based on the proved, high-performance technologies of predecessor power supply series, the so-called Dynamic Hybrid Transformer (DHT) Topology and Full-Zone Magnetic Quadrant Transformer (FMQ) Design. Enermax engineers successfully improved the cooling performance by applying innovative solutions and equipped the PSU with hand-picked, premium-quality components. That way, Platimax breaks down the barriers of the highest efficiency class, 80 PLUS Platinum.
With 89 to 94 per cent efficiency between 20 and 100 per cent load, Enermax shows the way into the future of power supply. Due to its first-class components, the flexible modular or full-modular cable management and numerous connectors, the new series is designed for long-during and reliable operation. According to that, the manufacturer grants 5 years warranty on all Platimax PSU.
Monday, November 28th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Graphics Cards
Palit's new GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Light Turbo is a custom design, dual fan GTX 560 Ti that comes overclocked out of the box and features LED lit fans which add a smooth glow to the card. Despite having two fans, the card is actually one of the quietest GTX 560 Tis that we tested so far - in both idle and load.
The latest beta drivers and the first in the 290 series have been released by NVIDIA today, supporting all graphics cards since the venerable 6-series. Their main new feature are official support for enabling ambient occlusion settings in the control panel separately for specific games and enabling NVIDIA Surround on the new X79 SLI-certified motherboards. Ambient occlusion (AO) is settable for uber-popular games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. So, what does AO do? We'll let Andrew Burns of NVIDIA explain:
If you're unfamiliar with Ambient Occlusion, it is most easily described as a way to make in-game shadowing more realistic, and therefore better.
What he doesn't say of course, is how it kills your frame rate, especially on lower end hardware. Anyway, there's all the usual goodies in this release: 3D Vision game profiles for games such as MW3, Diablo 3 & LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (yes really). There's a HD audio update and nine fixes too, including one for random flickering of the Windows boot logo as it's loading or fading away and a fix for the mouse cursor flickering and shaking in games such as Crysis 2 & Deus Ex when SLI is enabled when using 3DTV Play. The NVIDIA product release page is
here and they have a snazzy-looking driver selector
here. The release notes follow.
Case specialist NZXT presents their newest line of modular power supplies with the Hale82 units. Consisting of three different versions with 650, 750 and 850 Watts along with 80Plus Bronze certification, these offer a great value with uncompromising performance. With their black housing and cables, the Hale82 goes perfectly with the many black cases out there.
With the first power supply series - the Hale Power 90+, NZXT answered to the demand of the users by offering an extremely stable and high-efficient power supply with the coveted 80Plus Gold certification. On top of that, being modular ensures a clean case interior, as the user may only use the cables needed. This reduced cable clutter also improves the internal cooling, as nothing obstructs the air flow.
Hightech Information System Limited (HIS) today made the world's first USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter available - the HIS Multi-View+Sound. Delivering a fast and easy way to expand your visual computing experience across multiple screens, the HIS Multi-View+Sound turns your computer into a gaming and multimedia center.
ADATA Technology, a leading manufacturer of high-performance DRAM modules and NAND Flash application products, today introduced new industry-leading, single piece 8GB DDR3-1333 high-density memory modules. Implementing state-of-the-art technology and strict control of the production processes, these modules provide professionals and enthusiasts with new heights of high-speed computing experience.
ADATA is committed to providing high performance and stable memory solutions. This single piece 8GB Premier Series DDR3-1333 memory module series supports advanced user and professional data operation needs. With the limited space available on many motherboards, an insufficient number of DRAM slots is a common dilemma. This most recent advance in density further allows consumers to easily enhance overall system performance.
Today, Apacer took the lead by launching the world's fastest high-capacity Ultra High Speed microSDXC 64GB memory card with the latest UHS-1 interface and SDA 3.0 memory card standard. It provides up to 30MB/s UHS ultra-high transmission speed for high-end mobile devices, such as advanced smartphones, tablet PCs, event data recorders, etc. You may easily store 1080p Full HD videos, 3D games, digital music/photos, apps and other multimedia files. This feature offers the next-gen mobile experience, guiding you through the ultimate audio-visual journey. Apacer's new Ultra High Speed microSDXC 64GB memory card perfectly meets the demands of HD audio-visual transmission with its lightning-fast speed and super-large capacity.
Russian website Overclockers.ru claims to have a complete picture of what Intel's upcoming 22 nm Core "Ivy Bridge" desktop (2012 Core Processor Family) looks like. The site compiled model names, extensions, clock speeds, Turbo Boost speeds, L3 cache sizes, and TDP ratings of as many as 18 models, most of which are quad-core.
The table reflects that most clock speeds are similar to today's Sandy Bridge LGA1155 processor models, some have Turbo Boost speeds as high as 3.90 GHz. Since Ivy Bridge silicon is an optical shrink of Sandy Bridge LGA1155, from 32 nm to 22 nm, and since Intel is using a more energy-efficient transistor design, there are significant improvements in TDP ratings.
In August, we got a
first glimpse of AMD Radeon-branded DDR3 memory modules sold at select stores in Japan. At the time, AMD denied plans of directly selling AMD-branded memory to customers, and that it was determining if the sale of AMD Radeon-branded memory through channel partners is a viable opportunity. Today there is concrete evidence that AMD wants to go directly to customers with their DDR3 memory products, and has partnered with two well known companies in its effort.
Presenting a more polished AMD memory module lineup. The first ones (pictured in the link above) looked not much more than bare, generic-looking DDR3 modules with Radeon logo stickers. The new ones look better designed for customers, since good product design pays heavily in the retail channel. The new modules use black colored PCBs, metal heatspreaders, and red colored full-length stickers. A confirmation that these products are headed to the retail channel is the box. OEMs don't buy memory modules in boxes, they buy them in trays. AMD has a nice-looking product box design with a carbon-fiber pattern and appropriate branding.
As Dreamhack Winter, the world's largest digital festival and LAN party kicks off, SteelSeries and one of the most recognized and accomplish gaming teams, Team Fnatic, introduce the SteelSeries 7H Fnatic Limited Edition headset and SteelSeries Sensei Fnatic Limited Edition mouse. Available now on SteelSeries Web Shop, the Limited Edition 7H headset features 50mm dynamic driver units with new, sound isolating SNDBlock ear cushions; while the Limited Edition Sensei features award-winning technology like its 32 bit ARM processor that powers SteelSeries' ExactTech settings and customization abilities, all of which are housed in an ambidextrous, black, orange and white Fnatic color design and illuminated Fnatic team logo.
"We sponsor and work with a number of incredibly talented professional players and are proud to say that the Fnatic team is part of that family," said Kim Rom, SteelSeries CMO. "We have been supporters and collaborators with, as well as fans of, the talent that makes up the Fnatic squad for a long time now. We felt that it was the perfect time to introduce co-branded peripherals - that their players helped us design, regularly use and win with - to their immense and passionate fan following."
Sunday, November 27th 2011
On our front page, we placed a poll in mid-September, ahead of AMD FX Processor family launch (based on the "Bulldozer" architecture). Based on the most plausible specifications and the hype surrounding the products at the time, we had a hunch that neither Bulldozer nor Sandy Bridge-E will meet our readers' expectations. AMD FX Processor family turned out to be a Duke Nukem Forever, clogged in the pipeline for too long (since 2007, as a matter of fact), when it came out, it made a mockery of itself. It's barely faster than its previous generation.
Sandy Bridge-E promised to be a pin-up processor platform that's eons faster than its predecessor, its specs-sheets warranted its hype. As it turns out, although they're the fastest processors, they aren't much faster than previous-generation Westmere six-core chips at multi-threaded applications, and aren't much faster than Sandy Bridge LGA1155 Core i7 processors at gaming and serial loads. We set out to find out which would turn out to be a bigger "fail" (failure, in internet jargon). To stuff the poll up with more options, we experimented with the idea of placing a seemingly-unbeatable poll option "Our Politicians", just to see if either of the two could fail so hard, that politicians end up better. The myth that politicians always win at a failing contest is busted, at least in this case.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, that the close relationship between Microsoft and Intel (and by extension AMD) is crumbling into dust. In fact, they have never really been the best of friends. It has been clear since Microsoft unveiled that Windows 8 would run natively on ARM processors that things would never be quite the same again. Apart from some niche server variants of Windows, which could run on Itanium and other processors, all the previous desktop versions, including Windows 7, have run on x86 (
and x64 for the last 6 years or so) processors.
However, Microsoft is keen to increase its presence in the lucrative smartphone and tablet market, where it's not had much success so far, getting comprehensively trounced by Android and Apple. Microsoft would be happy to use an x86/x64 processor for this application, but here, the limiting factor is the energy source, the battery, forcing the entire device to consume very little power if it's to run for more than 5 minutes. To meet this requirement, processors based on the ARM architecture have met this need admirably for years, with excellent performance while the Intel x86 variants have not (see video below). This has lead Microsoft to forge a relationship with a new processor manufacturer, Qualcomm, who make their own variant of the ARM processor, called Snapdragon. In fact, the relationship is so close now, that Windows Phone 7 only runs on Qualcomm ARM chips.
Saturday, November 26th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
AMD rolled out its second Catalyst performance driver update in a week, with the Catalyst 11.11b. It follows
Catalyst 11.11a, which was released earlier this week. A performance driver update is what AMD used to call "Hotfixes", they are updates for recently-released WHQL-signed drivers, featuring some performance improvements fresh from the Catalyst developer team. In includes all the changes 11.11a brings to the table, plus the ones listed below:
Elder Scrolls Skyrim- New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling for AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
o AMD Radeon HD 5000 CrossFire support will be supported soon in an updated driver
Assassin's Creed: Revelations- New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling
DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11b Performance Driver for
Windows 7 and Vista |
Windows XP
Ubisoft, pioneer of the much-hated always-on DRM, is currently developing Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - but only for the console platforms. The PC will instead get the free-to-play ("F2P" in common parlance) Ghost Recon Online, which conversely will not be available for consoles. Ubisoft claims that this is because "95% of our consumers will pirate the game", so they are addressing the needs of this market. Sebastien Arnoult, Ghost Recon Online producer said:
We are giving away most of the content for free because there's no barrier to entry. To the users that are traditionally playing the game by getting it through Pirate Bay, we said, 'Okay, go ahead guys. This is what you're asking for. We've listened to you - we're giving you this experience. It's easy to download, there's no DRM that will pollute your experience.'
Note how Ubisoft are
finally admitting that DRM 'pollutes' the experience? No kidding. Arnoult then elaborated on the differences between the business models of the PC and console platforms:
We're adapting the offer to the PC market. I don't like to compare PC and Xbox boxed products because they have a model on that platform that is clearly meant to be €60's worth of super-Hollywood content. On PC, we're adapting our model to the demand.
2012-13 promises to be a period of big graphics product launches, centric to a new DirectX version, DirectX 11.1, which will ship with Microsoft's next major Windows version (currently referred to as Windows 8). Information compiled by ExpertsPC.com and 4Gamer.net tables what NVIDIA's next-generation graphics family could look like, and around what time it could be released to market. With its next-generation GeForce Kepler family of GPUs, NVIDIA will follow a sensible bottom-up product release model, to ensure that it isn't met with any technical hurdles with TSMC's new 28 nm manufacturing process, and so it could launch GPUs with increasingly higher transistor counts, till its top-of-the-line GPU is outed.
The first GPU in NVIDIA's pipeline is the GeForce Kepler 107 (GK107), on which will be based entry thru lower-mainstream SKUs. The data doesn't reveal things like core counts, but points out that GK107 will have a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, will use the current-generation PCI-Express 2.0 bus, will be built on the 28 nm process, and will support DirectX 11.1. This will be followed by the GK106, on which "sweet-spot" SKUs could be based. This will be NVIDIA's first PCI-Express 3.0 compliant GPU, it will have a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.
Friday, November 25th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Power Supplies
Till now NZXT had only one PSU series, HALE90, which included only Gold efficiency PSUs. However since Gold efficiency leads to higher prices, NZXT decided to release a new line of PSUs with lower efficiency and more affordable prices, targeting a wider range of users. The name of the new series is HALE82 and all of its members are 80 PLUS Bronze certified and feature a semi modular cabling design.
Intel's Ivy Bridge line of processors are not due for release until spring 2012, but it looks like Chinese website Coolaler has scored a sneak peak at the performance level of Intel's 22 nm Ivy Bridge platform by testing an engineering sample of a quad core CPU. The screenshot shows CPU-Z & Task Manager (no HyperThreading) readouts, while the AIDA64 Cache & Memory benchmark has been run. The CPU used is a 2 GHz sample as shown by the photo, which CPU-Z reports as running at its 2.4 GHz turbo boost speed (20% overclock) on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard. Rough and ready verdict: about the same speed as the current Sandy Bridge, but with a significantly enhanced northbridge and graphics core. The AIDA64 scores are actually slightly lower than the current SB scores, but this is likely because the CPU is running unsupported and unoptimized due to a mobo BIOS that's not made for it and a benchmark that cannot measure its true performance. Note the memory speeds, which were run fast at 2134 MHz 6-9-6-24 CR2, further indicating lack of optimization, since these timings suggest somewhat better performance than what was measured.
Over a thousand workers in Shenzhen, China went on strike against their employer Jingmo Electronics Corporation (JEC), which is a supplier for companies like Apple and IBM. According to China Labor Watch (CLW), a New York-based watchdog of labor rights in China, and an advocate of ethical consumerism, "the motivation behind the strike was the factory's decision to make workers work nightly overtime." CLW goes on to add that the workers had been asked to work from 6 PM to midnight and sometimes even up to 2 AM on top of the usual four to four and a half day shifts from 7 AM to 11.30 or 1 PM to 5 PM.
CLW goes on to add that the workers "commonly worked anywhere from 100 to 200 hours of overtime a month," but the factory refused to let them put the hours in at the weekend because under Chinese labour law JEC would have had to double the wages. Authorities dispatched several hundred riot policemen to tackle striking workers. CLW called upon Apple and IBM to assume responsibility of for these workers' dissatisfaction, and work with JEC to improve the working conditions in the factory. Responding to the strike, JEC agreed to cut the average overtime hours, and resume operations soon.
In-Win Development Inc, a leading innovator in high-quality, contemporary PC hardware and multiple winner of the internationally renowned Red-Dot Design Award, has today launched its new performance PC chassis, the BUC 101.
Its strength of design is echoed across both its boldly shaped exterior, high quality SECC steel construction and a hard-wearing black interior. With a striking expression and fantastic feature-set that includes support for multiple 300mm (11.8") graphics cards, it will perfectly suit any gamer.
TechPowerUp released a new version of GPU-Z, version 0.5.6. GPU-Z is our popular graphics card information and diagnostic utility that gives you technical details of the graphics hardware installed in your PC, and lets you monitor fine details such as clock speeds, temperatures, and voltages. The new version adds preliminary support for some of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce Kepler family GPUs. It also adds support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 CUDA cores, which will be launched this 29th. Support is also added for AMD Radeon HD 6320, FirePro V9800, FirePro V4900, GeForce GTX 460 V2 (GTX 460 based on GF114), Quadro NVS 420, Quadro NVS 450, and Quadro FX 380 LP. A small bug related to incorrect shader reading on "Blackcomb" is fixed.
DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.6 |
GPU-Z 0.5.6 ASUS ROG Edition
Finally, next generation gaming consoles are around the corner. It will have an uplifting effect on the entire gaming industry as it will raise the bar for visual and technical detail in games. Many of today's games are designed keeping consoles in mind, and so their PC platform versions don't look much more than what has come to be known as "console-ports". There are a few exceptions to this, but it would be refreshing to see most game developers move on to creating games that take advantage of today's insanely powerful PC platform, because the console platform will have caught up technologically.
Rumors have it, that Microsoft will be developing not one, but two product lines that succeed the Xbox 360, and we're not talking about product variants here, but two distinct lines. The first of the two will be an entry-level console designed more like a set-top box, designed around the Kinect controller (perhaps something to compete against Nintendo Wii U). The second product line will be the one that will be supercharged with the latest technologies that will raise the bar in graphics. It will compete with whatever succeeds the Playstation 3. There is talk that it will pack a 6 core processor, an AMD-made GPU, and 2 GB of fast DDR3 memory. This console could be unveiled to the world (although not launched), at the CES event held in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing TSMC some time to refine its 28 nm bulk process.
Yes, you heard that right, when completed, the Raspberry Pi foundation will be selling a credit card sized computer running Linux that can plug into your television and play H.264 1080p30 videos. Raspberry Pi is the somewhat cheekily-named UK registered charity which has been set up to design and build a very low cost computer that is targeted for use in computer science lessons in schools, to "put the fun back into learning computing." Why, was it ever not fun?! However, such a simple and cheap general purpose gadget has the potential for many other uses than the classroom, as the world is full of inventive tech-minded people that can tinker with something like this and build innovative projects with them, perhaps by using several of these together.
The product will come in two configurations, a $25 Model A with 128 MB SDRAM & $35 Model B with 256 MB SDRAM and both will come with the same 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 media processor featuring an ARM11 (ARM1176JZF-S) core, Broadcom GPU core, DSP core and support for Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM. We expect that in this day and age, most people will go for the 256 MB model, which is still a very small amount of RAM. For those that want to get the most out if this device, the website -
www.raspberrypi.org - has a
forum and a
wiki with tons of technical details on the device, including benchmarks and
links to many other news stories & blogs about the product. There's even a shop, although at the moment, it's only selling keyboard stickers of the foundation's logo.
Thursday, November 24th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Media Players
Eminent may not be a well known name in the media player market, but the company from the Netherlands manages to deliver a full range of players with a surprisingly unique set of features. We take a look at the EM7280, whip out the popcorn and see what it can paint on the big screen.
Intel started shipping the new Pentium 350, a model designed specifically for low-cost servers, micro-servers, and home servers; a segment Intel originally planned to address with some of its Atom dual-core chips. The Pentium 350 is an offshoot from entry-level desktop and notebook platforms the Pentium brand is currently in charge of, it is designed with durability and energy-efficiency required by servers in mind.
Available in the LGA1155 package, Pentium 350 is a dual-core processor based on the 32 nm Sandy Bridge dual-core silicon. It is clocked at 1.20 GHz, and features 3 MB of shared L3 cache apart from 256 KB L2 cache per core. Thanks to its low clock speed, the chip's TDP is rated at just 15W, making it ideal for home and small business servers. It will naturally benefit from the high IPC of Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip features Intel64 instruction set, its integrated memory controller supports up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1066/DDR3-1333 MHz memory.
GIGABYTE's brand new chassis, designed with the combination of innovative technology and powerful performance to cater to the needs of global professional gamers and designers. LUXO X10 is a powerful best selling gaming model, bringing along superior experience of approachable luxury, maximum convenience and great flexibility.
At the first glimpse of the case, people cannot help but notice its minimalism modern appearance. The classical combination of black and red emits an air of sophistication and delicate passion. A feeling of freshness is shining through the side panel blazing LED lights. Nevertheless, this new model is more than just good looks.
Here are the first pictures of Galaxy's GeForce GTX 550 Ti Display4 graphics card, designed exclusively for Asian markets. As its name might suggest, it is a GeForce GTX 550 Ti based graphics card designed to support up to four displays. The card uses an IDT VMM 1403 display output logic chip that lets it effectively make use of the total resolution the GPU supports. The redesigned display logic supports a total resolution of 5760 x 1080. Spread across four displays, you get 1440 x 1080 per display, or spread it across three displays to get 1920 x 1080 per display. Apart from four DVI connectors, its output logic makes room for a mini-HDMI connector.
The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is aided by 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. It is powered by a 3+1 phase VRM controlled by Galaxy's in-house G-Engine chip. The GTX 550 Ti packs 192 CUDA cores, and clock speeds of 950 MHz core, 1900 MHz CUDA cores, and 1025 MHz (4.10 GHz effective) GDDR5 memory. Galaxy also used its in-house "Glaciator" cooler, which makes use of a heat-pipe fed heatsink ventilated by a large central fan. This can can be partially detached to help clean it, and the portion of the heatsink directly underneath it. Galaxy's GTX 550 Ti Display4 is priced at RMB 999 (converts to US $157).
PNY Technologies is considered a leading designer, manufacturer, and supplier of memory upgrade modules launched the HP v112b tiny USB Flash Drive, adding a new USB Flash drive to its HP line-up the v112b, which is a tiny but elegantly designed drive. The drive comes in a shiny translucent sapphire blue casing with wavy design to help get a better grip. It comes with a cap, which also features the same wavy design, continuing the body design when closed. The design makes it water resistant, and it is also resistant to mechanical shocks. The COB packaging helps achieve such a small size.
A lanyard hold at the far end lets you tie it to a keychain, purse, belt, etc. Plug and play functionality lets you use the drive in Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7, and even on Mac OS 10.3 and above. Being a very tiny drive has its advantages, giving the drive ultra-portability. The small size and weight also makes it convenient to take it wherever you go to share your digital documents, pictures, video clips and music files.
The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, ruled that P2P filters installed by ISPs violate the European Directive on electronic commerce as well as fundamental rights. The full ruling can be accessed
here. This comes as a major blow to stingy ISPs who conserve and shed bandwidth in the name of checking peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, by somehow deeming that all P2P traffic consists of unlawful sharing of copyrighted content and software.
The ruling is part of a case filed by SABAM (Belgium's equivalent of RIAA), which sued ISP Scarlet for not filtering P2P traffic, and in the process, facilitating copyright infringement. A Brussels Lower Court then ordered Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor the internet traffic of its subscribers. In response Scarlet appealed against the verdict in the European Court of Justice. Scarlet argued that a filtering system would be incompatible with the Directive on electronic commerce and with fundamental rights. The European Court of Justice ruled in agreement with Scarlet.
Lenovo, today announced the IdeaCentre Q180 - a consumer desktop PC no larger than a paperback book, yet powerful enough to turn a digital TV into a multimedia hub for enjoying music, videos, games, web browsing and more.
"With the IdeaCentre Q180, we upped our game in the compact PC category," said Nick Reynolds, executive director, Product Group Marketing, Lenovo. "Featuring the latest HD Graphics and Blu-ray 3D playback, the Q180 enables consumers to change the way they enjoy multimedia and the Web in their living room at an affordable price point."
As the joyful Christmas approaches, Team Group Inc. presents the brand new F108-X'mas USB to make the sweetest holiday greetings. The graffiti art Christmas tree is painted and decorated with red reindeers and golden snowflakes. Its colorful and lovely patterns properly match to deliver sincere wishes and create a sugary Christmas fantasy for couples.
In creative packaging, the delicate F108-X'mas limited edition has beautifully carried out the holiday spirits. Using charming red and luxury gold with steamy textures, a pleasant, warm, and kaleidoscopic Christmas is in the air. F108-X'mas limited edition provides 4, 8, and16 GB stock capacities in 2 designs worthwhile to collect. What's more, the company is considerate to grant you lifetime warranty to store every precious memory.
When webpages weren't much more than text and images peppered with hyperlinks, and when animated elements were limited to slideshow-like animations by Compuserve GIF, Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) transformed the web, making it visually engaging. Even PCs with first-generation Pentium processors and 56K internet connections had access to a much superior internet experience thanks to Flash. According to Adobe's own statistics, over 90% of internet-enabled PCs have the Flash Player browser plugin installed. Apparently the "open/free everything" proponents want the world to get rid of the Flash plugin. Why? Because it's not "open", not all platforms can use it, and it poses security hazards.
Brandishing an extremely original name, "
Occupy Flash" calls itself to be a "movement to rid the world of Flash Player plugin," because "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology." Occupy Flash argues that with HTML5, Flash is redundant and "free". Not quite; people don't pay for Flash Player plugins, those who create Flash content do, for the Adobe Flash software. It's not like a transition to HTML5 is going to change that equation much. People still won't have to pay to be able to consume public HTML5 content, while those creating it will still need to use proprietary software to create quality content, it's just that they'll end up with more vendors to sell them that.
Exceleram announced a new value-segment 8 GB DDR3 memory module, the E30200A. This no-frills module lacks any heatspreader, because it probably doesn't need it. It can operate at DDR3-1333 MHz (PC3-10700) speed with CAS latency of 9T, and DRAM voltage of 1.5V. More importantly, it is priced at US $49.99 a piece, making 16 GB (2x 8 GB) dual-channel possible at just $99.98. Compare that to the prices of 2x 8 GB kits available on
Newegg.
"[The] target for us was to find a solution for our customers to obtain a new 8GB 1333MHz CL9 Memory Module with the price at only US$ 49.99. This price combined with the strong quality level as well as Exceleram always does, it's a really tough target for us to reach. But now we have got the solution, the E30200A Memory Module," said by Steffen Eisenstein, the Product Manager of Exceleram.
Japanese firm ROHM, in partnership with Osaka University, unveiled a new, afforable terahertz-range radio transmitter. To achieve terahertz frequencies, the transmitter should oscillate 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) times per second. At that rate, one can't really dub that "radio" frequency, because it enters what is known as "far infrared" (FIR) band, which is relatively unexplored by science so far, due to limitations in technologies (transmitters) that can accurately oscillate at a set frequency in that band.
What does it mean for us? To begin with, if ROHM's transmitter is able to strike an affordable price like it's designed to, it will exponentially increase data bandwidths offered by today's wireless networking technologies. A tiny transmitter developed by ROHM, measuring 1.5 x 3 mm, which uses resonant tunnelling diode technology, is already able to oscillate at 300 GHz (0.3 THz), achieving the ability to transmit 1.5 Gbps (192 MB/s). The people behind this transmitter believe that using the technology they developed, they should be able to scale up bandwidths to 30 Gbps in the future. The FIR band is relatively free, and less complex modulation sequences will be required, facilitating low-power transmission.
Wednesday, November 23rd 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Power Supplies
LEPA is a newcomer in the PSU market, behind which a major manufacturer is hiding: Enermax. Their products target mostly the mid-range market and are characterized in general by good price/performance ratio. Today we will test the G700-MA, a Gold efficiency 700W unit which will be of great interest to users who seek a high quality PSU of average capacity with many high-end features.
Review
Media Players
Arctic has been diversifying their product range greatly in recent years. While their foray into some things like toys or gaming consoles may be a bit too far fetched for some, the MC001-BD Media Center takes the company back to the roots. The Home Theater PC offers all the bells & whistles like Blu-Ray, USB 3.0, Intel Atom in combination with Radeon Mobility graphics and much, much more, while managing to cool the entire system passively. We take a look at the new, compact system along with a few accessories to see if it can take center stage and shine.
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple has a habit of trend setting. When Apple released their original iPad, it had a meager low resolution 1024 x 768 resolution display which was scoffed at by many, yet it didn't stop it from being a runaway success. And the iPad 2 didn't improve on it, either - perhaps surprisingly, since the original formula worked so well. However, in early 2012 Apple plans to introduce its new Retina display equipped next generation iPads, offering a very high 2048 x 1536 resolution. On the 9.7" screen of an iPad, this would make the pixels all but invisible to anyone, except for those with the sharpest of 20-20 vision, giving the screen superb clarity and wow factor. These will be incorporated into its next generation iPads, which is expected to push the PC notebook market to use higher resolution displays too in order to remain competitive.
The XBOX 360 Kinect motion tracking device has been a huge hit, especially with the modding community, who have got it to do things that Microsoft never envisaged for it. This appears to have paid off, because in an
MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that in 2012, they will launch a version tailor made for a Windows PC. It's very much the same as the 360 version, except for things like firmware adjustments, a shorter USB cable for greater signal reliability and a small dongle to
"improve coexistence with other USB peripherals". For developers, the new firmware
"enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters." Also, the
Software Development Kit (SDK) has seen numerous upgrades. There's significant interest from businesses too, so Microsoft
"are proud to be helping those companies to explore the profound implications NUI has for the future." Finally, the Kinect Accelerator incubation project run by
Microsoft BizSpark will be giving 10 tech-oriented companies $20,000 to explore innovative new ways of using Kinect. Applications close on January 25th, 2012. Official forum:
General Discussion-Kinect for Windows SDK
It looks like developer DICE has been doing a lot of listening to its customers, as the large number of complaints over in-game glitches has produced an almighty patch, fixing just about everything, including the kitchen sink, while making lots of little tweaks to improve gameplay and the user interface. On top of that, the patch is PC only for now as the console versions are taking "a bit longer due to [the] console certification process".
Bugfixes include such goodies as a "Black Screen" fix for an issue occurring on some PC Configurations; spawn protection improvements; increasing the damage from the 44 Magnum slightly; sharing your profile and stats with new Battlelog functionality; profile integration with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and lots more. The full list appears below.
NVIDIA today announced that, for the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.
The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.
Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan. With sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts, Tsubame 2.0 delivers 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy. It is 3.4-times more energy efficient than the next-closest x86 CPU-only petaflop system, the Cielo Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.
The only way mainstream portable
wintels are going the survive the onslaught of smaller, increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing devices (such as ARM-driven tablets and smartphones), is by slimming down radically, and making themselves available to the mainstream. No, we're not talking about cheapo netbooks, but ultrabooks (ultra-slim notebooks), that provide mainstream notebook-like performance in a much more compact package. Intel will give this form-factor a big push next year with an Ivy Bridge architecture-based processor platform designed keeping it in mind, and technologies centric to it.
To begin with, slimmer form-factors could eat into wired connectivity, hence, Intel will push its Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s interconnect to the fore. But wired connectivity is the least of ultrabook's limitations. Battery life, data storage, and additional computing power will need to be accessible yet optional to it, and hence docking stations will be hot in the market, yet again. Intel will pitch for Thunderbolt to be a standard component of docking port clusters.
Anandtech posted the first set of performance figures of OCZ Octane. The enthusiast community is looking at the outcome of OCZ Octane eagerly, because it is based on OCZ's own newest high-performance SATA 6 Gb/s SSD processor, the Indilink Everest, the first major Indilinx controller after OCZ's acquisition of the company. It adds to the options available to enthusiasts, between SandForce SF-228x based SSDs, and Marvell 88SS9174.
The [p]reviewer put the 512 GB 6 Gb/s variant of this drive though the site's "Heavy Workload 2011" test suite, in which it edged past Intel SSD 510 250 GB, but fell behind OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS 240 GB and Kingston HyperX 240 GB, both driven by SandForce SF-2281 processors. So far the performance yield looks encouraging, considering that OCZ has managed such performance on a drive with relatively higher capacity. Apart from the Indilinx Everest, OCZ Octane features 512 MB of cache and Intel 25 nm Sync MLC NAND flash memory. OCZ will also introduce a value variant that uses the SATA 3 Gb/s interface and Async MLC NAND flash. Complete reviews of this drive will surface in the coming days.
Team Group Inc. introduces the Team X101 USB 3.0 flash drive disk at 2011. The X101 is the world's first aluminum ally flash drive disk that uses gradient coating with color rendering to specify the extreme speed of 100MB/sec transfer rate. The subtle and simplified high quality metal appearance perfectly interprets the high speed performance of USB 3.0, adding another new force to Team Group's high-end products.
Combining both high technology and chic design, the Team X101 comes in a reserved color of stress its neat and trim business style with a solid quality that compliments the elegant taste of modern metro-sexual. The high performance helps save every valuable second for busy executives and businessmen so that they can work more efficiently. Adopting the new generation USB 3.0 ultra speed interface with a bandwidth that reaches as high as 5Gbps, which is 10 times faster than the current mainstream USB 2.0's 480Mbps. With USB 3.0, it takes only 70 seconds to transfer a 25GB blu-ray video. In addition to the high-speed transfer rate, the X101 comes in large capacities of 32GB or 64GB, making it the best choice for satisfying the mobile storage needs of elite professionals.
Cooler Master, an industry leading chassis, thermal solution, power supply, peripheral, and accessory manufacturer, today announces that it will be improving its best-selling, award-winning CM 690 II models.
Time tested as a titan among mid-tower cases, the CM 690 II makes it possible to take advantage of excellent airflow and water cooling options to vastly reduce temperatures on system components. The roomy interior space of CM 690 II Advanced enables users to install up to 10 fans, with enlarged mesh design for superb ventilation. Users can accommodate 120x240mm radiator at the top and bottom for superior cooling performance. It also supports up to 2 radiators for water cooling units, and larger CPU cooler, such as Hyper 612 PWM.
Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced that it has set a new world record with a memory frequency of 1733.8MHz (DDR3-3467) using Corsair Dominator GT CMGTX6 extreme-performance DDR3 memory.
World champion overclocker and Corsair employee Jake "Planet" Crimmins set the new record at Corsair's laboratory with a custom-designed, liquid nitrogen cooled PC based on an AMD FX-8150 processor and equipped with 1GB of Dominator GT extreme-performance DDR3 memory. The system was powered by a Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200 fully modular power supply.
Tuesday, November 22nd 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
Silverstone has managed to turn heads with the 90° turned motherboard tray. One of the cases, the Raven 2 has now been updated with a new hard drive tray system and USB 3.0. We take the chassis out during the night to see if we manage to scare it away or if it can hold its ground.
Around the 9th of December, AMD will announce its first Radeon HD 7000M series graphics processors, beginning with mobile parts (for notebooks). There will be at least 16 models announced, all based on two silicons: "Thames" and "Seymour", and being carved out of toggling various components within those GPUs. The models AMD will be launching will span across the Radeon HD 7400M series, 7500M series, and 7600M series. Thames and Seymour are brand new chips built on the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process, which will allow AMD more TDP headroom, which it can use to step up clock speeds.
While we don't have key details such as stream processor, ROP, and TMU counts, a table based on data compiled by CompuBase.de lists out GPU and memory clock speeds, memory interface widths, and memory type. The table also mentions some higher-end GPU models named "Chelsea", "Heathrow", and "Wimbeldon". By now you know that all these codenames are after names of places in the UK. That's one way you can identify Radeon HD 7000M mobile GPUs from the "Southern Islands" Radeon HD 7000 desktop discrete GPU family (named after islands in the southern hemisphere).
Do you want a really small PC that fits in the palm of your hand? Well, if you do, then VIA Technology have got you covered with their new ARTiGO A1150. As you can see from the pictures, it has a high 'cuteness' factor, due to its diminutive size of just 5.7" x 3.9" x 2". For processing, it sports a 64-bit VIA 1.0 GHz dual core Eden X2 CPU and a VX900H media system processor supporting the latest HD video codecs including H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2/4 at up to 1080p. Interfaces include HDMI and VGA ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, five USB ports including one USB device port, three audio jacks with optional wireless IEEE 802.11 b/g/n and SD card reader modules.
Target uses include the usual home/office environments, use as a super space-saving desktop PC, a home server, media streaming and surveillance applications. Of course, the real question is what kind of performance can one expect out if it, given that it's targeted at the desktop PC market, so one hopes that it can run Windows 7 at a decent performance level. Oddly, the
VIA press release doesn't say anything about the RAM, so it's not clear how much can be fitted, which type and what speed grades are supported.
The world of corporate disputes is a funny one. S3 Graphics filed a compliant against Apple for infringing four of its patents related to its graphics IP. Later this year, ITC announced a verdict ruling in favor of S3 Graphics around the same time S3 Graphics was being purchased by HTC. In a spectacular turn of events, on November 21, ITC took a U-turn by
overruling the favorable verdict and dismissing S3 Graphics' case.
Commentators note that AMD's intervention into the case as a non-party may have played a key role, AMD claimed the patents in question to be its own, later Apple sought dismissal of the case based on the grounds of AMD's claims. ITC denied AMD and Apple requests to publicly disclose the details of the patents in question, so the the public would't find out what patent claims were used against S3 Graphics. AMD is currently the principal supplier of GPUs for Apple's Mac products, though there are now rumors that with the next generation of Macs, Apple could change its GPU supplier to AMD's rival NVIDIA.
ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and channel manufacturer, today debuts the silently quick GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition for users that demand stunning Microsoft DirectX 11 visuals and noise-less cooling.
The ZOTAC GeForce GTS 450 ZONE Edition takes the award-winning GeForce GTS 450 graphics processor with 192 high-performance shaders and passively cools it using a ZOTAC-exclusive dual-slot fan-less cooling system that features copper heat-pipes and aluminum fins to keep the graphics processor cool while operating silently.
Amelia Andersdotter from Sweden will soon take oath as the youngest to join European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year old member of The Pirate Party was voted to her seat more than two years ago, but her appointment was delayed all this while, due to bureaucratic hurdles. Andersdotter promises to fight archaic copyright laws and corporate interests.
In an interview to Torrent Freak, Andersdotter touched on issues like competition between telecommunication companies (state and private operators), certification, and the infamous ACTA legislation. "When national parliaments have been saying that they can't do anything about ACTA, activists and media just kind of happily accept. What national parliaments could do, and should do, is obviously tell their national governments not to sign the agreements. That is and would be within their power," she said. You can read the full interview at the source.
For those who upgrade between succeeding versions of Microsoft Windows, the upgrade installer can be cumbersome. There are way too many prompts and clicks. Microsoft is working to make the upgrade package of its next major version of Windows, for now referred to as Windows 8, streamlined to as few as 11 clicks. The new installer will be designed to perform most of its tasks without needing user input.
Microsoft will implement a new web-delivery method, where you purchase your Windows 8 license online, and the installer downloads your soft copy to you. It is pre-fed with your 25-character product key. Microsoft's next major Windows release is slated for 2012.
Taiwan-based Genius, an international company in computer peripherals, announced the Eco friendly Genius DX Eco Mouse. Experience the most Eco friendly wireless mouse from Genius Blue Eye Family. The Genius DX Eco is battery-free, and helps contribute one own effort in environment protection.
Featuring a battery-free design, it has a built-in gold capacitor to expand rechargeable life up to 100,000 times, just a quick charge for 3 minutes and ready to use. The Genius BlueEye technology let one work virtually anywhere. Its bi-directional 2.4 GHz link works up to 15 meters away from the receiver, and is backed by anti-interference technology to ensure perfect working smoothness. Also available of four hot keys to access to previous/next page, flying scroll and dpi adjust between 800 and 1600 dpi. Plus its super mini receiver is easy for storage and prevents breakage.
AMD released its latest "performance driver" for Radeon graphics cards, the Catalyst 11.11a. With this release, AMD is using the term "performance driver" to refer to performance-enhancing Hotfix updates it launches between its scheduled monthly WHQL-signed updates. Catalyst 11.11a fixes some outstanding game-related bugs and improves performance and resolves driver-related bugs for a variety of recently-released titles such as Batman: Arkham City, Rage, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Battlefield 3. The rest of the driver is based on Catalyst 11.11.
DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11a Performance Driver for
Windows 7 or Vista |
Windows XP
A list of changes follows.
Monday, November 21st 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Power Supplies
As technology advances necessarily some old designs and beliefs are left behind. Without any doubt in today’s highly competitive market only the companies who decide to adapt to the current user demands and needs will see their sales increasing. Apparently this is what PC Power & Cooling did with their new Silencer MK III PSUs in which the abandoned the non modular design and adopted a semi modular one.
DisplayLink, the leading provider of technology for virtual and USB-connected computing, and I-O DATA DEVICE (
www.iodata.com) today announced the availability of the I-O DATA USB-RGB3/D USB 3.0 to DVI display adapter. Incorporating the DisplayLink DL-3100 chip for connectivity and virtual graphics, it is the first USB 3.0 enabled display adapter to ship in Japan.
"And this is as true in Japan as any other technology-embracing market."
Featuring the robust DisplayLink 3.0 video compression and support for resolutions up to 2048 x 1152, including 1080p, even the newest notebooks, netbooks and PCs can enjoy the benefits of multi-screen computing. And with the throughput of SuperSpeed USB 3.0, those monitors will display high-performance, full-screen HD video, 3D games, rich 2D graphics and multi-channel audio.
Over the weekend, we brought you
news that over 1600 bans had been issued to gamers caught cheating by exploiting bugs and loopholes. However, it's not a case of one little cheat and you're out forever. No, InfinityWard's community man Robert Bowling has now revealed that there's a ban scale being used by his studio's security teams, although no specifics were mentioned. He said on Twitter:
Every ban [is] unique to the level of douchiness of the offense. The greater the douche the greater the length [of the ban]. PermaDouche possible. Any attempt to cheat, hack or glitch in MW3 will not be tolerated.
InfinityWard relies on gamers reporting each other to help clean up the gaming space. To do this, gamers can rat on each other from the game's lobby, where clicking on a username gives you the option to report them. The information supplied then goes straight to the security team, who will, rather sensibly, vet the claim before issuing any ban, so as to counter the malicious false reporting that must also go on. Bowling explained how they do this:
Just in time for holiday giving, Samsung is introducing a Piano Black version of its WiFi-only Series 5 Chromebook. At a price of $349, the updated Series 5 is even more giftable than the original.
Chromebook, based on Google's Chrome operating system, is designed to provide people a faster, simpler and more secure computing experience. Due to automatic software updates, Google has continued to release new features and improvements on an ongoing basis. These new features coupled with the Samsung design aesthetic creates a technology device that gets better over time, offering the best possible web experience in one device for the internet-enthusiasts in all our lives.
JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced its participation in the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 12. CES, produced by the Consumer Electronics Association, is the preeminent showcase for the worldwide consumer electronics industry. JEDEC's partner program, Memory Matters: Memory Solutions for Consumer Products and Mobile Devices, will explore how technological advancements and new standards can enhance device performance, reduce power usage and enable compact form factors.
Ever-increasing expectations for device speed and performance, as well as the trend towards smaller form factors, are driving the need for versatile memory solutions. Speakers from Agilent, CST, Micron and Samsung will highlight leading-edge memory solutions for next-generation mobile applications, a new generation of low-power memories for smartphones and tablets, and much more.
Western Digital Corp. today reported that on November 18, 2011, an arbitration award of $525 million was rendered against the company by a sole arbitrator in a pending confidential arbitration action in Minnesota. The amount of the award does not include prejudgment interest, which will be subsequently determined. The award involves claims brought by Seagate Technology LLC against WD and one employee who was formerly employed by Seagate, alleging misappropriation of confidential information and trade secrets.
"We do not believe there is any basis in law or fact for the damage award of the arbitrator," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer. "We believe the company acted properly at all times and we will vigorously challenge the award. This does not affect our ability to conduct our operations, to complete the recovery and recommencement of our Thailand operations or, subject to obtaining the required regulatory approvals, to consummate our planned acquisition of Hitachi GST."
Winbond Electronics released a new line of serial peripheral interface flash (SPI Flash) memory chips designed to have tiny board footprints (sizes). 8-pin SPI Flash memory chips are in almost every part of today's computers, be it the chip that stores motherboard or VGA BIOS, the one that stores third-party controller firmware, or even boot ROM of network cards. Its applications get even broader with consumer electronics devices. Winbond launched new 8-pin SPI Flash chips in ultra-thin small-outline no-lead (USON) and wafer-level-ball-grid-array (WLBGA) form-factors, that have 20% smaller board footprints than common WSON and SOIC packages.
Winbond's new 6 mm² USON SPI Flash chips come in sizes of 512 Kb, 1 Mb, 2 Mb, 4 Mb, and 8 Mb, and with voltage options of common 2.5V and 3V. Low-power 1.8V options are available, too. The WLBGA SPIFlash chips will be available in 8 Mb and 16 Mb capacities, with package sizes of 3.4 mm² and 4.8 mm², respectively. Currently these chips are built on the more common 90 nm bulk manufacturing process, but Winbond expects to transition to 58 nm bulk process, driving down costs, in the future.
As early as in September, we heard
reports of AMD toying with Rambus XDR2 memory on its next generation of high-performance GPUs. Apart from our own community's response, that news met with a wall of skepticism as it was deficient in plausibility. New reports from Chinese websites have raised the topic again with fresh rumors that AMD will attempt to implement XDR2 on some of its next-generation ultra-high end products after all. XDR2, according to Rambus, can transport twice the amount of data per clock as GDDR5.
Apparently AMD and Rambus have had much more cordial relations with each other, than other companies the latter engaged in patent disputes with. In 2006, AMD
settled outstanding disputes with Rambus by willing to pay licensing costs for certain technologies claimed by Rambus, turning a leaf in the relations between the two. What Chinese sources are suggesting now, is that AMD will design its high-end GPU (codename: "Tahiti") in a way that will let it support both GDDR5 and XDR2. Certain higher-end SKUs based on Tahiti will use XDR2, while the slightly more cost-effective SKUs will use GDDR5.
"Trinity" is the codename of AMD's next-generation performance accelerated processing unit (APU) family. Based on the new socket FM2 package, these chips will take advantage of AMD's next-generation Piledriver processor core architecture and VLIW4 GPU stream processor architecture. Together, Trinity promises increased general, visual, and parallel compute performance. Some of the slides detailing AMD's own performance estimates were put up by DonanimHaber in their recent video bulletin. We screen-grabbed the performance graphs from the low-resolution video, hence the grainy images.
To begin with, AMD is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current "Llano" APU. It spread its benchmarks across three categories: visual performance (using 3DMark Vantage), general performance (using PCMark Vantage), and parallel compute (GPGPU) performance (calculated CTP SP GFLOPs). With 3DMark Vantage, Trinity A8 (quad-core), A6 (triple-core), and A4 (dual-core) APUs are seeing a roughly 32% improvement over their respective Llano-based counterparts; with general performance, the improvement is a candid 13.8% on average; but with GPGPU performance, the improvement is a massive 56.3% on average. This could be attributed to the VLIW4 architecture. Lastly, there are notable CrossFire dual-graphics performance improvements.
Norwegian company FXI aims to grab some attention with its latest creation, the Cotton Candy. Simply put, this is a thumb drive-sized device that either plugs into a PC/notebook using USB, or a TV/display using HDMI, and works as a cloud-client computer. In its tiny form of 8 x 2.5 cm (L x W), this cloud-client packs an ARM Cortex-A9 1.20 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, ARM Mali-400MP quad-core GPU, a micro-SDHC card reader, and connectivity that includes Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, WiFi b/g/n, and USB; stuff high-end smartphones are made of.
You can simply plug this to your HDTV, connect wireless keyboard and mouse that support Bluetooth or WiFi, and end up with a cloud-ready desktop powered by either Android or Ubuntu. You can even connect your Android smartphone to it and use its touchscreen as an input device. With your more powerful desktop or notebook, you can simply plug Cotton Candy to a USB port and boot from it (like you'd boot from a flash drive). The OS loads up, and you have your cloud desktop ready to go. Besides its compact form, Cotton Candy weighs as little as 21 grams. It is expected to be priced under US $200.
Sunday, November 20th 2011
In news, that will be sweet music to the ears of honest gamers, InfinityWard has been busily banning cheaters who exploit loopholes and coding errors in the game to get one over others. The figure is currently around the 1600 mark and rising, as InfinityWard's community man Robert Bowling posted on Twitter: Any attempt to cheat, hack, or glitch in #MW3 will not be tolerated. 1600+ bans issued. Updates in works. Please cont. to report offenders. He then added: We are doing mass bans on PC as well while we work on updates. He has promised that a hot fix is in the works for multiple glitches that have been reported.
Now, while cheating is wrong, it can also be an incredibly fun, but guilty pleasure. So, is it really all the cheater's fault, when opportunities like this are laid at there feet? It's like giving someone a cake and telling them not to eat it. Perhaps the program code should have been more bug free in the first place, too?
We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented -
www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature
here,
here and
here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.
Softpedia has
scored an exclusive interview with security researcher
Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) -
malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:
The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.
Saturday, November 19th 2011
AMD has now released the CrossFireX Catalyst Application Profiles 2 for their latest
11.11 WHQL drivers. The improvements apply to just two games:
New profiles added to this release:
- Saints Row 3: Resolves stuttering seen when playing in CrossFireX mode. Also provides Single GPU and CrossFireX performance improvements when running in lower resolution configurations
- Gothic 4 Arcania: Fall of Setarrif: Improves CrossFire performance
There's nothing yet for hit game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in this release, unfortunately. CAP 2 can be downloaded
here.
Imagine an amazing cellphone battery that lasts a whole week on one charge and takes a mere 15 minutes to recharge from flat. Sounds like science fiction or a dodgy claim, right? Well, incredibly, it isn't, but we will have to wait three to five years for such a wonder. Current high-end smartphones usually have to be recharged once a day, because battery technology really hasn't advanced enough to keep up with their increasing power demands. The same is also true of course, of anything else that uses batteries, such as laptops and electric cars. In the latter case, the batteries cost thousands, go flat pretty quickly, take an age to recharge and don't have that great a working lifetime. No wonder electric cars are still shunned by people that want real performance and practicality from their cars.
But all these frustrating limitations are set to end, if research with the catchy name of "In-Plane Vacancy-Enabled High-Power Si-Graphene Composite Electrode for Lithium-Ion Batteries" published in the November 2011 issue of Advanced Energy Materials is anything to go by. The lead author of this
article (paywall) is Harold H Kung, who is professor of chemical and biological engineering in the
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also is a Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellow. So, a pretty bright bod, then. He has written in the article:
We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery's charge life by 10 times. Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today.
That's amazing.
Really amazing and the kind of breakthrough the world has been waiting impatiently for, for years. So, how has this been achieved? There are two main problems that have been overcome - and overcome in one fell swoop.
Friday, November 18th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
SSD
OCZ's Synapse Caching SSD offers a unique way to achieve SSD-like performance for your big hard disk, which could be up to 3 TB in size. In our testing we see a performance improvement of 250% when compared to a SATA 6 Gbps HDD alone.
The TRIM command feature has become an industry standard for internal garbage collection on SSDs. Unlike with magnetic storage devices such as hard drives, in NAND flash storage devices, new data can't simply be overwritten on existing deleted data (like overwriting on cassette tapes), instead NAND flash cells are first put through erase cycles, and then fresh data is written on them. This leads to degradation of performance in SSDs, as all deleted data will be put through erase cycles. The TRIM command allows the drive to tag freshly deleted data for disposal, and then erase flash memory occupied by that data when idling, and dynamically allocating erased cells for fresh data. This dramatically reduces write performance degradation of SSDs. Unfortunately, issuing TRIM commands to SSDs that are part of a RAID volume is so far not possible, because the RAID volume acts as a sort of an abstraction layer between the OS and physical disks. Some low-level data about member disks can still be read by diagnostic tools, but that's about it.
If the Release Notes document of Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver 11.5.0.1109 Alpha (read
here) is to be believed, Intel plans to bring TRIM support to RAID 0 volumes with a future version of RST. Snooping through the document, one can find the following line:
2. This release will not enable the TRIM on RAID0 feature, but it will be added in the next RST 11.5 release. Contact your RST AE representative with questions.
Want a new graphics card this shopping season? Is news of Radeon HD 7000 series arriving late this year or early next year holding you back from purchasing current-generation? Don't let it, go grab that graphics card you had your eyes on. Fairly reliable sources point out that a bulk of Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards will be based on rebranded current and previous generation GPUs. This bulk mostly spans across the entry-thru-mid range of the product lineup. Familiar GPU codenames such as Cedar, Caicos, and Turks, make a comeback with Radeon HD 7300 series, HD 7400 series, HD 7500 series, and HD 7600 series.
Moving up the ladder, the source postulates two possibilities for Radeon HD 7700 series. First, and more plausible, is that the series is based on Juniper (a hop across two previous generations!); the second is that these make use of rechristened GPUs from a slightly higher market position from the previous generation. Perhaps Barts, perhaps even highly crippled Cayman. The only real next-generation GPU is codenamed "Tahiti", but we're hearing that graphics cards based on it are said to not follow the Radeon HD 7000 series nomenclature altogether.
Here are some of the first pictures of an unreleased custom design GeForce GTX 580 graphics card by Galaxy, given out by the good folks at HardOCP. It may look like yet another GTX 580 graphics card with a beefy cooling solution, but it's a little more than that. To begin with, it has a redone display logic that gives it a total resolution of 5760 x 1080. This means that three 1920 x 1080 displays can be connected to it without needing another card. Its display outputs include three mini-HDMI and a full-size DisplayPort. Display management is backed by Galaxy's in-house EZY display setting software.
Corepad, the manufacturer and distributor of PC gaming accessories, introduced the Corepad DeskPads in new sizes.
The Corepad DeskPad series are made of very durable, extreme large, flexible and smooth cloth. These huge mousepads will cover most of your Desk and are available in 3 sizes. It's supposed to put your keyboard or Laptop on as well. Besides that your arms lean comfortable on the surface.
LSI corporation is the first to implement new serial-attached SCSI (SAS) 12 Gb/s interface, geared for future generations of storage devices that can make use of that much bandwidth. For now, LSI proposes SAS expander chips that distribute that bandwidth among current-generation storage devices. The company displayed the world's first SATA 12 Gb/s add-on card, which uses PCI-Express 3.0 x8 interface to make sure there's enough system bus bandwidth. This card can connect to up to 44 SAS or SATA devices, and supports up to 2048 SAS addresses. It is backwards compatible with today's 6 Gb/s and 3 Gb/s devices.
By making use of the 12 Gb/s SAS Expander solution paired with 32 current-generation Seagate Savvio 15.3K RPM hard drives, LSI claims 58% increase in IOPS compared to a 6 Gb/s host controller, because of better bandwidth aggregation per drive. There's also a 68% increase in bandwidth yield. The array of 32 hard drives could dole out 3106.84 MB/s on IOMeter, and more significantly, over 1.01 million IOPS. As big as this number seems, it could be an IOMeter bug, because the numbers don't add up. Perhaps it's measuring IOPS from disk caches.
Thursday, November 17th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
Antec aims to deliver a functional, good looking chassis at an interesting price point with the P280. As part of the Performance One line-up, you can expect the ability to fill the chassis with high-end components like an XL-ATX motherboard and long graphics cards. But will the chassis break a sweat doing so or keep on performing?
The latest Sandy Bridge-E 6 core processors have just been released, to excellent reviews. However, the architecture is designed for 8 cores, so these current i7-3960X & i7-3930K processors actually contain those 8 cores, but with two turned off in order to enable them to fit within a manageable 130 W power envelope. Hence there's quite a bit more potential to be released and soon. Therefore, anyone looking to invest in the premium-priced SB-E platform right now, should note that these processors are at the initial
C1 stepping and have the
VT-d hardware virtualization issue and PCI-E 3.0 compatibility uncertainty.
The VT-d problem will be a real show stopper where hardware acceleration of a virtual machine is a must, so it shouldn't be ignored.
VR-ZONE brings us news that the fully unlocked SB-E 8 core chips will be released as the long awaited Xeon E5 family of processors, which will be built on the
C2 stepping, solving the above issues. However, being 8 core, these will be very power hungry indeed, consuming around 150 W at just 3 GHz with all 8 cores active and 20 MB of L3 cache. At 2.5 GHz though, the new processors are expected to fit within the 95 W power envelope.
While the Modern Warfare 3 launch has got off pretty smoothly overall with few technical glitches
and made Activision a shed-load of money, it seems that some XBOX 360 players are not so lucky.
g4tv.com reports that there is a "
A 14-page thread on Xbox.com points to multiple XBOX 360 gamers getting similar disc read errors from the game." The general symptoms seem to be that the console will either not read the disc at all, or starts, but then falls over flat on its face with an ungainly crash a little while later. While many posters have suggested solutions, there doesn't appear to be a definitive fix. Therefore, the best course of action for this problem is to return the disc to the retailer and ask for a replacement.
Finally, If you're a console gamer, then this of course serves you right for not being a PC gamer and enjoying the benefit of superior hardware. It should also be noted that the PC version comes as a download on the Steam online network. This eliminates any DVD read issues as there's no DVD (the installation disc in the retail version can be ignored) and also greatly improves loading times both at the start and during level changes, since it loads from the hard disc.
Earlier this week, Intel launched the fastest desktop processors under its Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" platform, with is partners, motherboard, memory and cooler vendors. Less than a week into its shelf life, Sandy Bridge-E already has a successor taking shape at Intel, slated for the fourth quarter of 2012, but that's far from being the most interesting part of this news. According to a new internal slide scored by a source at XFastest, Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with today's Intel X79 platform, and LGA2011 socket.
Suddenly, Sandy Bridge-E makes for a sweeter deal because its platform longevity (for upgrades) is at least two years. Ivy Bridge-E, like Ivy Bridge LGA1155, will be built on the 22 nanometer silicon fabrication process. We don't expect Ivy Bridge-E to be much more than an optical shrink of today's Sandy Bridge-E silicon, but the shrink could leave scope for enabling some of its components otherwise locked out for the Core processor family. Sandy Bridge-E silicon physically holds 8 cores and 20 MB of L3 cache, but the fastest Core processor based on it has just 6 of those cores, and 15 MB of L3 enabled. The source at XFastest says that while Ivy Bridge-E is slated for Q4 2012, the LGA1155 Ivy Bridge will launch across Q1 and Q2 of 2012 (March~April).
Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0. The DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is designed for enthusiasts, gamers, early adopters and high end consumers; it features the fastest speeds and largest capacities that Kingston has to offer in a USB Flash drive. Faster speeds and higher capacities enable users to quickly store their digital files and keep it with them at all times, in HyperX style.
Its high-speed eight-channel architecture provides USB 3.0 data transfer rates of up to 225 MB/s read and 135 MB/s write. Users can save time associated with opening, editing and copying large files and applications between devices. The fast write speeds also allow users to work on large files or applications directly from the USB 3.0 drive without performance lag.
With the release of the venerable Spectre Silent Fan Series in August 2010, enthusiast hardware designer BitFenix proved its engineering prowess in the case cooling space. Today, BitFenix ups the ante with the Spectre Pro Performance Fan Series. By combining innovative features and a fresh new design aesthetic, the Spectre Pro Performance Fan Series represents the new gold standard in case cooling fans.
"After we released the Spectre Series last year, users looking primarily for a silent build were floored at just how good silent fans can be," says BitFenix Product Manager David Jarlestedt. "Now with the many unique features and design elements that we've implemented into Spectre Pro, I believe that the performance crowd is going to be even more impressed."
SteelSeries, the leading manufacturer of premium-quality, competitive gaming peripherals and Ignite Game Technologies, creators of groundbreaking auto racing platform Simraceway, today introduced the Simraceway SRW-S1 Steering Wheel, an affordable, high-performance PC controller that aims to open up a whole new racing world to players frustrated by the limitations of joypads.
A handheld hybrid racing controller that combines the features and functions of a high-end wheel with the portability and convenience of a joypad, the SRW-S1 includes a motion-sensor for steering and a patent-pending throttle and brake paddle system for a fully simulated driving experience without the need for floor pedals.
Chinese company Yeston released a new Radeon HD 6790 graphics card for gamers on a tight budget. It makes use of cost-effective cooler and PCB designs to make itself available at a price-point of 799 RMB (about $125). The familiar-looking cooler borrows its design from the likes of MSI Cyclone. It consists of a copper-plate base which makes contact with a heatsink with spirally-projecting fins and two 8 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat-pipes; these heat-pipes pass through two aluminum fin arc structures on either sides of the main heatsink. Ventilation is care of a central 80 mm fan.
The PCB uses a cost-effective 3+1 phase VRM to power the 40 nm Barts LE GPU, making use of common coil-type chokes and DPAK MOSFETs. The card is one of few HD 6790 offerings out there, that draw power form just one 6-pin PCIe power connector (most designs use two). The GPU features clock speeds of 840 MHz core and 1050 (4.20 GHz effective) memory; and is aided by 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. It packs 800 stream processors. Display outputs include two DVI, and one each of HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2.
Cooling specialist Prolimatech is expanding their diverse line-up of coolers further after the successful Panther launch. Their latest CPU cooler by the name Lynx aims to take the entry level by storm, offering excellent compatibility and bundling a 120 mm PWM equipped fan right out of the box.
The manufacturer Prolimatech is known for high performance and silent cooling solutions like the Megahalems, Armageddon and Genesis. Their newest unit is incredibly compact and intended to appease the budget user. Called Prolimatech Lynx, it delivers the most cooling possible combined with a size that ensures maximum compatibility.
Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced a range of HyperX Genesis memory in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB kits to support the new Intel Sandy Bridge-E X79 quad-channel processors and X79 Express-based motherboards. Kingston HyperX Genesis is the perfect solution for enthusiasts who require 4x raw performance increases afforded by quad channel over single channel solutions.
For extreme users who require both the fastest memory and largest capacity, Kingston's 2400MHz and 2133MHz will soon be available in both 8 GB and 16 GB kits of four modules. Other HyperX Genesis memory for X79 systems include 1866 MHz and 1600 MHz frequencies in kits of four and eight, with capacities ranging from 8GB to 32GB. All of Kingston's HyperX kits have achieved Intel XMP certification and are compatible with the latest X79 motherboards from vendors such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI and ASRock.
The KFA2 GeForce 570 MDT X4 is designed to play the latest DirectX 11 games in full 1080p. Whilst the KFA2 GeForce 570 supports up to 4 monitors its main feature includes 'Virtual single monitor mode' which shares one desktop across 3 screens, producing surround HD game play.
The card features 4 DVI ports to support digital PC displays natively, and also has one Mini-HDMI port with digital audio for use with HDTVs. Like the GTX 560 Ti MDT X5, the GTX 570 MDT X4 also allows you to connect an additional display for the Windows desktop to use for chats, playlists, video, supporting all the latest features such as DirectX11 and PhysX.
As the demand of high speed data transmission is increasing, KINGMAX, a world renowned leading brand of DRAM and flash memory, has launched two stylish metallic look UD-09 USB 3.0 flash drives at the same time, to cater to users who pursue comprehensive high speed data transmission equipment.
On the whole, the speed of new UD-09 is twice that of typical USB 2.0 drive, and the grey and piano black with stylish shinning plating in the middle adds to the excitement of UD-09. The new entry-level PD-09 projects simplicity in style with pink and mist grey to choose from, and scratch resistant design makes PD-09 the most durable. Capacities of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB are now available.
Wednesday, November 16th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
The NZXT Source 220 aims to deliver cool looks, capable interior, USB 3.0 - all at a really affordable price point. The Source series of cases aims to take on the budget market, but still offers the distinct NZXT looks we have come to expect. How does it turn out?
Rambus is the company best known for suing dozens of companies over memory patents that it holds and is suing so prolifically, that many just see this company as a patent troll. It has been accused many times of obtaining submarine patents while a member of the JEDEC group until a decade ago, which it is now fraudulently using to try and extort royalties from every other company using DDR memory and its derivatives. Unfortunately, those lawsuits didn't stick, encouraging Rambus to carry on enthusiastically. Rambus won patent fights against
NVIDIA and
Samsung for example, who now have to pay them ongoing royalties. However, it looks like Rambus may have bitten off more than it could chew, because it has just lost a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron Technology Inc and Hynix Semiconductor Inc, erasing more than half of the chipmaker's value as investors abandoned its stock in droves. Rambus stock immediately plunged more than 60% on this good news.
NVIDIA today announced that system builders worldwide are now shipping the fastest PC gaming platforms ever built, thanks in part to NVIDIA SLI technology and the just-released Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors and X79 chipset-based motherboards.
The combination of NVIDIA SLI technology -- which allows for multiple GPUs to run on a single PC -- and new X79-based motherboards allow gamers to customize their PC experience with up to four NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570, the world's fastest DX11 GPUs. Licensed by the world's leading motherboard manufacturers -- including Intel, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI, SLI technology is crucial for playing this year's hottest graphics-intensive games, such as the recently released Battlefield 3 and upcoming Batman: Arkham City with detail, resolution and immersion settings cranked up.
In an effort to make it easier for programmers to take advantage of parallel computing, NVIDIA, Cray Inc., the Portland Group (PGI), and CAPS enterprise announced today a new parallel-programming standard, known as OpenACC.
Initially developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, OpenACC is a new open parallel programming standard designed to enable the millions of scientific and technical programmers to easily take advantage of the transformative power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems.
OpenACC allows parallel programmers to provide simple hints, known as "directives," to the compiler, identifying which areas of code to accelerate, without requiring programmers to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.
At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.
During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.
The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies. Khronos has updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to ensure that implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development. The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are available
here.
"The OpenCL working group is listening carefully to feedback from the developer and middleware community to provide significant and timely functionality for heterogeneous computing in this cross vendor open standard," said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. "The OpenCL working group is also broadening its membership and has growing representation from the mobile and embedded industries and is enabling innovative devices such as FPGAs to be driven through OpenCL."
Today, the United States Congress will hold hearings of an internet censorship system for America. That's right, "Land of the Free" gets a Great Firewall of its own, which is proposed to be practically as empowered as the one People's Republic of China uses, only that it threatens to have wider reaching consequences on areas such as freedom of speech, freedom of information (by that we're not endorsing piracy), and the integrity of the DNS system.
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Even as the ecosystem of devices that use Thunderbolt interconnect grows at a snail's pace, there are companies such as ORICO from China that have ideas to take Thunderbolt-attached storage forward. It unveiled CGI sketches of products its working on, 3.5-inch SATA hard drive enclosures. Available in sizes of 1, 2, 4, and 5 drives; these enclosures connect installed hard drives to the system over Thunderbolt, some of the larger variants feature two connectors, to allow Thunderbolt daisy-chaining with other devices and displays. The enclosures make use of aluminum bodies, and draw power from external power bricks. The company didn't give out any more information.
Team Group Inc. announces the Xtreem LV/ Dark series are now fully compatible with the latest flagship Intel X79 platform. After long anticipation, the new Sandy Bridge-E (LGA-2011) of high-end processor Intel Core i7 is officially released this week. In response to the expectation of overclocking enthusiasts, X79 platform adopts the quad-channel memory up to 51.2GB/s ultra-broad bandwidth. Only Team's Xtreem LV/Dark series could perfectly suit every X79 motherboard in the market and operate processor Core i7 to the extreme.
Xtreem LV flagship overclocking memory modules has been widely preferred among players. After making great R&D efforts, the product now well adapts Sandy Bridge-E series of processor Core i7 besides its outstanding stability and compatibility. Xtreem LV series have passed the most strict product trials and overclocking tests to provide the greatest reliability. Meanwhile, Xtreem Dark provides audiences the best way to experience the ultra speed of overclocking with its great cost-effectiveness.
On this day 40 years ago, Intel Corporation introduced the world's first commercially available microprocessor - the Intel 4004 - triggering the start of the digital revolution. While most people have never seen a microprocessor, devices that contain them have become so integrated into daily life that they have become virtually indispensible.
Microprocessors are the "brains" inside computers, servers, phones, cars, cameras, refrigerators, radios, TVs and many other everyday devices. The proliferation of microprocessors is due in large part to Intel's relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, a forecast for the pace of silicon technology development that states that roughly every 2 years transistor density of semiconductors will double, while increasing functionality and performance and decreasing costs. It has become the basic business model for the semiconductor industry for more than 40 years.
Apple today named Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. as the Company's non-executive Chairman of the Board. Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apple's board since 2005, has served on all three board committees- audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation-and will continue to serve on the audit committee. Apple also announced that Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, will join Apple's board and will serve on the audit committee.
"Art has made enormous contributions to Apple since he joined the board in 2000," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "He has been our longest serving co-lead director, and his insight and leadership are incredibly valuable to Apple, our employees and our shareholders."
Iomega, an EMC company and a global leader in data protection, today announced the completion of its new Mac-oriented hard drive line with the launch of the new Iomega eGo Mac Edition Portable Hard Drive, an on-the-go stylish drive with plenty of storage that can withstand drops and still travel easily in a pocketbook or briefcase.
Combined with the recent launches of the Iomega Helium Portable Hard Drive and the Iomega Mac Companion Hard Drive, Iomega now has a complete new line of portable and desktop hard drives for Mac users. All three new drives are formatted HFS+ for compatibility with Mac computers right out of the box, making them perfect complements to today's Apple notebooks and desktops.
AMD, along with launching several new Opteron processors, retouched prices of its socket FM1 accelerated processing units (APUs), across its A-Series. These include tiny price hikes for its lower-end APUs, A4-3300 and A4-3400; a minor price cut for the A6-3500; a price-cut for the FX-6100; and introduction of the new Athlon II X4 651. To begin with, the dual-core A4-3300 and A4-3400 got hiked by $2, sending their prices from $64 and $69, respectively, to $66 and $71, respectively.
On the other hand, the price of A6-3500 is cut from $89 to $85. The six-core FX-6100 socket AM3+ processor saw a $10 price-cut, sending its price down from $165 to $155. Lastly, AMD introduced a new Athlon II processor in the FM1 package, the Athlon II X4 651, AMD's second, after Athlon II X4 631. This quad-core chip has 1 MB L2 cache per core, and is clocked at 3.00 GHz, 400 MHz higher than the Athlon II X4 631.
Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system, notebook and mobile device manufacturer presented white-box All-In-One (AIO) system-G11 not long ago. To surprise the market, ECS provides two more designs for G11-ID2 (North Star) as photo frame style now, and ID4 as L-stand style in Q4, 2011.
Original ID1 as photo-frame style displays an elegant and classical glossy design. ID2 maintains a glossy surface but with a new North Star speaker bezel. North Star represents the leader of stars in Chinese culture and guides the direction in astronomy; G11 new bezel design ID2 leads your new digital life as a North Star. The new ID4 design transfers the photo-frame style to an L-stand style with a brand new stand for users to easily adjust the height and degree of visibility. The new G11 ID4 stand gives you more options for your space arrangement.
Tuesday, November 15th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Portable Storage
The Superior SH14 drive from ADATA offers two fairly unique attributes: shock resistance and water resistance. We take the drive for a spin and torture it to see if we can break it.
Yes, after 2.5 years in the making and over 4 million sales, Minecraft has finally gone gold. This is the game with the charmingly blocky graphics where the player builds their cartoon world out of blocks and must hide from monsters at night. It will be officially released at the inaugural MineCon event in Las Vegas this Friday. Developer Markus "Notch" Persson head of studio Mojang announced it had gone gold on Twitter:
So, yes. Minecraft has gone gold.
Today, we brought you the
depressing news that Activision are unlikely to bring the Call of Duty social network called Elite, to the PC platform, despite all their loyal PC gamers, who have bought every iteration of the game going and in particular helped them achieve their blockbuster sales of $400M last week. This delight came courtesy of this
tweet:
@thejuggz We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC.
Well, what do you know, but it looks like Elite is coming to the PC platform
after all. Yes, you heard that right. In a
tweet a while later, Activision claim to have "misspoken", like this:
We misspoke. Our goal has always been to provide a free PC offering for ELITE. Stay tuned for an update as timing is still being determined.
So PC gamers will at least get the free version. Fantastic. Still second class, but better than nothing. Probably best to keep a close eye on those tweets and a sceptical outlook on this one until it happens. You couldn't make this stuff up.
Just over a week ago, we brought you
frustrating news that the brand new Call of Duty Elite social network was going to be delayed for the PC, once again leaving the PC gaming crowd feeling like second class citizens compared to their console counterparts. Now, in a bitter blow, it appears that the Elite service may shut out loyal PC gamers altogether. Plus, as is typical of big companies, the message was delivered in the most terse and disrespectful way possible, via a short
Twitter tweet:
@thejuggz We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC.
So, that's it then, PC gamers may never get it and there's no explanation why. One can only surmise that it's due to the alleged "security issues" previously alluded to. Therefore, hopefuls will just have to wait on tenterhooks for an undefined period of time. So,
the biggest sales launch in history isn't enough to convince the company to support the PC platform? It looks like detractors of the Call of Duty franchise have a very legitimate axe to grind this time, doesn't it? Probably the best way to view this unfortunate news is that the benefits weren't worth it anyway.
Well, this 11.11 release doesn't list any performance improvements unfortunately. It contains just one new unexciting feature and a few fixes, but still has quite a long list of known issues. The new feature is Adobe Flash Player 11 hardware accelerated graphics support, including the A-series and E-series APUs. Fixes include things like Rage texture corruption, bezel compensation working correctly in Far Cry 2 and a screen tearing fix for displays in clone mode. Therefore, if your setup is working fine, there's no rush to update to this driver in case it breaks something. Note the following CAP 1 profile updates added to this release:
- Battlefield 3: Tweaks to the CrossFire profile
- Global Ops: Commando Libya: Improves CrossFire performance
- Driver San Francisco: Disables CrossFire
DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL for
Windows 7/Vista 64-bit,
Windows 7/Vista 32-bit,
Windows XP 32-bit,
Windows XP 64-bit
DOWNLOAD: Release Notes
This week, ASUS, along with the rest of the PC motherboard industry, launched its socket LGA2011 board lineup, with its three main lines: P9X79, ROG Rampage IV, and TUF Sabertooth X79. The ROG line included the Rampage IV Extreme, which ended up being ASUS' flagship socket LGA2011 motherboard for the platform's launch. It's filled to the brim with all the features gamers and overclockers will ever need. But as with most ROG lines, Rampage IV will have a complete triad: Extreme (already launched), Formula (a notch below Extreme, but still offers great features), and Gene (Micro-ATX, stuffed with features).
Press shots and presentation slides of the Rampage IV Formula started making waves today. Pictures reveal the board to be standard ATX. Unlike the Extreme, Formula has just four DDR3 DIMM slots (one slot per memory channel), yet it supports all the DRAM multipliers Extreme does. The CPU is powered by a 11-phase Digi+ VRM. It is wired to four PCI-Express 3.0 (capable) x16 slots, among which two are PCI-Express 3.0 x16 capable, and all four are x8 capable, depending on the way they are populated with addon cards. Apart from these long slots, there are two PCI-E 2.0 x1. 4-way SLI and CrossFireX are supported. Storage connectivity includes four SATA 3 Gb/s (black), four SATA 6 Gb/s (red, two from the PCH, two from third-party controller), and two eSATA 6 Gb/s (also from a third-party controller).
Digital Storm, the predominant name in computer system integration and engineering, proudly announces the flagship system in its award-winning line of ODE gaming computers - ODE Level 4. This new system takes the pre-built and fully customized concept to the next level by integrating Intel's X79 chipset, Core i7 3930K six-core CPU, and overclocking it to 4.6GHz. ODE Level 4 gaming PCs are packed with lightning fast components that have been optimized to deliver unparalleled performance, while not breaking the bank.
Based on Intel's X79 chipset, ODE Level 4 boasts blazing fast speed that creates unrivalled gameplay. Digital Storm engineers have also taken advantage of the quad-channel memory controller on the new X79 chipset by designing a luxurious 16GB configuration of DDR3 memory that delivers an even more responsive user experience. Additionally, a configuration of three NVIDIA GTX 570 1.2GB video cards, in triple SLI, generates fluid smooth graphics, creating an immersive gaming experience.
Mach Xtreme Technology Inc., a worldwide leader in top performance, high reliability and user-friendly designed PC components, today unveiled Urban Series Quad-Channel DDR3 memory kits giving demanding enthusiasts exactly what they need. The kits are optimized for Intel X79 express chipset based motherboards.
Urban quad-channel DDR3 modules offer desktop users groundbreaking computing experience at an attractive price point. Featuring enhanced capacity of 4GB per module, these new high-density 16GB kits provide customers with cutting-edge memory solution that significantly increases memory space driving breakthrough gaming and digital media content creation performance of X79 based systems. Each kit is designed to work as a kit and users working with the latest operating system can keep multiple applications open or run smoothly memory intensive graphic programs. The uniquely designed lightweight heatsink is made of specially imported top grade Japanese aluminum.
ASUS, maker of the world's best-selling and most innovative motherboards, is excited to release a wide range of new X79 motherboards. All feature the new Intel X79 Express Chipset, with support for 2nd generation Core i7 processors in the new LGA 2011 Socket. The complete lineup includes P9X79 Series motherboards with total performance tuning and control, the enthusiast-centric ROG Rampage IV Extreme, the ultra-reliable TUF SABERTOOTH X79, and the professional P9X79 WorkStation Series supporting NVIDIA 4-way SLI and AMD CrossFireX.
All motherboards feature ASUS Dual Intelligent Processor 3 technology with the latest ASUS DIGI+ Power Control design providing three digital voltage controllers onboard, one for the CPU and two for DRAM. ASUS' class-leading Digital Power designs result in better performance, greater stability, and enhanced overclocking for all users. All of the new motherboards ship with multi-GPU support, PCI Express 3.0 capabilities*, exclusive ASUS UEFI and up to 64GB of quad-channel DDR3 support via 8-DIMM slots.
GIGABYTE TECHNOLGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced the launch of their latest X79 series enthusiast motherboard range. Supporting the latest 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 processor family for high-end desktops, these new X79 Express Chipset motherboards unite unrivalled desktop PC performance with a new level of hardware flexibility and control. GIGABYTE 3D Power and its all new 3-way Digital Power Engine offers ultimate control of your PC's power delivery, while GIGABYTE 3D BIOS provides a wholly more intuitive and graphical UEFI BIOS environment.
"This new GIGABYTE X79 series range of boards are all about giving enthusiasts and professionals unprecedented control over their PC's hardware," commented Tim Handley, Deputy Director of Motherboard Marketing at GIGABYTE. "GIGABYTE 3D Power and 3D BIOS give hardcore gamers, extreme overclockers and cutting-edge content creators absolute mastery over every aspect of their PC."
Motherboard platforms change frequently, especially when a new chipset is unleashed. The big change coming from Intel recently is the high-end X79 chipset, taking over from the crusty old X58 chipset. The new socket boasting a scarcely credible 2011 pins to allow the new Sandy Bridge-E processor has more memory channels. The newly released X79 platform is known for the astonishing OC capability. Designed for serious overclockers, ASRock is excited to introduce several high-performance motherboards based on Intel X79 chipset.
"The motherboard is the basis of your rig, and will dictate how well the rest of your PC's components perform." Commenting on the new release, James Lee, V.P of ASRock Sales and Marketing, is with confidence. "ASRock X79 Overclock KING Motherboard Series offer the Digi Power (the most stable CPU voltage), Premium Gold Caps (top-tier capacitors), X-FAN (the smart cooling design) and Game Blaster (a Sound & LAN 2-in-1 card exclusively offered from ASRock), everything essential for overclocking. Our exciting X79 mobos could boost the performance of any kind of PC!" He stated.
Leading international mainboard and graphics card manufacturer MSI today announces the official release of its X79A-GD65 (8D), X79A-GD65, X79A-GD45, and X79MA-GD45 mainboards. The new mainboards are based on Intel's latest X79 chipset and uses the LGA 2011 socket supporting the 2nd generation Core i7 processors. The X79A-GD65 (8D) features with 8 memory DIMMs, supports 16GB DDR3 memory modules, bringing maximum capacity up to a staggering 128GB! For superior quality and stability, MSI X79 series mainboards adopts Military Class III components. With DrMOS II - the next generation of DrMOS with improved double thermal protection - the lifetime of components is maximized, even in warmer environments or when the machine is heavily overclocked.
MSI X79 series mainboards also feature the latest PCI Express Gen 3 bus and MSI's proprietary Click BIOS II for maximum performance and user convenience. When taking into account all of the other advanced technologies supported such as 3-Way NVIDIA SLI and 4-way AMD CrossFireX multi-GPU processing technology, THX TruStudio PRO sound, Multi-BIOS II, Control Center II, and Super Charger, MSI X79-series mainboards are simply the best choice for enthusiasts!
True next generation motherboards have arrived with the EVGA X79 lineup. The new EVGA X79 motherboard series packs in the latest technologies to give you an uncompromising experience! Unparalleled memory bandwidth with true quad channel DDR3 memory support, and Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 gives you intelligent computing by optimizing performance on the fly! Up to 4-Way SLI** gives you the expansion you need to maximize your graphics performance.
High performance 12+2 PWM, 100% POSCAP Capacitors and ESR/ESL Film Capacitors* deliver clean, optimal power to your system for maximum overclocking. Dual 8pin CPU connectors* can provide up to 600w of steady power to the CPU through a high quality CPU socket with three times* the normal amount of gold content for the lowest impedance, and highest current transfer. Also, with built in EVGA EVBot support, you can overclock on the fly from the palm of your hand.
Monday, November 14th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
anidées is a new brand in the tough case market. Their first chassis - the AI6 aims to deliver the utmost quality with a solid choice of features. All this at a sub 100 Euro price point. We were impressed by the quality of materials used and also the attention to detail.
Razer, maker of high performance gaming gear, has reported that two of their prototype gaming laptops were stolen on the weekend of 4th November from their Bay Area R&D lab. Looking at the basic specs of the laptop, one can see why they were so attractive to thieves: Intel Core i7 2640M Processor (2.80 GHz), 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory, 17.3" LED Backlit Display (1920 x 1080 pixels) & NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M with NVIDIA Optimus Technology and 2 GB Dedicated GDDR5 Video Memory and of course the styling. The outfit is understandably miffed about this and have announced the theft on their
Facebook page:
ENERMAX is proud to announce the launch of its first wireless keyboard and mouse combo "Briskie". True to traditional ENERMAX style, Briskie adopts a simple and sleek design. The 2.4GHz wireless keyboard and mouse combo uses the world's smallest*1 nano receiver and offers plug-and-play automatic wireless synchronization. The user-friendly design features LED battery status indicators and a built-in power saving system.
The Briskie keyboard compares favorably with the scissor key designs of high-end keyboards and has a 10 million keystroke life span. With a smooth palm rest and two-level height adjustment, it remains comfortable after long hours of use. Briskie's spill-resistant structure avoids damage caused by accidental spills and makes cleaning very easy.
anidées presents their first Mid-Tower chassis named AI-6B. The case offers a clean, understated design which is a welcome change from the outlandish, LED equipped offerings in the market today, while still offering all the essential and useful features one would look for in an enclosure like this. A slightly flashier version with a window with the model name AI-6BW and a variant with sound dampening, the AI-6BS, are also part of the launch line-up, which are available immediately exclusively at Caseking.
The new comer in the case market by the name anidées has made it their goal to take the ideas and suggestions from the hardware community and offer the enthusiast user a unique blend of functionality and quality. Fittingly, the brand anidées is a mix of the English and French variants of the word idea.
Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash, storage and enthusiast computer products today introduces their new lineup of Quad-Channel Division 4 DDR3 memory solutions specifically engineered for future quad-channel memory based platforms.
For hardware enthusiasts, content developers, and high-end gamers looking for ultimate performance, the Patriot Memory Viper Xtreme Division 4 kits are designed for extreme overclocking and feature a custom copper and all aluminum heat shield to provide the best thermal protection available.
CyberpowerPC, a leading manufacturer of custom gaming desktop PCs, gaming notebooks, and performance workstations, today announced a new series of enthusiast gaming PCs based on Intel's 2nd Generation Core i7-3000 Series CPUs (code named Sandy Bridge-E) and X79 chipset motherboards.
CyberpowerPC gaming systems receiving the new CPU makeover includes the Gamer Xtreme 3D series, the FANG EVO Black Mamba and Cobra as well as its award winning Gamer Xtreme XE and XI systems. The series will include the flagship Intel Core i7 3960X (3.33Ghz and Turbo Boost up to 3.9Ghz), and the Core i7 3930K CPU (3.2Ghz and Turbo Boost to 3.8Ghz) to deliver unmatched performance, the ability to customize your rig, and features that put you in control of the action.
Futuremark, the world leader in performance benchmarking software, today announced development of a new version of 3DMark, the company's flagship benchmark for gamers. 3DMark for Windows 8 (working title) is designed for gaming performance measurement and comparison across all Windows 8 devices from tablets and notebooks to high-end desktop gaming systems. The announcement was accompanied by an atmospheric concept image for the new benchmark showing an elemental rock warrior brandishing two blazing swords.
Jukka Mäkinen, CEO of Futuremark said, "With Windows 8 gamers will be able to enjoy their games on a wide range of devices from lightweight tablets to heavy-duty desktop rigs. Faced with so much choice it will be hard to work out which devices offer the best value for money. Fortunately 3DMark for Windows 8 will be our most wide-reaching 3DMark ever, able to accurately measure and compare gaming performance across all devices and graphical feature sets available with Windows 8."
Memory is one of the necessary components with the PC. To enhance the look of these, most high performance modules are covered by fancy heatspreaders. Avexir takes things a step further by adding blue, pulsating LEDs to the mix on their Core Series memory.
As a customer-oriented brand, Avexir Technologies Corporation always tries to listen to the wishes of the growing fan base, taking their suggestions seriously. From the affordable Budget to the Standard Series, along to the high-end offerings like the Blitz family for the enthusiast gamer, Avexir aims to deliver a diverse line-up for ever customer.
TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., will announce its latest platforms that fully support the latest 32nm AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors (NYSE: AMD) at SC11. TYAN will be presenting a live demo of its GN70-B8236-IL, a powerful and cost-effective GPU/HPC 2U server solution installed with two AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors and two AMD FirePro V8800P Graphic Cards at TYAN booth #4202 during the show.
TYAN will be showcasing its broad portfolio featuring AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors which ensure that customers experience power efficiency, performance, scalability and management flexibility via features such as AMD Turbo CORE technology and HyperTransport 3.0 Technology. TYAN offers a total of 13 AMD G34 solutions that support the 16-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors which deliver advanced performance for complex workloads and offer flexible scalability for expanding HPC requirements. TYAN also offers six AMD C32 platforms which are compatible with AMD Opteron 4200 Series processors and target applications ranging from general purpose computing to highly-threaded mission-critical applications such as SMB cloud computing, web servers as well as VM applications and virtual machines.
Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced several new quad channel DDR3 memory kits optimized for motherboards using the Intel Core i7 processor family for Socket LGA-2011.
After announcing the world's first high-performance quad channel 32GB memory kit in October, Corsair is following up with the addition of three new quad channel memory kits. Like all Dominator memory kits, the new kits are assembled with tightly screened DRAM and include Corsair's DHX+ heatsink patented technology. All Dominator quad channel kits support Intel's latest XMP 1.3 profiles for easy performance tuning.
Intel today released its Core i7-3000 series processor family, codenamed "Sandy Bridge-E". These new processors, along with the new Intel X79 chipset, make up for an entirely new platform. The processors are an upscale of the Sandy Bridge architecture found on chips in the LGA1155 package. The Sandy Bridge-E silicon measures 20.8 x 20.9 mm, with a humungous transistor count of 2.27 billion. In its Core i7-3000 configuration, the silicon has up to 6 cores, up to 15 MB of L3 cache, four DDR3 memory channels, and 40 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes ("some" devices "may" support Gen 3.0, Intel's words).
Sandy Bridge-E has the same instruction set as Sandy Bridge, which includes SSE up to version 4.2, AVX, AES, and features Turbo Boost 2.0, HyperThreading. It's the memory controller that's complete upscale. It features four independent 64-bit paths to DDR3 DIMMs, making it a quad-channel DDR3 IMC. DDR3-1600 MHz is natively supported. There are three models, the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition leads the pack with a clock speed of 3.30 GHz, 3.90 GHz top Turbo Boost speed, and 15 MB of L3 cache. It has 6 cores and 12 threads with HTT enabled. This chip has all its multipliers unlocked and is geared for overclocking. It is priced at US $990 in 1000 unit tray quantities, though retailers might draw a decent margin for the boxed parts.
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced immediate launch and availability of its AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 Series processors (formerly code-named "Interlagos" and "Valencia"). The new AMD Opteron processors are designed to give enterprises:
- Better performance for business with up to 84 percent higher performance
- Increased scalability for Virtualization with up to 73 percent more memory bandwidth, enabling servers to host more virtual machines and also handle increasing workloads
- More efficient economics for the Cloud with half the power per core[iii], requiring 2/3 less floor space and up to 2/3 lower platform price
"Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualization has provided a new level of reliable consolidation and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency. We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment," said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business, AMD. "The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over. Leading OEMs are now offering cloud, enterprise and HPC customers a full suite of solutions based on the industry's most comprehensive server processor portfolio, the new AMD Opteron family of processors which deliver an inspired balance of performance, scalability and efficiency."
G.Skill has announced the development of its brand new RipjawsZ series quad-channel memory modules, designed specifically for Intel LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors and X79 systems.
A World First in Super-Sized & Super-Speed, the new RipjawsZ builds on a history of Ripjaws world first performance boundaries and award-winning quality, by including extreme performance kits such as, DDR3 2,500MHz 16GB (4GBx4) 1.65V kit, and super size kits including DDR3 64GB (8GBx8) 2133MHz at only 1.5V, and the fastest ever 8GB DIMMs in the DDR3 2,400MHz 32GB(8GBx4) kit. The following screens show two RipjawsZ 2,400MHz 32GB(8GBx4) kits running together at 2400MHz 64GB and booting at breath-taking 2600MHz 64GB with ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.
Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system, notebook and mobile device manufacturer presents two king-level motherboards to join ECS Black Series as the best gaming station of next generation based on Intel X79 chipset supporting LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors-X79R-AX Black Extreme and X79R-AX Black Deluxe.
ECS Black X79 Series unleashes the extreme power of Intel Sandy Bridge-E processors and breaks the limitation of your desktop computer to a height you could never dream of. ECS Black X79 Series is equipped with four PCIe Gen 3 x16 slots for 4-way GPUs supporting NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX graphics cards to construct an invincible gaming station. Also, ECS Black X79 Series supports quad-channel memory up to 64GB providing off-the-chart task processing speeds; the memory frequency support could also overclock to 2500MHz which is over 87% more than the traditional 1333MHz memory frequency.
Sunday, November 13th 2011
Today's Reviews
Following our
article yesterday about AMD using new high performance liquid cooling technology for their upcoming 7900-series graphic cards, TechPowerUp can now bring you a detailed insight into how this technology works, which has been developed by Vapro Inc. The following slides will help to explain this technology.
By using liquid cooling based heatsinks, the following performance advantages are achieved: improvement of thermal resistance, handling of high heat flux and power and easy to manufacture.
Here is the first picture of AMD accelerated processing units in the existing FM1 package and future FM2 package on which the next-generation Trinity APU will be based on. Both packages are very similar, follow AMD's favourite yet archaic PGA design. The pins are physically arranged in a mostly similar fashion, though we don't have a pin map at hand. The difference comes with some of the blanked pins in the sub-central portion of the pin array. The FM2 package has 904 pins, compared to 905 on FM1. One pin is blanked, while a pair of blanked pins are arranged further away from the central cutout.
This makes FM1 and FM2 clearly incompatible. Neither will you be able to use today's A-Series APUs in the FM1 package on future socket FM2 motherboards, nor will you be able to run future FM2 APUs on today's FM1 motherboards. Yet, AMD will port the A75 FCH chipset to the next-generation "Virgo" platform. The FCH or Fusion Controller Hub, like Intel's PCH (Platform Controller Hub), is not much more than a glorified southbridge, and is portable between Fusion platforms as it's essentially a PCI-Express 2.0 x4 device. In the picture below, "Llano" FM1 APU is on the left, and "Trinity" FM2 on the right.
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) reported revenue of $1.07 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2012 ended Oct. 30, 2011, up 4.9 percent from the prior quarter, and up 26.3 percent from $843.9 million in the same period a year earlier.
On a GAAP basis, the company recorded net income of $178.3 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2012. That compares with net income of $151.6 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, in the prior quarter and $84.9 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, in the same period a year earlier.
On a non-GAAP basis -- which excludes stock-based compensation, amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, other acquisition related costs, and the tax impact associated with these items -- net income was $217.0 million, or $0.35 per diluted share. That compares with net income of $193.5 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, in the prior quarter, and net income of $117.4 million, $0.20 per share, in the same period a year earlier.
EVGA made its SuperClock CPU fan-heatsink ready for Intel's new "Sandy Bridge-E" socket LGA2011 platform with a mounting kit update that can be purchased separately, as well as could be included in future batches of the product. Carrying the part number M020-00-000234, the LGA2011 mounting kit update for EVGA SuperClock, is priced at US
$9.99 on the EVGA store. EVGA released the SuperClock CPU fan-heatsink
this May, it is a tower-type fan-heatsink with design based on
Swiftech Polaris 120. EVGA's implementation makes use of black fins, heat pipes, and a red LED-illuminated fan. Excluding the LGA2011 mounting kit, the EVGA SuperClock is priced at $55.
Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced the USB 3.0 Express ST4, a USB 3.0 flash drive with 4 channels of flash and impressive performance.
Super Talent is known for providing the fastest USB 3.0 flash drives available today. Many of our record holding designs are based on SSD controllers which offer extreme performance but at a substantial cost. Unlike SSD based flash drives that must be converted to USB using an additional bridge chip, native USB 3.0 drives use a single controller enabling designs to be smaller and less expensive.
Republic of Gamers and Sabertooth aren't the only special client motherboard product lines of ASUS apart from its mainline, there's also the WS (workstation) series, that consists of motherboards fit for mission-critical environments, and which are filled to the brim with features. These motherboards are often based on chipset from Intel's client product lines, rather than enterprise ones. Intel's Sandy Bridge-E 1P platform will get a similar treatment with the P9X79WS.
Based on the ATX form-factor, the P9X79WS uses a typical X79 motherboard layout. The socket LGA2011 is powered by a 10-phase Digi+ VRM, which is cooled by a heatsink that shares its heat with a VRM heatsink cluster over the memory VRM, and the one over the X79 PCH. There are eight DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting quad-channel DDR3 memory. All expansion slots are PCI-Express long-type, though the exact lane configuration is not known. The board is advertised with 4-way NVIDIA SLI and CrossFireX support, so at least four of those slots could be wired to the CPU.
Over the weekend, OCZ's newest consumer SSD line, Octane, quietly crept up shelves. It was released in late October. Octane is a significant product for OCZ despite having successful SandForce-driven lines such as Vertex 3 and Agility 3, because it's the first fruition of its acquisition of Indilinx, a company behind SSD controllers. Octane is available in a wider range of capacities than the other SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" SSDs in OCZ's stable: 128, 256, 512 GB and 1 TB. It does away with targeting the sub $150 market using 80 GB or 64 GB variants, and starts right with 128 GB, priced at $199.99 (an increasingly popular price-point for those building $1500-ish gaming PCs), the 256 GB model goes for $369.99 (a decent price compared to 240 GB SandForce and Marvell based SSDs), 512 GB for $879.99, and we're yet to get pricing on the 1 TB model, it will be released to the market a little later.
Indilinx' latest SSD controller, with the most up-to-date feature-set, the Indilinx Everest, is at the heart of these drives. This is what makes the OCZ Octane a litmus test for OCZ's move to acquire Indilinx at a time when there's no dearth for high-performance SSD controllers such as the SF-228x. Indilinx Everest features a dual-core ARM ASIC, with up to 512 MB of cache (notice there's no overprovisioning by default), advertised speeds of up to 560 MB/s (read), up to 400 MB/s (writes), lowest latencies in the industry, 8 NAND flash channels with 16-way interleaving, and proprietary NDurance Technology that increases NAND life up to 2X of the rated P/E cycles, apart from industry standards such as SMART, NCQ, and TRIM.
SteelSeries were showing off their brand new mouse, dubbed Sensei at this year's Beep event in Denmark. The mouse is capable of 11,000 CPI and has an on board ARM processor that handles all the interpretation and communication with the PC. According to SteelSeries the on-board processor will cut the delay between tracking to movement on screen by as much as 2 ms. The button mechanisms and design is very similar to that of the SteelSeries Xai. The Sensei will retail for $89.99 which seems reasonable considering the design.
The new WoW MMO mouse also made it to the show and proved that you can fit eleven buttons to a mouse without it looking cluttered. This mouse is very small and features a heavily arched palm rest. Diablo III is nearing release and so are the Diablo III-themed mouse and headset from SteelSeries. The mouse is based upon the Xai but features, but with better gold plated key mechanisms which have over twice the life span. The Diablo III mouse will sell for $69.99 which is around the same as the Xai. The Diablo III headset is based on the more familiar Siberia platform, but with a more customized body, band, and cushion.
Saturday, November 12th 2011
videocardz.com brings us a photo showing the benefits of AMD's new liquid chamber technology over the standard vapour chamber technology used in current heatpipe cooling solutions. There's quite a few benefits, some of which are no drying out, physical robustness and greater reliability. Indeed, can you imagine the disastrous effect on your graphics card of having the cooling system spring a leak during an intense gaming session? Doesn't bear thinking about… Certainly the era of having to replace your graphics card's shrill and inefficient cooler with a high performance aftermarket one are long over, as stock coolers are now generally of very good quality. The liquid chamber system will be used by all AMD's partners who stick to the reference design. Check out the photo for the full info.
Just a handful of days ahead of Sandy Bridge-E's launch, a Chinese tech website,
www.inpai.com.cn (Google translation) has done what Chinese tech websites do best and that's leak benchmarks and slides, Intel's NDA be damned. They pit the current i7-2600K quad core CPU against the upcoming i7-3960X hexa core CPU and compare them in several ways. The take home message appears to be that gaming performance on BF3 & Crysis 2 is identical, while the i7-3960X uses considerably more power, as one might expect from an extra two cores. The only advantage appears to come from the x264 & Cinebench tests. If these benchmarks prove accurate, then gamers might as well stick with the current generation Sandy Bridge CPUs, especially as they will drop in price, before being end of life'd. While this is all rather disappointing, it's best to take leaked benchmarks like this with a (big) grain of salt and wait for the usual gang of reputable websites to publish their reviews on launch day, November 14th.
Softpedia reckons that these results are the real deal, however. There's more benchmarks and pictures after the jump.
Just like any good design implementing security by obscurity, hackers and cheaters will find a way to exploit the system in no time flat. In this instance, DICE said via Twitter that cheaters have "found a glitch that allows them to use the Engineer repair tool or the EOD Bot to garner tens of thousands of points in a match." A beautiful and satisfying cheat if ever there was one, really letting you get on the wrong side of your fellow player! However, there's this small problem, since developer DICE has now cottoned on to underhand tactics and is banning these sporting gamers en-masse. Isn't retribution wonderful?
Via Twitter, DICE reported, "This week we've banned hundreds of offending accounts and have stats-wiped accounts for exploiting (such as boosting)..." and they also ask for honest gamer's help in nailing the culprits, "To report players cheating or boosting send us a direct message to this Twitter with a screen shot of the Battle Log Report." There is also a problem with the Sony PS3 version of the game, which will be addressed with a patch, soon. This suggests that the bug is in the core program code, rather than a platform-specific implementation. Finally, one should always strive to behave honestly and ethically in life and it looks like in this instance it really pays off. Here's wishing all honest players an enjoyable time playing BF3, free from cheaters.
Friday, November 11th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
The latest chassis from BitFenix aims to offer "relentless performance". It offers a cool looking design, three retail Spectre cooling fans connected to a fan controller and a whooping four USB 3.0 ports. But will the Raider manage to flex its muscles and withstand our bombardment or will it fail to defend itself?
Shattering its own day-one sales records, Activision Publishing, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, announced that its highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has become the biggest entertainment launch ever with an estimated sell-through of more than $400 million and more than 6.5 million units in North America and the United Kingdom alone in the first 24 hours of its release, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information.
This marks the third consecutive year that the Call of Duty franchise has set day one launch records across all forms of entertainment, something no other entertainment franchise in any medium has ever accomplished. Last year, in North America and the United Kingdom , Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops had estimated day-one sell-through of $360 million and in 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, set day-one records with estimated sell through of $310 million, according to Charttrack and retail customer sell-through information.
On November 8, 2011, millions of fans attended more than 13,000 midnight openings at retail stores worldwide. According to Microsoft, after just two days, the number of gamers playing simultaneously on Xbox Live set a new peak concurrency record.
VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the VIA VE-900 Mini-ITX Mainboard, immediately available worldwide at incredibly competitive pricing. The VIA VE-900 Mini-ITX provides the ideal platform for DIY enthusiasts to custom build stylish home desktop and media center PCs.
Featuring a high-performance 1.4GHz VIA Nano X2 dual core processor and the VIA VX900 unified all-in-one media system processor, the VIA VE-900 Mini-ITX Mainboard delivers a highly optimized platform that boasts stunning HD video performance of the most demanding video formats at resolutions of up to 1080p. The VIA VE-900 Mini-ITX also supports high fidelity surround sound through the VIA VT1708S HD audio codec which delivers amazing stereo 24-bit resolution and up to 192kHz sample rates and adds HDMI support in a compact, power-efficient package.
Thermaltake, being the industry pioneer brand with expertise in PC power and thermal solutions, carrying the corporate vision of "building Thermaltake Technology into a cultural brand for the enjoyment of entertainment, e-Sports, technology, and lifestyle" and continues to drive toward the corporate mission of "delivering the perfect user experience" for all users. This November, is presenting the essence of mainstream systems - the SMART Series PSU, a value series of power supply units (PSU) that incorporated various PSU high-tech components, leading technology and Eco-friendly credentials, ranged between 430w and 750w with the choice of modular and none-modular that will accommodate any mainstream build under any circumstance.
Chinese company JEHE is launching its latest compact mini-ITX motherboard in Europe under the Giada brand, the MI-Z68. As the name suggests, it is based on Intel Z68 chipset, and supports Core i3/i5/i7 processors in the LGA1155 package. There is no TDP restriction, as the board features a full-fledged CPU VRM that draws power from a 4-pin 12V connector apart from a 20-pin ATX connector (any of today's PSUs with 24-pin connector will support it). The board uses a 4+1 phase CPU VRM, with single phase memory. There are two DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel memory. The lone expansion slot is a PCI-Express 2.0 x16.
There's impressive storage connectivity, this includes two mSATA 3 Gb/s (on on either side of the slot), two SATA 6 Gb/s (blue), and two SATA 3 Gb/s (black). There are just two USB 3.0 ports, both on the rear panel, and driven by a Renesas-made controller. 8-channel HD audio with optical SPDIF output, one gigabit Ethernet connection (driven by Realtek-made PHY), display outputs that include DVI and HDMI, a number of USB 2.0 ports and PS/2 keyboard, make for the rest of the rear panel. The Giada MI-Z68 will be priced at €88.
After
showing off the PCB of the new design GTX560Ti days before, Colorful today releases this new graphics card and named iGame GTX560Ti Kudan.
iGame GTX560Ti Kudan requires three slots and assembles three fans, one is 80mm, and the other two are 70mm which with "Shark Bionic" design in order to reduce the noise. Users need to remove the cooler to install the expansion card on the obverse side near the rear plate. Both WHDI card and Television Card are available to be installed independently to satisfy users' requirement.
Thursday, November 10th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
The Carbide 500R is the high-performance version of the 400R with additional cooling and an edgier design. Will these be enough to justify the higher price tag and will it leave us as impressed as with the more affordable brethren?
Hot on the heels of our story
Are The Days Of DRM Numbered? news
reaches us that for its upcoming title, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Ubisoft is abandoning its despised always-on internet DRM, which continues to cause much controversy. This type of DRM requires the hapless gamer to have a persistent internet connection, with authentication data constantly flowing between their computer and Ubisoft's servers. The instant that connection is interrupted, the game stops dead in its tracks with a warning message to restore the connection. What if someone experiences an extended ISP outage? What if they want to play while away on holiday, where there's no internet connection, or it's very limited and expensive? What if the authentication servers fall over as
they have done so in the past? There are in fact, too many serious negatives to list here. This is a dreadful and shameful way for Ubisoft to treat its customers who are being handled like criminals with curfew electronic ankle bracelets. This requirement eats into a gamer's monthly bandwidth allowance just for the benefit of Ubisoft. No wonder it's despised and hated so much.
Gabe Newell of Valve has issued a statement that the
forum hack they experienced over the weekend actually goes much deeper than they thought. The criminals accessed the main database containing such goodies as user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. Apparently, no personally identifying information was taken - but we await the result of the full investigation before breathing a sigh of relief. Due to this serious breach, TechPowerUp advises all Steam users to change their account password
immediately. People starting up their Steam client will now see the following message from Gabe Newell about this:
Today, premier PC hardware designer BitFenix is pleased to announce our latest mid-tower ATX chassis design - Raider. Unlike other competing chassis that bundle run-of the-mill fans, Raider comes equipped with no less than three premium BitFenix Spectre fans for unmatched cooling performance. As the world's first chassis to offer four SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, Raider combines advanced features with a sleek maximum airflow design for an unstoppable combination of aesthetics, performance and function.
"Our Raider is about all-out aggressive cooling," says BitFenix Product Manager David Jarlestedt. "With features like four USB 3.0 ports, integrated fan control, Spectre cooling and an all-new design, Raider is ideal for users who require the ultimate in air cooling performance."
Coolink today presented its first CPU cooler to support the upcoming Intel LGA2011 platform for Core i7-3000 series Sandy Bridge-E processors. Based on the award winning Corator DS, the new Corator DS - LGA2011 is equipped with the proven SWiF2 - 120P PWM high-performance fan as well as the latest edition of the SecuFirm 2 mounting system for LGA2011, featuring optimized mounting pressure for excellent cooling performance.
"The upcoming release of Intel's Core i7-3000 series Sandy Bridge-E processors will raise the computing performance for enthusiast and professional users alike, so they can look forward to an interesting platform. However, these high performance processors need an adequate cooling solution to unleash their full potential and the Corator DS is predestined for this task", explains Timothy Chu, Coolink CEO. "With the Corator DS - LGA2011, which is based on the successful and award-winning Corator DS, we are proud to offer an attractive Core i7-3000 cooling solution for customers who are looking for great performance at reasonable costs."
Synology Inc. today unveiled that its popular j Series line is available now with the newest generation of DiskStation DS212j, a budget-friendly, easy to use, and versatile 2-bay NAS server.
"The DS212j is designed to work seamlessly with iPhone, iPad, and Android phone, letting users to stay in touch with their stored digital content on-the-go," said Darren Lin, product manager of Synology Inc. Synology offers various mobile apps that allow users to access to data, view photos, stream music and videos, and even view live feeds from IP cameras on-the-roam. "Thanks to DS212j's ability to add terabytes for our mobile needs, all our tablets and smartphones storage limitations are now gone," added Lin.
Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the Performance Pro Series SSDs.
The Performance Pro Series, designed with the Marvell SATA 6 Gb/s SSD controller, delivers an impressive ATTO Max performance of up to 515MB/s Sequential Read and 440 MB/s Sequential Write, and can sustain very similar performance when reading and writing compressed and non-compressible data, such as audio, images, and video files. Additionally, the Performance Pro Series has built-in advanced background garbage collection to allow for consistently strong performance even with operating systems that do not support the TRIM command. This integral performance optimization makes Performance Pro SSDs an ideal solution for RAID configurations, which typically do not support TRIM.
Arctic unveiled the latest accessory for its VGA coolers, the S1 Plus Turbo Module. Arctic releases "turbo module" accessories to provide active air-flow for its passive (silent) VGA coolers. The S1 Plus Turbo Module works with the recently-released Accelero S1 Plus VGA cooler. It's not much more than a 120 mm with a special mount hole spacing. The fan spins at speeds between 600 and 1000 RPM, with noise levels as low as 0.25 sone. Its package includes rubber bolts, that dampen vibrations, a Molex power adapter, and a syringe of Arctic MX-4 thermal compound (you'll probably need to remove the heatsink to attach this, and so you'll need fresh thermal compound). Backed by a six-year warranty, the Arctic S1 Plus Turbo Module is priced at about $12.
German memory maker Exceleram is among the first to release quad-channel DDR3 memory kits, in time for Intel's Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" processor platform. Sandy Bridge-E processors pack a massive four-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller, and require at least four DDR3 modules to perform optimally. The kit released by Exceleram features in its "Grand" series, and totals 32 GB in size, spread across four 8 GB modules. These modules run at DDR3-1333 MHz speed, with timings of 9-9-9-24, and DRAM voltage of 1.5V. Exceleram did not give out pricing details, but you should be able to buy one of these in time for your big fat Sandy Bridge-E build.
XFX' line of high-grade power supplies targeting gaming PC builds, ProSeries, got an overhaul with three zesty new kilowatt models, including 1000W, 1050W, and 1250W. Among these, the 1050W and 1250W models bear 80 Plus Gold certification, while the 1000W 80 Plus Platinum. The three feature completely modular cabling including with essential cables such as 24-pin ATX, and CPU power. The units feature XFX' signature body design, which looks like a futuristic weapons crate.
The PSUs feature what XFX calls SolidLink technology. Each of the cable connectors are soldered straight to the main PCB, and not connected through wires. This works to minimize energy loss. All three feature a single 12V rail design, which ensures efficient power distribution. Other regulars include active PFC, and active protection against over voltage, over current, overheat, and short-circuit. The units are cooled by a large 135 mm fan, backed by an active fan control that prioritizes silence. The three are backed by 5 year warranty by XFX. Pricing and availability are not known.
Eurocom Corporation (www.eurocom.com), a developer of long lifespan, fully upgradable Notebooks, high performance Mobile Workstations and Mobile Servers is now offering a Mobile Workstation capable of supporting NVIDIA 3D Vision with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M and 560M GPUs.
Eurocom offers 3D Vision support on the Neptune Mobile Workstation through a built in-emitter, 3D active shutter technology, a 120Hz display and supported NVIDIA graphics cards. The EUROCOM Neptune comes complete with an NVIDIA 3D Vision Kit which consists of one pair of 3D Vision glasses and USB cables. Each lens of the glasses operates at 60Hz, and alternate to create a 120Hz 3-dimensional experience.
On the 29th of this month, NVIDIA will launch its newest graphics card SKU, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores. We got our first sniff of it
last month. Today we present to you all the specifications that matter: clock speeds, voltages, device IDs, etc., but first a brief history. NVIDIA launched the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti back in January, based on its spanking new GF114 silicon. It packed 384 CUDA cores, a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, 1 GB of memory, high clock speeds, and fairly decent overclocking potential. AMD's Radeon HD 6870 was "pwned" (NVIDIA's words). But then, AMD managed to work closely with its partners to create a 1 GB version of its Radeon HD 6950 graphics card. Coupled with diligent component cost balancing, AMD was able to neuter GTX 560 Ti to a good extant. With the upcoming winter shopping season, NVIDIA does not want to take any chances with its competitiveness in the $250-ish "sweetspot" segment, and hence it had to redesign the GTX 560 Ti.
The new GeForce GTX 560 Ti will come with "448 Cores" brand extension, and as it suggests, the GPU now has 448 CUDA cores as opposed to 384 cores on the original. The new SKU will use the same silicon on which the GTX 570, GTX 580, and dual-GPU GTX 590 are based: GF110. The chip will carry the marking "GF110-270-A1". Apart from the 448 CUDA cores, the new SKU will have a memory bus width of 320-bit, and standard memory amount of 1280 MB, just like the GTX 570. The GTX 560 Ti Core 448 has clock speeds of 732 MHz core, 1464 MHz CUDA cores or shaders, and 950 MHz actual (1900 MHz DDR, or 3.80 GHz GDDR5 effective) memory clock speed. So the only thing that sets the new GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores from GTX 570 is the CUDA core count (448 vs. 480 on the GTX 570).
Wednesday, November 9th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Graphics Cards
PowerColor's HD 6970 Devil 13 is a brand-new premium class Radeon HD 6970 which comes with the highest clocks available on any HD 6970 card. The Devil 13 also includes voltage monitoring points for voltmodders and a high quality power conversion system. But is that enough to justify a price of $549?
By now, many people may have heard of the Modern Warfare 3 heist in Créteil, south Paris, France over the weekend. This was executed by staging a collision between a car and the delivery truck, carrying 6000 physical copies, worth around 400,000 Euros. When the truck driver and his colleague got out of the truck to deal with the incident, two masked criminals then stole the truck by subduing them with teargas. There's no word on whether the truck's drivers were injured in the attack. A nasty little incident for sure for the hardworking staff, but thankfully nothing more dangerous was used.
The successor of the popular Midgard Mid-Tower is getting ready to step up to the plate. Xigmatek has once again managed to fill the Midgard II with a long list of unique features for the demanding PC enthusiast. Just to name a few: USB 3.0, a rubberised surface by the name of "Leather Touch", a hot-swap bay in the top, room for up to eight fans and a 280 mm radiator - all for an unbelievably low price!
When Xigmatek presented the original Midgard in 2009 as their first chassis, it managed to capture the hearts of PC users all over the world. The reviewers praised it, the users loved it. This secret behind its continuing success is quite simple: at the time, the Midgard was at the top of its game in terms of technical aspects by offering eSATA, hard drive trays and screw-less installation methods along with the possibility to route water cooling out the back of the chassis.
Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the next generation of its entry-level, budget SSDNow V Series. The SSDNow V200 helps consumers revive their current PC and extend the life of their investment. The SSDNow V200 brings value and performance to consumers who are looking for an inexpensive upgrade option to boost their computer's performance.
The SATA Rev 3.0 (6Gb/s) SSDNow V200 is nearly twice as fast as the previous V100 SSD* (figure 1). It is also up to 20 percent less in price than its predecessor SSDNow V100 drive making it one of the best price/performance SSD solutions in the marketplace1. With better performance and a lower cost, the value-driven SSDNow V200 is perfect for cost-conscious consumers who are looking to upgrade to Flash-based, hard-drive solutions for the first time.
A month after debuting its Premier line of mainstream DDR3 memory modules, A-Data released new high-density 8 GB modules in the series. Available in both desktop UDIMM and notebook SO-DIMM form-factors, A-Data's new modules operate at PC3-10700 (DDR3-1333 MHz) speeds with CAS latency of 9T, and DRAM voltage of 1.5V. The new modules make use of 4 gigabit memory chips made possible in the mainstream segment by advancements in silicon fab processes. Unfortunately, the pricing isn't quite "mainstream" yet. One of these 8 GB Premier modules by A-Data could set you back by €159.90. They are backed by limited lifetime warranty.
AMD today announced AMD Ready Solutions for servers, a collaborative effort with leading server platform manufacturers to provide a broad portfolio of ready-to-market AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor-based motherboards worldwide through authorized AMD distributors the day of the launch. Because the upcoming AMD Opteron processors will drop into the existing socket infrastructure, leading motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS, Supermicro and TYAN are able to bring fully validated and rigorously tested platforms to market even more quickly. These new platforms address market demands and customer requirements for a wide range of server workloads, including high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, virtualization, enterprise and database applications and Web/email servers.
"With AMD Ready Solutions for servers, our customers can find complete and verified server platforms in the channel the day of launch," said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business at AMD. "The combination of the existing socket infrastructure already in place with AMD Ready Solutions will enable faster and easier upgrade paths to new levels of server performance and scalability."
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and power management solutions for computing devices and systems, today unveiled the Silencer Mk III Power Supply Series from PC Power & Cooling. Offering industrial-grade performance and stability for demanding computing environments, the Silencer Mk III provides high efficiency, quiet operation, and features the company's first modular design.
"PC Power and Cooling has always catered to those clients that are looking for both performance and reliability from their power management solutions and the Silencer MKIII PSU continues that tradition and incorporates new features such as a modular cable design," said Steve Lee, Senior Vice President of Power Management at OCZ Technology Group. "This is the first modular PC Power PSU and we spent extra time and resources to make sure we got it right by combining a highly efficient core with Japanese capacitors, a whisper quiet 120mm fan, and the flexibility of modular cabling, all to create the best Silencer yet, and we are releasing this exciting new series in a range of models up to 600W and pricing them competitively, making the Silencer MKIII PSU's the ideal blend of performance, features, and overall value for customers."
Here are the first slides detailing Haswell, Intel's next generation processor architecture that succeeds Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Intel follows a "tick-tock" product development model. Every year, Intel's product lineup sees either of the two. A "tock" brings in a new x86 architecture, a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process. For example, Sandy Bridge is Intel's latest architecture, and is based on the 32 nm fab process. Ivy Bridge is a miniaturization of Sandy Bridge to 22 nm. Likewise, Haswell will be a brand new architecture, it will use the 22 nm fab process cemented by Ivy Bridge.
If all goes well with Intel's 22 nm process, Haswell is scheduled for Q2 2013. 2012 (Q2 onwards) will be led by Ivy Bridge. But then here's a "shocker": Haswell's desktop version will use a brand new socket, LGA115
0, and will be incompatible with LGA1155. This is because of drastic changes in the pin map of the package. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge share the LGA1155 socket, and will hence, have kept the socket alive for over 2 years. A major change with the component arrangement in the platform that is affecting Haswell's pin map is that Haswell will have a higher bandwidth chipset bus, rearranged PCIe pins (with FDI pins), rearranged power pins, and miscellaneous pins. It does away with a separate power domain for the integrated graphics controller.
StarTech.com, a leading manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity parts has announced the release of the (SKU: USB2VGAE3) USB to VGA Adapter and the (SKU: USB2DVIE3) USB to DVI Adapter which support high resolutions (1920x1200) and are optimized for web browsing and office application performance.
The new adapters have been added to StarTech.com's extensive line of USB Video Adapters, which enable users to add dual display or multi-monitor capability to a desktop or laptop computer through USB, eliminating the need to open the computer case in order to install a secondary or specialized (multi-head) video card.
Noctua today introduced the new NF-F12 120mm Focused Flow fan. Teaming up eleven stator guide vanes with a specially conceived seven blade impeller, the NF-F12's Focused Flow system creates outstanding static pressure and focuses the airflow for superior performance on heatsinks and radiators. At the same time, a wide range of advanced aerodynamic design measures, second generation SSO-Bearings and Noctua's new, custom designed PWM IC for fully automatic control guarantee astounding quietness of operation.
"Our award-winning NF-P12 has become a standard choice for pressure demanding applications such as CPU coolers and radiators, but we've been striving to achieve even better performance in this domain, and this is how the NF-F12 was born", explains Mag. Roland Mossig, Noctua CEO. "Due to the stator guide vanes focussing the airflow, it can push the air through dense fin stacks more effectively. This type of design has mostly been used for noisy high speed fans so far, so our engineers have put a lot of thought into keeping the noise in check."
Tuesday, November 8th 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Motherboards
Biostar is back in our test station, this time with a stylish and affordable AMD 990FX solution, the TA990FXE. Straight out of their "Extreme Edition" product line, the TA990FXE is for discerning gamers on a budget, who want top-level performance. Is it truly "Extreme"? We take a look.
The
Techdirt article below will not please the big content industries making today's games, movies and music, or anyone who believes that they need to protect their content from so-called "pirates" and "thieves" (copying isn't stealing, but many haven't seen the memo) to control distribution so that they can squeeze the hapless customer for every penny they can get. Good Old Games
www.gog.com have been up and running since 2008 and they're proving that locking up content with anti-consumer
DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is pointless and counterproductive. It's even more pointless when you consider just how quickly every scheme out there is cracked, often within a day or two and a week is a long time in most cases.
I have republished this Techdirt article, because I believe that we are at a turning point in time with content delivery. We will start to see some new triple-A content released that is unencumbered by pathetic DRM schemes which treat their customers like criminals, inconveniencing and annoying them in the process. Over time, this would become the norm, with all new premium content being released without DRM, treating customers like regular human beings instead of criminals. Wouldn't it be nice to buy the latest games such as Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 without any DRM shackles? It would be fantastic and the games houses would sell just as much if not more without DRM, regardless of the many unauthorised copies knocking around the internet.
You know what, we won't even go through the drill of expressing surprise that a new major version of Firefox is released on a nearly-monthly basis. Mozilla released Firefox 8.0, about 7 months after it released Firefox 4.0. And they look similar, except that the new one looks more polished. Granted, drastic UI changes can hit users' learning curve and preferences. The new UI sports essentially the same layout as its predecessors since version 4.0, but the elements look designed better, fused into the theme. It's the under-the-hood changes that are counting. Mozilla would never pack so many background changes to the monthly updates of Firefox 3.
DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 8.0
With this release, Mozilla Firefox has the following changes over the previous generation:
Patriot Memory, a global pioneer in high-performance memory, NAND flash, storage, and enthusiast computer products, today announces their new Mac Series XT SSDs and SODIMM lines. Optimized for the latest and popular Mac products, these premium offerings are geared for power users demanding the latest storage and memory technology to increase productivity and performance.
"Patriot Memory's Mac Series XT SSDs will provide users with a great alternative to traditional mechanical hard drives", says William Lai, Patriot Memory's Product Manager. "Offering an easy solid state and memory upgrade, Mac users will be able to maximize their computing experience almost instantly."
In addition to their well-known "QuickPort" docking stations, which provide computer connection to unobstructed SATA hard drives, the Sharkoon "QuickDeck" has long been a table adapter in their product line in which data mediums are not standing upright, but rather inserted laying down. The Sharkoon QuickDeck is also immediately available in a "Pro" edition, with a USB3.0 port and stacking feet.
The Sharkoon QuickDeck offers room for SATA hard drives in both 2.5 and 3.5 in formats. The drives are simply inserted horizontally into the front and open top plastic frame. A rail fixed to the floor folds up for smaller 2.5 inch hard drives. The hard drive can be easily detached from the QuickDeck with the help of an ejection lever attached with the SATA port. External connection occurs over the fast USB3.0 port.
ENERMAX is pleased to announce the new flagship tower series: Fulmo GT and Fulmo. They are the fusion of performance and style, with exceptional compatibility and ease-of-use design. This series comes in both full-tower and mid-tower sizes, each providing different configurations. The Fulmo and Fulmo GT meet different demands from advance users to performance craving enthusiasts.
AMD is fine-tuning its product development cycle to deliver a new processor architecture towards the end of each year, and a new chipset towards the beginning of one, maintaining platform compatibility and longevity. The company launched its socket AM3+ compliant 9-series chipset months ahead of its first-generation Bulldozer FX processor family, though it looks like in the year 2012 it will launch a new line of desktop chipset, in all likelihood it will precede the launch of second-generation Bulldozer (codenamed "Piledriver") processors.
In 2012, AMD chipset family will be led by the 10-series chipset. At the very top is AMD 1090FX northbridge, followed by 1070. 1090FX will be designed to give out two PCI-Express x16 links, which can then drive up to four graphics cards. The 1070, on the other hand, gives out just one x16 link, which can drive up to two graphics cards. AMD will scrap its present model of 990X and 970, in which the northbridge is essentially the same piece of silicon, with the 990X having lane switches and supporting CrossFireX. A big revelation here is that the 10-series chipset will not feature PCI Express Gen 3.0. We'd normally expect AMD to be at the forefront of supporting new technologies. If we remember, AMD 790FX was the first AMD platform chipset in the industry to feature PCI-Express 2.0. Also, it is highly likely that AMD's Radeon HD 7000 series graphics, which are slated for later this year, will support PCI-Express 3.0 interface.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today launched the RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS and RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS solid state drives. Designed to deliver maximum throughput in multithreaded applications, the new Max IOPS edition is an extension of the company's industry-leading RevoDrive 3 product line, supporting workstation users that require greater transactional throughput and bandwidth.
The RevoDrive 3 X2 Max IOPS series combines a proven cutting-edge PCI Express architecture and OCZ proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 flash virtualization layer with premium NAND flash components to deliver exceptional 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS, along with increased transfer rates at 1900 MB/s reads and 1725 MBs/ writes.
Monday, November 7th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
The CM Storm Trooper aims to take the gaming crowd by storm and position itself as the elite chassis for LAN Party goers, as it offers a long list of unique and useful features. We take the chassis hostage and stuff it full of hardware to see if it buckles or manages to strike back like a trooper.
Valve, a company that operates solely online, takes its security pretty seriously and has a good reputation in this area. However, at the time of writing, its
Steam forums are down, having suffered a hack attack earlier today. Visit the forums now and you see a message saying "The Steam Forums are temporarily offline for maintenance. Your patience is appreciated." This attack was apparently done by hackers who want to offer free game cheats (but one should be wary of stealthy malware payloads) since before the forums were taken down, they had planted this message:
Ever wanted to dominate the servers you play on with guaranteed results, but you were too afraid to cheat because of ban risks?
The rest of the message then recommends a website where one can obtain all sorts of illegal game cheats, hack tools and porn. Some Steam forum users even received an email with this text, such as this
NeoGAF user. There's no indication that any user's account information has been compromised. However, if you haven't yet set up
Steam Guard, now is a good time to do so, along with changing your password when the forums come back online. Also, be sure to use different a password for every login. Of course, many other gaming forums have been hacked in the past and just this year saw many hacks against such big names as Nintendo, Sega, BioWare, Epic Games and of course Sony, which was hacked many times over in protest at their business practices, such as removing the OtherOS feature from their PS3 console.
MSI is among the most secretive companies with their socket LGA2011 motherboard early information as the big Sandy Bridge-E day approaches (mid-November), yet we managed to score some early pictures of their top-end product from our spy-satellites and a network of cold war era retirees. Enter the MSI Big Bang XPower II, the company's top-tier socket LGA2011 motherboard for enthusiasts. This board is designed in the XL-ATX form-factor, and will fit in cases with at least 10 expansion slot bays. Thanks to the added board area, it's able to accommodate both a strong VRM, and high room for expansion (with eight DDR3 memory slots and seven PCI-Express slots).
To begin with, the LGA2011 socket is powered by a 24-phase VRM that makes use of driver-MOSFETs, solid-chokes, and High-C POSCAP capacitors. The memory is powered by a 4-phase VRM. The board draws power, apart from the 24-pin ATX, from two 8-pin EPS connectors, and an optional 6-pin PCIe (to stabilize PCIe slot power delivery). We can see many accessories to this VRM, such as phase-loading LEDs, and consolidated voltage measurement points. We are particularly intrigued by the design of the heatsinks over the VRM and chipset. The one over the VRM looks like the barrels of a Gatling gun, while the one over the chipset looks like a small piece from an ammo belt. You will either love it or detest it.
A certain British retailer listed the two hexa-core Sandy Bridge-E chips, Core i7-3930K and Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition. The top-end i7-3960X is priced at £850.79 (including taxes), that converts to around US $1,361. The unlocked Core i7-3930K, on the other hand, is priced at £477.59 (including taxes), that's around US $764. Earlier this month, news surfaced of a Chinese retailer
listing these chips. The Chinese put the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition at the equivalent of US $1,227, and Core i7-3930K at the equivalent of US $912.
While the British store is making the Core i7-3930K at least $150 cheaper, it's still a long shot from the $583 price point that the chip is expected to occupy. On the other hand, the British store is quoting a price that's about $130 higher for the Core i7-3960X. It looks like Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is increasingly unlikely to come with a three figure price.
Last week we got a glimpse of Gigabyte's new
3D BIOS technology, a UEFI setup program with an innovative and functional user interface built into Gigabyte's upcoming X79 motherboards. Today Gigabyte released a new video detailing another such innovation, called 3D Power. This program gives you total and unrestricted control over the three main dimensions of your motherboard's power delivery: voltages, PWM frequency, and phase control. Gigabyte announced that all its upcoming X79 motherboards will feature PWM (pulse width modulation) CPU power design, backed by highly capable PWM controllers that give you a plethora of things you can tweak.
To begin with, the 3D Power application starts up with a cube that has the icons of the three main elements. Clicking on "voltage" gives you control over voltage-related settings in three main pages, turbo voltage response, load line calibration (active V-droop control), and active over-voltage protection. Load line calibration allows you to fine-tune the extant of V-droop correction over a variety of power domains, such as CPU, VTT, IMC, and DRAM.
Micron Technology, Inc., today announced a new portfolio of load reduced dual-inline memory modules (LRDIMMs) featuring a 64GB offering. In addition to the standard densities of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, which are sampling in high volume to several customers, Micron is introducing a 64GB LRDIMM to meet the ever-growing density requirements of servers.
Micron continues its memory market leadership with modules that provide 50 percent higher memory capacity and a performance increase of 33 percent for server applications. Resulting improvements to system scalability can significantly enhance cloud computing, high-performance computing, Web servers, transactional databases, and data analytics while reducing power needs by nearly 10 percent per DIMM slot compared to standard modules.
Cooler Master, an industry leading chassis, thermal solution, peripheral, and accessory manufacturer today extends its support for its customers. As was previously announced, Cooler Master is providing a free bracket to support LGA2011 on the Hyper 212 EVO. This will now be extended to one of Cooler Master's best-selling CPU Coolers. Loyal owners of the award-winning Hyper 212 Plus need not worry as this offer covers the Hyper 212 Plus as well.
Support will continue to grow for other Cooler Master CPU Coolers. To be notified when new CPU Coolers brackets are available through this program or CM Store, please sign up for the Cooler Master Newsletter.
Following the release of the already popular Bluetooth based Chill KB-1BT Micro Keyboard; Danish company Chill Innovation A/S has now also launched a 2.4G RF based version optimized for HTPC (Home Theater PC), Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. The new Chill KB-1RF Micro Keyboard comes factory pre-paired with the tiny Nano USB dongle included. Just plug it in your host, and you are in control.
The wireless Chill KB-1RF Micro Keyboard can also be operated in BIOS environment etc. Furthermore it supports Wake-on-USB, so you can turn on your PC right from the Keyboard (when supported by the host) - a highly welcomed feature among HTPC users.
Hightech Information System (HIS) today unveiled their first twin-fan cooler equipped graphics card range, the HIS 6670 Fan 1GB. Low Profile: Ideal for Media Centers & Home Theater PCs.
Home Theater PC users, looking for that extra bit of cooling to give their system an extra edge, will be delighted with the model's double airflow allowing for expanded cooling efficiency and heat dissipation. The HIS 6670 Fan is another excellent choice within HIS' low profile GPU range for home entrainment enthusiasts looking to build their personal bespoke Home Theater or Media Center PC.
Sunday, November 6th 2011
The original 8-bit Commodore 64 computer was very popular in the early 1980s, but the original company eventually closed down in the 1990s, having launched their 16-bit Amiga range in the meantime as the C64s successor. For a while now, replica C64 models, packed with the latest PC technology, have been made by Commodore USA, a different company that has purchased the original Commodore brand.
Since last summer, they have been selling a replica for $999 powered by an Intel CPU. This PC, called the C64x Ultimate (model number: C64x-UL) included a dual core Atom D525, NVIDIA Ion 2 graphics, 4 GB RAM and a 1 TB hard drive. A barebones version is available for $349 without a motherboard, just the keyboard and case, allowing the customer to add their own hardware into the retro box. However, Commodore USA has now upgraded their offering with a considerably more powerful CPU. This version is the C64x Extreme (model number: C64x-EX) which includes a 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7-2720QM CPU, mini-ITX motherboard and PSU, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, DVD writer (slot loading) 2 TB 7200 RPM HDD, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The back panel has the following ports: legacy PS/2, USB 2.0 x5 (one eSATA combo) USB 3.0 x2, Ethernet and three audio jacks. Video connectivity is looked after by HDMI, DVI-D and VGA outputs.
DuPont announced today that it has signed a technology licensing agreement with a leading Asian manufacturer of Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) display products. The agreement will enable process technology developed by DuPont to be used in the company's production of large AMOLED television displays. The DuPont AMOLED process technology enables large displays to be produced at significantly lower cost than alternative technologies. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
"AMOLED televisions clearly represent the future. They are preferred by consumers for their superior performance, they are more energy efficient and the process technology we're licensing allows them to be manufactured much more cost effectively," said David B. Miller, president, DuPont Electronics & Communications. "We look forward to helping make the promise of AMOLED television a commercial reality at a price point that is within reach for the mass consumer market."
The current display technology standard for most PCs and TVs is LCD nowadays. However, LCD technology has significant and well known drawbacks, such as limited viewing angles, poor colours, motion blur and input lag. These problems cause some people to swear by and hold on to the old and now obsolete CRT monitors, as it had none of these problems (it did however, have lots of others). There are various types of LCD technology in mainstream use today which attempt to address these shortcomings, but none fix them all. For example, TN displays are cheap to buy, relatively fast which reduces motion smear and input lag, but at the expense of viewing angle and colour accuracy, making them suitable for fast gaming and animation. Meanwhile, IPS displays have the opposite characteristics, making them suitable for professional photographic work, where accurate colours and vibrant pictures are essential.
Guru3D reports on a
post from NVIDIA tech support on NVIDIA's forums regarding TDR issues (Timeout Detection & Recovery problem (display stopped responding but has successfully recovered)). These problems centre around Battlefield 3 and Windows Media Centre, which NVIDIA can't reproduce, so it looks like the problems may be with specific card models. NVIDIA rep ManuelG posted:
The next generation NVIDIA and AMD GPU's are going to be built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) brand new 28 nm process, which may offer a 45% speed boost to these new products. Smaller geometries usually mean that a processor will use less power and can be made smaller, faster and more cheaply than previously. It's good news then that TSMC reports that the new process is ready for mass production and is running very well indeed. So well in fact, that unnamed sources within TSMC claim the new 28 nm process allows for a 45% increase in clock speed over the current 40 nm process. Put this together with improved GPU architectures and the next generation of graphics cards could be wickedly fast, something every enthusiast likes to see. However, it appears that NVIDIA and AMD may go for a blend of performance and power usage, rather than outright performance, since power use of modern graphics cards is already hitting limits of acceptability. So, does this mean that these new cards will overclock like never before? We will have to wait and see. AMD's cards should be out around the new year and NVIDIA's a couple of months later.
Head on over to DailyTech for a lot more detail on this.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, due for release on 8th November, will feature a new social network called Call of Duty Elite. However, this will only be available to console owners, which is sure to disappoint PC gamers loyal to this gaming series. Call of Duty Elite offers gamers a premium membership for $49.99, offering competitions, training videos and $60 worth of DLC, along with all the usual stats tracking and social features.
OneOfSwords interviewed Beachhead Studio's Chacko Sonny, who explained the reason for this:
The issue here is that the PC is an insecure platform. Without a central, trusted resource for stats, a lot of our competition features become unfair. We can't give away prizes when people can easily cheat their stats. Leaderboards are less fun when a lot of the users are there unfairly.
Saturday, November 5th 2011
EVGA has just announced a new dual GPU card based on the GF114 GPU - check out the product launch page
here and the product page
here. If their performance graph on that launch page is accurate, then the card is around 30% faster than a GTX 580 when running the Unigene Heaven benchmark. The output panel contains three DVI connectors for NVIDIA 3D Surround, along with a mini HDMI port. The cooler has three fans, which should make for a well-cooled and reasonably quiet card. The marketing blurb says:
Introducing the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win
It may not be called a GTX 585, but it's the next best thing. This card harnesses the power of two EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU's for blistering fast DirectX 11 performance, including tessellation performance that destroys the competition. Experience a whole new level of interactive gaming and combine up to three displays off a single card for the ultimate in 3D entertainment, or disable Surround and combine up to four displays for maximum productivity. With these features and more, the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win gives you double the GPU's and double the win!
Translated, this means that your life isn't worth living without one of these babies in your rig. Apparently.
Memristors are a fourth class of electric circuit, first hypothesized way back in the 1970's, which are a new addition to the transistors, capacitors, resistors etc that go into making a silicon chip. HP has put a great deal of resources into developing this technology and is expected to release memory-like memristor products in 2013, so it's not far off from commercial deployment. Now however, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have found a way to use memristors to make what they describe as a "fully functional" flexible resistive random access memory (RRAM). This memory is built on a plastic substrate and can be randomly accessed, written to and erased. However, as this substrate is flexible, it can be bent and rolled up easily, opening up possibilities for use that haven't even been thought of yet.
The recent dreadful flooding in Thailand has forced the closure of several hard drive factories. The immediate concerns of course, are for the health and wellbeing of the people living and working in the area. The wider concern is the severe restriction in hard drive manufacturing capacity. Already, prices have doubled or tripled, depending on the exact model affected. The biggest HD manufacturer, Western Digital, has been hit the hardest, as IDC predicts that up to 75% of its production will be shut down. This means, that the big corporate HDD customers, those like HP and Dell, who build computer systems in large volumes, will get whatever inventory is available to fully satisfy their needs. Whatever is left is then sold on to the retail channel, for ordinary consumers to buy. IDC believes that hard disk production will reach pre-flood levels by around March, but that HDD levels by then will be very low. The prices should go through the roof then, in the meantime. As expected, this will also increase the prices of complete systems, as such a price hike is too much to absorb fully.
Newzoo, a games industry
market research and consulting firm firm has published a report entitled "Newzoo Topic Report DLC, Pre-Owned & Digital Distribution". This explains the ongoing push towards distributing games online, as opposed to physical copies on disc. It explains that there are three basic reasons for this:
1 Free-Riders: Only 44% of US console gamers ever spends money on Console Games
2 Pre-owned: 23% of console and boxed PC/Mac games budget goes to pre-owned trading
3 DLC: Americans will spend $950 million in 2011 on game and add-on content downloads
Friday, November 4th 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
With the Sandy Bridge LGA1155 platform, announced at the start of this year, the PC motherboard industry saw a wide transition to UEFI, a new board firmware that overcomes many of the limitations of the decades old BIOS, including the archaic user interface. The second biggest motherboard vendor by volumes, Gigabyte, wasn't part of that wave. It continued to use dated Phoenix AwardBIOS with a few riders that made it look like the company was dragging its feet over UEFI adoption.
First, it tried to address the 2.2 TB boot volume size limitation by coming up with an address-space tweak it ended up calling HybridEFI (which has nothing to do with EFI). Next, it addressed the need for a more intuitive (preferably GUI) setup program with a Windows-based CMOS setup program called TouchBIOS, it came with the Fisher Price looking interface that every other manufacturer's UEFI setup program had, topped off with touchscreen support. However, faced with the inevitability of facing lack of support for Ivy Bridge (more
here) and Sandy Bridge-E, the company decided to take the plunge. It wants to come up with something that's a lot more functional than most others' UEFI setup programs that feel like the same old interfaces skinned. Enter Gigabyte 3D BIOS.
Motherboard vendors aren't the only ones getting ready for the big launch of Intel's new high-end desktop (HEDT) platform - Sandy Bridge-E, the ecosystem also consists of memory and cooling products vendors - more importantly, memory. Intel Sandy Bridge-E processors pack an integrated memory controller with a massive 256-bit bus width. To put it into perspective, if a motherboard is populated with four DDR3-1333 MHz modules, the system memory bandwidth would be a staggering 42,600 MB/s. Like everyone, G.Skill is expected to have memory kits with four DDR3 memory modules. It is likely that these kits consisting of four matched modules will be referred to as "quad-channel". Around this time, the company will have a new lineup, RipjawsZ.
RipjawsZ will make use of a new, slightly taller than standard heatspreader design, and will be available in at least two color options - black and red. Some of the kits will consist of just modules, while some will also pack Turbulence II air-coolers that use two fans. In all there are two basic types of modules: ZL, ZH; among these ZH provides the best timings for the frequencies it offers. These modules will be available in a variety of speeds: DDR3-1333, DDR3-1600, DDR3-1866, DDR3-2133, and DDR3-2400. Modules with speeds of up to DDR3-1866 make do with 1.5V DRAM voltage, DDR3-2133 needs 1.60V, while some higher speed modules need up to 1.65V. These kits are available in a variety of capacities - 8 GB (4 x 2 GB), 16 GB (4 x 4 GB), 32 GB (4 x 8 GB), and 64 GB (probably 8 x 8 GB). These modules will be Intel eXtreme Memory Profile (XMP) revision 1.3 compliant.
Here are the first pictures of MSI's socket LGA2011 motherboard in the micro-ATX form-factor. Earlier this week, we got to see through ASRock's
X79 Extreme4-M that LGA2011 micro-ATX boards were indeed possible. Called the MSI X79MA-GD45 (MS-7738 V1.1), this board offers all the connectivity possible on a board with such a tight footprint. The LGA2011 socket is powered by a 9-phase VRM. It is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, two on either sides of the socket, powered by 2-phase VRM. Expansion slots include two each of PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and PCI-Express 2.0 x1. 2-way SLI and CrossFire are supported.
SATA connectivity includes two SATA 6 Gb/s (white), four SATA 3 Gb/s (black). There are no eSATA ports, but four USB 3.0, two on the rear panel, two by internal header, driven by Renesas-made controllers. The rest of the connectivity is fairly standard: 8+2 channel HD audio driven by Realtek ALC892 CODEC with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs, single gigabit Ethernet driven by Realtek 8111E, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. One of the front-panel USB 2.0 headers is designed for charging portable devices even with the system shut down (yet plugged in). The board will be driven by UEFI firmware, we're getting to see some nifty features for overclockers such as voltage measurement points across a wide range of voltage domains.
AMD announced a restructuring plan and implementation of operational efficiency initiatives designed to strengthen the company's competitive positioning. AMD expects that these combined actions will create a more competitive cost structure and rebalance the company's global workforce skillsets, helping AMD to continue delivering industry-leading products while improving productivity, reducing time-to-market and better aligning with key industry trends that are expected to drive growth.
"Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD's competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud."
Rouchon Industries, Inc. dba Swiftech today announced the release for retail sales of the H2O-x20 Edge "HD" series liquid cooling kits using their new flagship CPU waterblock the Apogee HD and the patent pending MCRx20 Drive (Rev3) series of PC radiators.
The new kit series announce uncompromised performance, functionality, and simple installation at a reasonable price. "This new generation offers an ease of installation which is very close to that of other all-in-one kits, but it does it without sacrificing performance and functionality: users can take full advantage of the power of liquid cooling i.e. low temperature and low noise while not being restricted to CPU-only cooling as is the case with other all-in-one kits" said Gabriel Rouchon Swiftech's Chairman & CTA.
ASUS began bundling copies of Battlefield 3 (not Limited Edition) and an ASUS-Battlefield 3 themed Lanyard with GeForce GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II TOP graphics card and Xonar D2X PCI-Express 7.1 channel sound card. You can buy either of those and get a Battlefield 3 coupon that can be redeemed on Origin.
The GeForce GTX 560 Ti TOP will allow you to play Battlefield 3 at 1080p resolution with quite some eye-candy turned on. Its core is overclocked to 900 MHz (from NVIDIA reference speed of 820 MHz), and memory at 1050 MHz (4200 MHz GDDR5 effective). The DirectCU II cooler, ASUS claims, keeps the card 20% cooler than the reference heatsink. There is 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. This GTX 560 Ti is based on the 40 nm GF114 silicon, packing 384 CUDA cores.
StarTech.com, a leading manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity parts has announced the release of the (SKU: SATDOCK4U3RE) USB 3.0/eSATA to SATA Standalone 1:3 Hard Drive Duplicator Dock, which enables users to perform 1:3 sector-by-sector duplication from a single SATA hard drive onto three others simultaneously, without having to connect the dock to a host computer. The Duplicator Dock also includes a SATA to IDE adapter, which provides the option of connecting an IDE hard drive in one of the SATA slots.
"IT professionals are always looking for ways to make their jobs more efficient and this new multi-drive duplicator allows them to accomplish just that," commented StarTech.com Senior Product Manager, Carey Cline. "The ability to perform a sector by sector duplication on up to three drives simultaneously, frees up the user's time to perform other functions while the back-ups are created in the background. The fact it acts as a standalone unit also means it doesn't use up resources on their computer system."
Thursday, November 3rd 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Portable Storage
While USB 3.0 equipped external hard drives are a dime a dozen, the Verbatim Store'n'Go for Mac adds Firewire 800 to the mix. This makes the external drive rather unique and offers a noticeable price advantage when compared to the likes of LaCie or Freecom variants.
In a move that could "ruin a lot of people's Christmas," as TechEye puts it, it is learned that AMD is headed for executive layoffs. The company's new CEO, Rory Read apparently sees value in a leaner, more efficient organization. This, despite rather positive third quarter results, where AMD bagged $1.69 billion in revenue and $97 million in profit. The CEO is eying total restructuring, according to sources. As expected, AMD refused to comment.
Rosewill the leading hardware solution provider bringing the best choice in value, announced its newest member of Rosewill gaming and performance computer case family, BLACKHAWK-ULTRA.
The BLACKHAWK-ULTRA has all the features that made the original BLACKHAWK a success, including a great design, led fans, and full black interior. Where the BLACKHAWK-ULTRA is unique is with the space that is offered inside of this case, you will be able to mount HPTX or even a second power supply if needed.
HP today announced a new industry program comprising a new server development platform, customer discovery lab and partner ecosystem to help customers significantly reduce complexity, energy use and costs.
HP's new program, dubbed Project Moonshot, combines with HP Converged Infrastructure technology to allow the sharing of resources - including storage, networking, management, power and cooling - across thousands of servers. It paves the way to the future of low-energy computing for emerging web, cloud and massive scale environments.
HP today announced the HP Slate 2 Tablet PC with expanded touch capabilities, enhanced multitasking performance and embedded security, providing added flexibility to mobile business users. The company also announced a new notebook PC targeting business, education and government customers.
The HP Slate 2 Tablet PC provides instant deployment for business and vertical markets such as education, healthcare, government and retail, where jobs frequently take users away from a traditional desk. With a full-featured Microsoft Windows environment, the 1.5 pound HP Slate 2 Tablet PC provides professionals with the flexibility to create, edit and review content on one highly mobile and lightweight device.
There sure is going to be fierce competition between motherboard vendors once "Sandy Bridge-E" Core i7 processors come out, a little later this month. Even the tiniest edge over competitors in terms of features can go a long way with market success. Gigabyte is ready with one such feature of its own: the Bluetooth 4.0 + WiFi b/g/n card, which it will bundle with the GA-X79-UD5, GA-X79-UD7(OC), and G1.Assassin 2. Simply put, this is a special addon card that will provide a Wireless b/g/n (wireless n at 150 Mbps), and Bluetooth 4.0 (24 Mbps) connectivity.
Here's how it works: the card sits on one of the board's PCI-Express x1 slots (or any PCIe slot for that matter), the PCIe connection is wired to the wireless network controller on the mini-PCIe card. We expect this to be a common Atheros AR9285-based card. The main card also has a Bluetooth 4.0 controller, which connects to the system using USB 2.0. A cable runs from the card to any of the board's USB 2.0 front-panel headers. The Bluetooth controller only uses one port, so the other is wired out as an internal USB 2.0 port (good for any DRM dongles you may have). The card is then wired to two antennas (included), one for the wireless network controller, the other for the Bluetooth, both have activity LEDs. It's not known if Gigabyte will sell this card separately, so just about anyone can use it.
Wednesday, November 2nd 2011
Today's Reviews
Review
Cases
Thermaltake's initial release of the Level 10 was co-designed with luxury car manufacturer BMW. The second iteration is a boiled down and condensed version that maximizes all the enthusiast wants while reducing the price considerably. The Level 10 GT just might be the best gaming case on the market.
Hot on the heels of our
previous story of Apple Macs falling prey to a DDoS trojan, we now have another Mac trojan come on the market, as explained by
Sophos. Yes, the Apple platform must indeed be becoming more popular to get this one. It's an unfortunate fact of life that the popularity of any computing platform, including smartphones, can be judged by the number of criminals who will attack it. This little nasty, called
OSX/Miner-D or 'DevilRobber', hijacks Mac OS X to perform various tricks, which include minting Bitcoins (the virtual and now
virtually worthless currency) stealing usernames and passwords (of course) taking screenshots and stealing the victim's Bitcoin wallet while it's at it, if there is one. And for good measure:
it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history, and .bash_history.
So, now the criminals also know about all the sites one has visited, eroding user privacy even more. It looks like this malware has covered all the bases, but wait, there's more.
Fans of 2004's hit horror sci-fi shooter Doom 3, are about to receive a nice gift courtesy of its creator, John Carmack. He's putting the source code out there for anyone to have, as he tweeted
here:
doom 3 source is packaged and tested, we are waiting on final lawyer clearance for release.
This should see some excellent spin-offs and mods from the talented modding crews out there. For those that just want to play the game and not mess around with compiling it first from the source code, it's now available very cheaply from most games outlets.
MSI has announced the launch of a new all-in-one PC model designed specifically for business users: the Wind Top AP2011. The industry-leading adoption of LED panel, integration of the display into the main body of the PC, and brand-new industrial design make for a neat, uncluttered desktop. The Wind Top AP2011 also features unique energy-saving technology, providing power consumption that is approximately 30% lower than conventional CCFL panel. Combined with MSI's other energy-saving technologies, this can help business enterprises to make substantial savings on their electricity bill, making this a truly "green" PC.
As far as performance is concerned, the Wind Top AP2011 uses the second-generation Intel Core processor, whose revolutionary computing capabilities permit more efficient multi-tasking. Besides its energy-saving characteristics and enhanced support for multi-tasking, MSI has also given the Wind Top AP2011 a range of additional features specially designed to meet the needs of business users, including the provision of multiple COM ports, the ability to link the AP2011 up to a barcode reader, credit card reader or credit card terminal. With its energy-saving design and its unique combination of advanced technology and efficient functionality, the Wind Top AP2011 is ideal for both individual users and business enterprises.
Stealth.com Inc. (Stealth Computer), a leading ISO 9001 manufacturer of industrial rugged computers and peripherals has released the new model LPC-125LPFM, a rugged, small footprint, fanless computer for industrial, Mobile/In-Vehicle and Embedded applications.
The LPC-125LPFM is a breakthrough in small form factor computing. The rugged, diminutive size, noise free computer operates in wide temperature ranges and drawing less than 20 Watts of operational power. This energy efficient & versatile PC measures out at only, 4.6" x 6.1" x 2.0" (117mm x 155mm x 52mm) or slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. The Stealth Mini PC weighs in at a mere 1.2lbs or 0.54kg. The PC operates from 10-26V of DC power making it ideal for DC powered applications typically found in vehicle and mobile applications.
Noctua today presented a new special edition of its award-winning NH-D14 cooler for the upcoming Intel LGA2011 X79 platform. Having received more than 250 awards and recommendations from the international press, Noctua's NH-D14 has become a benchmark in premium quality quiet cooling. The new SE2011 version is a special edition for Intel's soon to be released Core i7-3000 (Sandy Bridge-E) CPUs and comes equipped with Noctua's SecuFirm2 mounting system for LGA2011 as well as an exquisite NF-P12/NF-P14 dual PWM fan configuration.
"Hardware enthusiasts have every right to be excited about Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processors, but to get the most out of it, you'll definitely need a high quality cooling solution", says Mag. Roland Mossig, Noctua CEO. "Our flagship model NH-D14 has earned a reputation as one of the finest high-end quiet coolers on the market, so we thought that this should be a perfect match. The new special edition for LGA2011 will keep your Sandy Bridge-E CPU cool no matter what you throw at it, and it will do so at minimum noise levels, thus appealing to overclockers and quiet enthusiasts alike."
Leading memory storage brand, SP/Silicon Power announces super mini-size Touch T01 flash drive today in response to the market trend of mobile devices. The overall dimension is minimized by 30% and there is only 10 mm of length is in sight when it connects to the USB port. Therefore you are able put your laptop or tablet personal computer into the handbag without having to retract the USB flash drive which upgrades your storage data mobility!
In addition to portable device, Touch T01 is even suitable for the consumers using flash drives daily. Those include usages of connecting to car stereos, mp3 players or digital photo frames. It is not only more convenient but also expands the storage space for music, photos and other multimedia files. Touch T01 provides an array of choices in capacities from 4 GB to 16 GB to satisfy customer's various requirements.
Biostar's coveted TPower brand makes a comeback with TPower X79, Biostar's premium overclocking motherboard for the Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" platform. TPower motherboards have been known to be a part of some record-setting CPU OC feats right from the days of LGA775. The TPower X79 is another product that's meant for record-setting feats, with its strong VRM and slim feature-set that does away with everything overclockers don't need and adds to the bloat of the motherboard.
The CPU is powered by an 8-phase DuraMax VRM with active phase control and direct FETs. It draws power from two 8-pin EPS connectors, apart from the 24-pin ATX and an optional 4-pin Molex for PCIe slot stability. Apart from a strong VRM, the board makes use of POSCAP capacitors in the CPU area, and a high-quality clock generator. The VRM and chipset heatsinks are connected with a 6 mm heat pipe, the heatsinks are made of a ceramic surface material for better dissipation. The CPU is wired to just four DDR3 DIMM slots, one per channel, which shouldn't be an issue for overclockers. It gives you shorter memory traces. Apart from JEDEC speeds of up to DDR3-1600 MHz, the board supports DDR3-2400 MHz by overclocking.
In late September, S3 Graphics, still a subsidiary of VIA Technology and soon to be transferred to HTC, dragged Apple Inc. to court over charges of patent infringement related to graphics component IP of nearly all Apple products, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and iMac. Last month, AMD, now a main supplier of graphics processors for Apple's Mac products, intervened with a counter lawsuit claiming it owned the patents that S3 has asserted against Apple, and sought an immediate halt to S3's patent case against Apple.
In an October 28 filing with the ITC, S3 says that a federal judge struck down a request for an immediate halt into S3's case, but the Commission is scheduled to release its final decision on November 15. The case struck down is (rather was) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. v. S3 Graphics Co., 11cv965, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (Wilmington).
AMD's third 8-core desktop processor model is available through OEMs such as HP. Called the AMD FX-8100, this chip is the most affordable among the available FX-8000 series chips (that's FX-8120 and FX-8150), and according to HP's component pricing, about $80 cheaper than the FX-8150. The AMD FX-8100 is a base model processor option for HP Pavilion HPE h8z desktop. It can be configured to have FX-8150 instead, for $80 over the base price of the desktop, of $830.
The FX-8100, like every other FX Series processor, features an unlocked base clock multiplier to help with overclocking. The chip is clocked at 2.80 GHz, with TurboCore technology, all eight cores can overclock themselves to 3.10 GHz. To handle tasks that aren't multi-threaded, the chip can overclock some of its cores (up to four of them), all the way up to 3.70 GHz. Like every other FX-8000 series chip, the FX-8100 packs 16 MB of total cache (8 MB total L2 + 8 MB L3), features an advanced instruction set of AVX, AES, XOP, SSE 4.2/4.1/4a, and a system interface of 5.2 GT/s with HyperTransport 3.1.
Tuesday, November 1st 2011
Today's Contests
Today's Reviews
Foxconn's latest premium gamer-overclocker segment motherboard, the Quantum Force X79, has finally taken shape. Foxconn's Quantum Force motherboards are designed to offer good overclocking features at a great value. The Quantum Force X79 uses a 14-phase VRM to power the LGA2011 "Sandy Bridge-E" processor, plus a 2-phase VRM for the memory. There are four DDR3 DIMM slots, one per memory channel. Expansion slots include three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (PCI-E1_x16, PCI-E3_x16, and PCI-E4_x16. The second black slot (PCI-E2_x16) is electrical PCI-Express 2.0 x8.
The board is packed with features that help overclockers, starting with triple redundant BIOS, voltage measurement points for manual voltage measurements (with a wide range of voltage domains), manual overclocking buttons on board, power, reset, clear-CMOS buttons, POST speaker, and plenty of fan headers.
Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and big capacities to help satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. The new Barracuda family makes it easier for consumers to find the product they need and reduces costs for Seagate's original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the number of product qualifications and amount of inventory they need to manage.
"A simpler desktop drive product family is exactly what Seagate customers are asking for," said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate. "The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content. In addition, our OEM and channel customers want to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage in their inventory."
SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced a new model in its successful HD 6900 series of graphics cards - the HD 6970 2GB with a new super efficient Dual fan cooler and Dual BIOS giving users the choice of fast, quiet operation or performance tuning.
The new SAPPHIRE HD 6970 has the same internal architecture as the standard model, with 1536 stream processors and 96 texture processing units, and clock speeds are 880MHz for the core and 1375Mhz (5.5Gb/sec effective) for the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. This new design has two 90mm fans with thin impellers that can move the same amount of air at 10% lower rotation speeds than conventional fans, keeping noise low, and their special dust repelling bearings contribute to high reliability.
Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system, notebook and mobile device manufacturer releases a new member of ECS Black Series-H61H2-A2 Black Deluxe, another new face of ECS Black Series that provides much more advanced computing manageability, flexibility and gaming experience.
To bring the H61 ATX motherboards even further, ECS adopts additional chips to support USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s for more users to experience high-speed transmission of new-generation interface. In addition, ECS H61H2-A2 Black Deluxe passes 50∘C Super Burn Test, which simulates severe computer-using environment to ensure the quality, durability and safety of your computer. It also features all solid capacitors, anti-static protection and anti-surge protection.
Sharkoon introduces two new Power Supply series to the market for PC users and gamers who are looking for products from the provider in a particular price-performance range.
The WPM series with modular cable system arrives to the market in the three performance classes of 400, 500 and 600 Watts. The models comply with ATX specifications ATX 12V V2.0 and provide an efficiency of over 80 percent. Firmly attached to the power supply are a 20+4 Pin mainboard connector, a 4+4 Pin CPU connector and a 6+2 Pin PCIe connector. The enclosed plug-in cable set consists of a 6-Pin PCI cable, a cable with connections for five optical drives plus Floppy as well as two cables with three SATA connections each.
AMD today launched the AMD FirePro V4900, which delivers unequaled performance for Digital Content Creation (DCC) and Computer Aided Design (CAD) professionals at an entry-level price point. By leveraging AMD's most advanced graphics technology, including AMD Eyefinity technology, the AMD FirePro V4900 significantly improves application performance and drives efficiency in the workplace. In fact, the AMD FirePro V4900 more than doubled the performance of competitive offerings in many CAD and DCC application tests.
"The AMD FirePro V4900 stands in a league of its own and redefines entry-level professional graphics card capabilities," says Sandeep Gupte, general manager of Professional Graphics, AMD. "The AMD FirePro V4900 leverages AMD's most advanced graphics technology, which not only enhances user experience and boosts performance of professional applications, but also features AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology that supports up to six displays, increasing user productivity."
Acer is spreading holiday cheer this season with new all-in-one (AIO) desktops that combine the audio/visual excitement of HD with the fun and entertainment of a touch-screen display. The new models include the Acer AZ5 Series with an ample 23-inch HD monitor and the AZ3 Series, which features a more compact 21-inch HD screen to fit within tight areas. These new AIOs conserve space and make an appealing entertainment hub for the entire family to enjoy.
"A sophisticated appearance and practical design make our all-in-one form factor very popular with consumers," said Irene Chan, senior business manager of consumer desktops for Acer America. "Our newest all-in-one models feature an intuitive touch screen display for playing digital music, scrolling through images, browsing online recipes and viewing social networking sites. In addition, full HD performance heightens the visual excitement of movies and games."
ASRock's first wave of socket LGA2011 motherboards comes a full circle with the X79 Extreme4. The series consists of the X79 Extreme4,
X79 Extreme4-M (micro-ATX),
X79 Extreme7, and
X79 Extreme9. There aren't many micro-ATX LGA2011 motherboards that we're hearing about, and hence ASRock might get the opportunity to charge a premium for the X79 Extreme4-M, making this the most affordable LGA2011 board from ASRock's stable. It still packs a lot of features and connectivity. To begin with, it is consistent with the black and gold styling of the other boards, including the active fan-heatsink over the X79 PCH.
The LGA2011 socket is powered by an 8-phase VRM design, which is identical to that of the X79 Extreme4-M. The socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting quad-channel DDR3 memory (one DIMM per channel). It has an interesting combination of expansion slots, making use of all 7 spaces available to the ATX form-factor. It includes three PCI-Express x16 (first two are permanent PCI-Express 3.0 x16, the third is permanent PCI-Express 2.0 x8), two PCI-Express 2.0 x1, and two legacy PCI. Storage connectivity includes two SATA 6 Gb/s and four SATA 3 Gb/s internal ports wired to the X79 PCH, three additional SATA 6 Gb/s and one eSATA 6 Gb/s wired to ASMedia-made SATA controllers.
The latest data from Jon Peddie Research, which is known for closely tracking the PC graphics hardware industry, claims that the PC graphics industry has stabilized and returned to a more predictable path in Q3 2011. Shipments have increased 16.7% sequentially, and 18.4% compared to Q3 2010 (year over year). Much of this is attributed to the market success of Intel "Sandy Bridge" Core processors, which has also worked to increase Intel's market share. Intel is the market leader in PC graphics, with AMD in the second place, and NVIDIA third.
Intel holds 60.4% of the market, a significant increase from the 54.8% it held in Q2 2011. It grew at the expense of both AMD and NVIDIA. AMD's share slipped a little, despite the introduction of new A-Series "Llano" accelerated processing units. AMD holds 23% of the market, down from the 24.4% it held in Q2. NVIDIA is in a bit of trouble. The green team holds 16.1% of the market, down from 20.1% it held in Q2. This is attributed to its exit from integrated graphics. Its discrete GPU business still sees growth.
Swiftech announced the release for retail sales of their new flagship CPU waterblock, the Apogee HD, concurrently with Revision 3 of the Patent Pending MCRx20 Drive series of PC radiators.
Close to 18 months in the making, the Apogee HD was designed to surpass its predecessor the Award Winning Apogee XT in all critical areas: improved thermal performance, reduced flow restriction, new choices of colors, classic black or fashionable white, fine-tuned mounting system, lower cost, and an exclusive innovative feature that works in conjunction with the new Revision of the MCRx20 Drive PC Radiators: the Multi-port connectivity.
