While GIGABYTE's first motherboards based on Intel's new entry-level H81 Express chipset were mostly focused on small business PC builds, its latest one could lure HTPC builders. The new H81M-HD3 is built in the narrow micro-ATX (244 x 190 mm) form-factor as the other H81-based motherboards from the company, with a feature-set tuned for the living room. To begin with, the board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS connectors; the LGA1150 socket is powered by the same simple 2+1 phase VRM. The CPU socket is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory; and a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot (as PCIe gen 3.0 is outside the platform's feature-set). A pair of legacy PCI slots and a PCI-Express 2.0 x1 make for the rest of the expansion area.

The H81 PCH gives out two each of SATA 6 Gb/s and SATA 3 Gb/s ports. With the help of an additional VLI-made USB 3.0 host controller, the board features a total of six USB 3.0 ports (four on the rear panel, two by header). Display connectivity includes dual-link DVI, D-Sub (VGA), DisplayPort, and HDMI. 8-channel HD audio with optical (TOSLINK) SPDIF output, driven by Realtek ALC892 CODEC; and gigabit Ethernet, driven by Realtek 8111F controller, make for the rest of the connectivity. COM and LPT ports are given out by headers. The board is driven by AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS, backed by GIGABYTE's dual-UEFI technology. We expect this one to go for around $60.

GIGABYTE announced its first socket LGA1150 motherboards based on Intel's new H81 Express chipset for entry-level desktop platforms, among the trio of H81-based motherboards launched today, are the H81M-DS2, H81M-D2V, and H81M-D3V. The three are based on a common compact micro-ATX PCB design measuring 226 x 170 mm, and differ with connectivity features. The H81 Express is basically B85 Express without SBA, and fewer SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and PCIe gen 2.0.

The H81M-DS2 has a focus on legacy connectivity, which could go well with POS (that's point-of-sale, but we won't disagree with what you made out) PCs that are wired to old LPT printers. Its legacy ports include an LPT parallel port, an RS232 COM serial port, separate PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard. Its lone display output is a D-Sub (VGA). The H81M-D2V sheds LPT while retaining a the RS232 COM port, and a slightly more modern display connectivity that includes D-Sub (VGA) and DVI. It features a single, common PS/2 connector. The H81M-D3V has the least legacy connectivity, with just DVI and D-Sub for display outputs, no rear-panel COM or LPT ports, and a common PS/2 connector.

Intel issued a product change notification (PCN), marked 112432-00, which attempts to improve the reliability of the system under heavy wireless network stress. A design flaw in Intel's reference NUC boxes equipped with wireless LAN and Thunderbolt came to light late last year, when a reviewer at TechReport discovered that when under stress, the mPCIe WLAN card can overheat, causing the neighboring mSATA SSD to malfunction. In its latest PCN, Intel included a 9.5 mm-thick flexible thermal pad on the top panel, which draws heat from the SSD, and conducts it to the chassis.

The information was sourced and publicized by the VideoCardz.com crew on Tuesday, confirming some previous leaks and refuting others. The new GeForce GTX 760 employs the same reference design NVIDIA used for its previous generation cards (GTX 670, GTX 660 Ti, GTX 660 and GTX 650 Ti) and is designed to replace the GTX 660 Ti in NVIDIA's current lineup. The card employs a cut down version of the GK 104 GPU, with 1152 CUDA Cores, 96 TMUs and 32 ROPs. With a base clock of 980 Mhz and a boost value of 53 MHz, for a maximum out of the box frequency of 1033 MHz, the new card supports GPU Boost 2.0 which is a temperature controlled feature (the cooler the chip the higher the clocks). Stock memory size will be 2 GB and reference memory clocks were set at 1502 MHz, for a slightly over 6 Ghz effective speed. A 256-bit wide memory bus is employed to offer 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth at stock clocks. TDP is set at 170W for the new card, requiring two 6-pin PCIe connectors

Also relevant to the topic is another piece of information unveiled along with the above mentioned specifications, the fact that the GeForce GTX 760 will complete NVIDIA's portfolio for the coming months. NVIDIA presumably awaiting AMD's move before launching any more GeForce products of its own. AMD, in turn, being expected to bring out the Radeon HD 8000 Sea Islands cards in September.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced a significant upgrade to its enterprise software portfolio with a new version of its FlashSoft software for Windows Server and Linux operating systems. FlashSoft 3.2 server-side solid state caching software complements and enhances the performance of existing applications, and server and storage systems.

"Solid state storage strategies are changing the economics of data management. The challenge, however, is adding enterprise flash technology without major disruptions to ongoing IT operations," said Jeff Boles, senior analyst and director of Lab Validation Services, The Taneja Group. "SanDisk's FlashSoft software efficiently integrates solid state cache into servers without changing where data is stored or the features and capabilities of a consolidated storage approach. This 'disruptionless' approach dramatically simplifies the introduction of solid state, and allows SanDisk customers to immediately address performance challenges without changing existing storage strategies."

Be quiet!, market leader with power supplies in Germany for seven consecutive years, introduces its brand new "Pure Power L8" power supplies. The new series ranging from 300 to 700 Watts offers unprecedented low noise levels in the entry market and takes recent customer needs into account, offering PCIe connectors already for the 300 Watt model.

Be quiet!'s Pure Power L8 with cable management is one of the most successful power supplies for the company. It offers a great set of features for a reasonable price. Now be quiet! decided to broaden this offer even more by releasing Pure Power L8 models in a version with fixed cables. Doing so, be quiet! is able to bring the fantastic feature set of these popular PSUs to an even lower price level.

A system built with thousands of Intel processors and co-processors was just named the most powerful supercomputer in the world in the 41st edition of the Top500 list of supercomputers. The system, known as "Milky Way 2," includes 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and 32,000 Intel Xeon processors and operates at a peak performance of 54.9 PFlops (54.9 quadrillion floating point operations per second) -- more than twice the performance of the top rated system from the last edition of the Top500 list in November 2012. This is the first exclusively Intel-based system to take the top spot on the list since 1997.

Intel also announced the expansion of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors portfolio and revealed details of the second generation of Intel Xeon Phi products code named "Knights Landing." The new products and technologies will continue to radically increase the energy efficiency and performance of supercomputers worldwide.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry's first PCI-Express (PCIe) solid state drive (SSD) for next-generation ultra-slim notebook PCs.

"With the Samsung XP941, we have become the first to provide the highest performance PCIe SSD to global PC makers so that they can launch leading-edge ultra-slim notebook PCs this year," said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. "Samsung plans to continue timely delivery of the most advanced PCIe SSD solutions with higher density and performance, and support global IT companies providing an extremely robust computing environment to consumers." Samsung started providing the new SSD to major notebook PC makers earlier this quarter. The XP941 lineup consists of 512, 256 and 128GB SSDs.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of NAND Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, announces its Super Hybrid drives for enterprise and desktop consumers.
The Super Hybrid is a group of SSDs and an HDD combined together that is connected to a system through a PCIe slot. This new product supports sequential read and write speeds of up to 800 MB/s with a cache of 192 GB.

For reasons unknown, Creative's newer generations of Sound Blaster sound cards don't bear the THX logo anymore. Its previous Sound Blaster Recon3D series of cards shipped with THX TruStudio Pro software, which is replaced by Creative's own SBX Pro Studio, in its newest Sound Baster Z series. Post-processing layers such as Crystalizer, Pro Surround, Pro Bass, Smart Volume, and Dialog Plus, are each re-branded with SBX ProStudio prefixes. The company reportedly revised its Sound Blaster Recon3D mainstream sound card with SBX Pro Studio, replacing THX TruStudio Pro, and the resulting product is labeled Sound Blaster Recon3D r2. The card is otherwise identical to the original.

Based on Creative's Sound Core3D native-PCIe chipset, and a Cirrus Logic-made DAC, the Sound Blaster Recon3D r2 offers 5.1-channel output with 24-bit resolution, 96 kHz sample rates, 102 dBA SNR, a dedicated 600 Ω headphones amplifier, EAX 5.0 Advanced HD, OpenAL hardware-accelerated audio API support, and support for Windows 8. The card complies with Intel Azalia specifications, so non-Windows operating systems can run it as a generic HD audio device. The latest driver update for the original Sound Blaster Recon3D doesn't change THX TruStudio Pro from the feature-set.

Mushkin, Inc., an industry leading designer and manufacturer of high?performance and mission?critical computer products, announced today the launch of their new Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD alongside Mushkin's "Pacific Rim Sweepstakes" which will run from June 5, 2013 until August 17, 2013. Prizes offered include a home theater system valued at $3,500 and a brand new Razer Blade Pro Gaming Laptop valued at $2,299, in addition to a limited edition Mushkin themed PC and Mushkin/Pacific Rim prize packs.

"Mushkin's Pacific Rim sweepstakes definitely appeals to our audience on a variety of levels and provides our consumers with the chance to win some amazing prizes," said Nicolas Villalobos, Director of Global Marketing at Mushkin, Inc. "Alongside this campaign we are excited to launch our latest Scorpion Deluxe line of SSDs. Our customers can now manage data faster, safer and more efficiently. Whether for digital content creation, virtualization, database acceleration, motion picture visual effects or your own application, the Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe PCIe SSD is always ready."

Cooler Master unveiled the second generation of its GX line of mainstream PSUs for gaming PC builds. These extremely well 'packaged' PSUs come in mid-range capacities under 850W, offer all the connectivity most gaming PCs need, at usually good prices. Pictured below is a new 700W model, which is compliant with the latest ATX specifications, supports Core "Haswell" low-power C-states, and offers essential features such as APFC, protection from over/under voltage, overload, overpower (output), and short-circuit. It offers all the cabling (fixed) you need for a gaming PC with up to two graphics cards; including four 6+2 pin PCIe, nine SATA, three Molex, apart from 24-pin ATX and 4+4-pin EPS. GX series PSUs lack fancy 80 Plus certifications, but Cooler Master claims this unit should offer 85 percent at typical loads. Cooler Master addressed the issue of a generally edgy fan-speed curve with its mainstream PSUs, by deploying a large 135 mm Yate Loon fan to keep the unit cool.

Advantech, a global embedded platform manufacturer, today unveiled the new ASMB-822I server-grade motherboard powered by Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family technology. This new technology comprises 64-bit multi-core processors, PCI Express Gen3 high speed communications, and DDR3 memory with total capacity up to 96GB. ASMB-822I is perfect designed for high performance demands such as NVR, DVR and also target to video wall, video conferencing, surveillance and other mission-critical applications.

"Advantech is committed to providing a full spectrum of embedded systems with advanced and intelligent built-in technology, from fanless and ruggedized to high-performance solutions," said Linda Tsai,Director of Advantech Embedded Systems Group. The ASMB-822I is an ATX server board equipped with LGA 2011 Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 series and Intel C602J series chipset. It supports six DDR3 registered DIMM slots for a 96 GB total capacity and dual GbE LANs using Intel controllers.

Micron Technology, Inc. today announced a new PCIe all-flash I/O accelerator to improve overall performance in enterprise servers, appliances and storage platforms. The new Micron P420m combines consistent performance with the inherent power efficiency of an all-flash system to deliver improved economics for enterprise data centers. The P420m accelerates performance of today's demanding data center applications, including online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing and virtualization.

Ultimately, Micron's P420m ends the wait game for digital data. It features ultra-low latency performance that enables fast and predictable response times to information frequently used in data center environments. When tested against competing PCIe solutions in a MySQL server running an OLTP benchmark, the P420m is the fastest and most consistent performer, delivering more than 3,200 web server requests per second. It handily manages online requests during peak traffic times, improving the overall end-user experience.

Other World Computing (OWC), a leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology company, today introduced the OWC Mercury Helios+E2 Thunderbolt SSD Solution. The bootable 'all-in-one' storage performance and expansion solution offers owners of Thunderbolt technology enabled Macs and PCs sustained read/write data throughput up to 617MB/s from up to 960GB of OWC Mercury SSD capacity; two Thunderbolt interfaces for connecting multiple Thunderbolt devices; and two eSATA 6Gb/s expansion ports for connecting up to an additional 32TB or more of external storage/backup capacity.

With Computex 2013 a little over a month away, alongside which Intel plans to launch its 4th generation Core "Haswell" family, motherboard manufacturers are gearing up for another summer of product launches, with compatible socket LGA1150 motherboards. Among these is MSI, which teased its flagship motherboard that targets overclockers and PC enthusiasts interested in taking the Core i7-4770K and Core i5-4670K for a spin. This motherboard falls inside the company's Big Bang series, bearing the name Z87 XPower. As the name suggests, it's based on Intel's Z87 Express chipset.

Not much is known about the Big Bang Z87 XPower, except what the teaser video (after the break) and a couple of corner-shots reveal. Expect a fancy new color scheme (probably a combination of gold and black), a new design scheme for the VRM and chipset heatsinks with a glowy "X" sign, the usual plethora of overclocking options MSI packs with its high-end motherboards, and what appears to be an mSATA or mPCIe slot, in one of the pictures.

Market launch of AMD's Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" dual-GPU graphics card is less than a week away, according to an OCaholic report. Sources told the publication that AMD plans to launch its flagship graphics card on the 24th of April, 2013. According to it, reviews of the card should already be underway. AMD Radeon HD 7990 is the company's flagship graphics card, featuring a pair of 28 nm "Tahiti" GPUs. According to specifications derived from older reports, it packs a total of 4096 stream processors, and 6 GB of GDDR5 memory across two 384-bit wide memory interfaces. What sets this card apart from the HD 7990 "New Zealand" launched last year by AMD's partners is the power-optimizations AMD put into it, leaving the card to draw power from "just" two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and make do with a dual-slot cooling solution.

During her keynote at the Intel Developer Forum today in Beijing, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, discussed how her company is helping users harness powerful new capabilities that will improve the lives of people by building smarter cities, healthier communities and thriving businesses.

Bryant unveiled details of upcoming technologies and products that show how Intel aims to transform the server, networking and storage capabilities of the datacenter. By addressing the full spectrum of workload demands and providing new levels of application optimized solutions for enterprise IT, technical computing and cloud service providers, unprecedented experiences can be delivered.

An anonymous tipster left an interesting picture on our doorsteps. It shows a pair of Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" reference-design graphics cards chugging along inside an enthusiast PC. AMD surprised us late last month, when it showed off a reference-design Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU graphics card, at the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) event. The cards in this new picture appear to be identical to the one AMD showed. The "Radeon" embossing appears pretty clear on both cards, so one can't mistake them for FirePro S10000.

Bearing a new internal codename "Malta," compared to last year's various dual-HD 7970 contraptions that were codenamed "New Zealand," the new Radeon HD 7990 is being designed to be far more energy efficient, and quiet. While the various "New Zealand" cards often featured three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and triple-slot cooling solutions, "Malta" makes do with just two 8-pin power connectors, and a dual-slot cooler. We've been talking to a lot of reliable sources in the industry, and nobody has any clue about a tentative launch date.

HGST today announced the industry's fastest and most advanced enterprise-class, multi level cell (MLC) SAS SSD family - the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR. From the market share leader in enterprise SAS/FC SSDs, these HGST drives are the first to double today's SAS interface speed.

Designed for the most demanding applications where "hot" data is accessed frequently, such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics, HGST's new 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs help increase input/output per second (IOPS) and improve response times to mission-critical data in cloud and traditional IT datacenters environments.

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., a leading HBA and storage solutions manufacturer, announces the industry's first 40-Port SATA 6 Gb/s HBA - the Rocket 750. HighPoint is proud to introduce our innovative SATA Aggregation Technology to the storage marketplace - this revolutionary architecture allows a single host adapter card to support up to 40 SATA hard drives, and represents the industry's lowest-cost mass SATA storage solution.

The Rocket 750 is ideal for applications that require huge levels of storage capacity such as data Libraries, archiving and backup solutions, but need to maximize cost savings over SAS expander-based configurations. Powered by a PCIe 2.0 x8 host interface, 40 device channels, and HighPoint's Intelligent Storage Health Management Suite, the Rocket 750 is an ideal DAS solution for PC platforms and SMB server applications.

Cooler Master showed off a new line of performance-segment PSUs under its V-series. Consisting of three models, the V700 (700W), V850 (850W) and V1000 (1000W), the three boast of 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating (90 percent efficiency at 50 percent load, 87 percent efficiency at 100 percent load).

The three feature fully modular cabling (including 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS); four 6+2 pin PCIe connectors on the V700, and six on the V850 and V1000; and all modern protection features. It's reported that the three are originally manufactured by Seasonic. Pricing and availability are under the wraps.

ASUS is working on the GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini, a high-end graphics card that's size-optimized for mini-ITX gaming PC builds. NVIDIA's reference-design PCB for the GTX 670 already established that compact (<20 cm long) PCBs are very much possible for the chip. ASUS designed its own short (17 cm long) PCB with a 5-phase VRM, which draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, instead of two 6-pin. This allows you to make do with compact PSUs that only feature one PCIe connector, and avoid wasting Molex cables on the second 6-pin.

What's more interesting about the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini is its cooler, which appears to use a combination of a thick metal plate that draws heat from VRM and memory on the obverse side; and a round aluminum fin-stack, which could be cooled by a single ~80 mm fan. ASUS did not release pricing or availability information, and is still gauging community interest in such a product.

What's better than an OCZ Vector SSD? Two of them in RAID 0, on a PCIe add-on card. The SSD may use two SSD subunits in RAID, yet it's backed by OCZ's VCA 2.0 (virtualized controller architecture), which lends it TRIM support, even in high-performance RAID 0 modes. At CeBIT, the company ran live benchmarks of the drive. These include tests that are generally lenient on the drives (sequential tests), yet the results are impressive.

To begin with, the Vector PCIe 960 GB belts out up to 929.96 MB/s sequential read speeds, 883.94 MB/s sequential writes; and a comfortable 4K 64-thread read performance of 544.71 MB/s, 486.19 MB/s writes. It scrapes the 1000 MB/s mark in ATTO. In synthetic tests that replicate real-world scenarios, such as ISO file copy, program access, and game resource access, the drive managed to stay above 396 MB/s. The drive has advertised read/write speeds of 1000 MB/s, and random access performance as high as 140,000 IOPS.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the general availability of the next release of its popular VXL Cache and Virtualization Software. VXL 1.3 has evolved its synchronous data mirroring capabilities and automatic server failover mechanisms to enable 'SAN-less,' highly available, fault tolerant environments based entirely on virtualized host flash. The ability to provide uninterrupted service for business-critical applications even during severe system failures is a requirement for IT managers of any sized data center, and ideally suited for virtualized database deployments, email servers, or cloud computing applications.

Another innovation in this new version of VXL allows IT managers to pre-load the cache with critical data at pre-determined schedules to ensure that important data is available on SSD flash at the precise time it is required by the application.