Lenovo today announced that it is offering Elemental Accelerator software with select NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics solutions on ThinkStation S20 and D20 professional workstations. Elemental Accelerator works with NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics to add GPU-accelerated power and performance to the Adobe Creative Suite 4 workflow.

Lenovo workstations equipped with NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics and Elemental Accelerator let Adobe Creative Suite 4 users harness the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform high-speed, high-quality video encoding. This combination delivers dramatic time savings over conventional CPU-only encoding solutions. By executing demanding processing tasks on the GPU, Elemental Accelerator speeds up video transcoding and frees CPU resources to perform other tasks, helping to result in a faster, more efficient video editing and production environment.

NVIDIA BIOS Editor (aka NiBiTor) got its update for this month. The popular BIOS manipulation utility has been updated to version 5.3. As with every new release, version 5.3 brings along an expanded supported products list, a number of critical and trivial bug fixes, and an improved ability to work with unsupported hardware in a limited way. Newly supported products include:

• GeForce GTX 295 (Single PCB)
• GeForce GTX 260M
• Quadro FX 3700M

DOWNLOAD: NiBiTor v5.3

Professional videographers face continuous pressure to deliver high quality work under tight deadlines. To ease that burden and enable greater levels of creativity, NVIDIA today announced the availability of GPU-accelerated plug-in solutions for Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) users, optimized to run on a wide range of NVIDIA Quadro graphics solutions.

NVIDIA is offering exclusive discounts of up to 50 percent on plug-ins from Elemental Technologies, Boris FX, Red Giant Software and proDAD when purchased at NVIDIA.com.

Among the plug-ins being offered is the NVIDIA CUDA architecture-based Elemental Accelerator 2.0 for Windows from Elemental Technologies (MSRP $499 discounted to $249). By leveraging the CUDA parallel computing architecture, this new plug-in offloads H.264 video encoding to the Quadro GPU, enabling Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 users to experience a performance increase of up to 11X when compared to CPU-only video encoders. Now available on a range of Quadro GPUs, Elemental Accelerator 2.0 supports the creation of Blu-ray DVDs and web content using Flash. In addition, NVIDIA and Elemental Technologies are bringing accelerated H.264 video encoding capabilities to Mac Pro users for the first time with the new Elemental Accelerator 1.2 for Mac OS X running on the Quadro FX 4800 for Mac.

Soon after becoming the first to be out with a portable desktop alternative featuring the Intel Core i7 processor, SmoothCreations dished out another of its kind, this time a portable workstation named Bulldozer. The company is looking to target two classes of consumers with this product: gamers, and graphics professionals, who will take advantage of its hardware for high-definition gaming or CAM/CAE/CAD, medical imaging, forensics, government or military use. The applications are broad thanks to the hardware, which just might come at the expense of a little portability.

The Bulldozer features a 17-inch screen with a native resolution of 1900x1200 pixels. Under its hood is a Core i7 (models 940 or 965 XE) or Xeon X5580 processor. Up to 16 GB of memory can be opted for, along with up to 1.5 TB of storage thanks to three SATA HDD bays. A Blu-Ray combo drive provides removable storage. Connectivity options include WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, and Bluetooth 2.0. Graphics is care of NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 with 1 GB of memory. Depending on the application, 64-bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, or RedHat Linux could be opted for. Its pricing is not known.

Intel's Core i7 helped strengthen the company's foothold over the desktop CPU market beyond what it already had with the Core 2 series. The level of performance the Core i7 has on offer, comes at an expense of high thermal characteristics, with the rated TDP of 130W to begin with. Eurocom feels it could design a laptop, a portable workstation rather, that features Core i7 series processors. It could be one of the first to do so, with the Phantom i7 D900F.

Holding Core i7 processors in their existing series: models 920, 940, 965 XE, the Phantom i7 holds a 17-inch display with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 or 1680 x 1050. It features up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and up to 1.5TB of storage using three 500GB hard drives. A Blu-ray or DVD writer drive and a 7-in-1 memory card reader handle removable storage. Graphics will be handled by 1GB variants of GeForce 9800M GTX, Quadro FX 3700 or a soon-to-be-released "G280" graphics accelerator. Connectivity is care of Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, an ExpressCard slot, and optionally Bluetooth. A built-in TV-tuner and a 12-cell battery make for the rest of the package. The Phantom i7 is slated for May.

Demand for better graphics performance and programmability within the professional notebook market continues to increase as animators, designers and engineers work with larger 3D models, datasets and images. NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, continues to address the demand with the introduction of a new series of NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile GPUs, featuring an NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Processor. Leading workstation manufacturers such as Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and Lenovo are now offering the new series of Quadro FX mobile GPUs across a wide range of professional notebook workstations.

NVIDIA, the world leader in visual computing technologies, once again takes the lead in improving productivity for computer-aided design (CAD) and digital content creators with the announcement of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700, a high-end graphics board capable of delivering a performance increase of up to 2X as compared to the previous generation of product.