Swiss overclocker Christian Ney set a new memory OC record, clocking in at 1950.3 MHz (actual), 3900.6 MHz DDR. The record was made possible (apart from great skills), by G.Skill F3-2666C11-4GTXD 4GB DDR3-2666 MHz memory, AMD A8-3870K APU, Gigabyte A75-UD4H motherboard, and a liquid nitrogen pot made by K|ngp|n Cooling. A top performing memory module was picked from nearly a dozen modules. The 1950.3 MHz DRAM clock was supported by timings of 14-14-14-36. DRAM voltage is kept under the wraps. The CPUID and HWBOT validations can be found here, and here.

A year after the Thailand flooding disaster partially derailed production, the global hard disk drive (HDD) industry has fully recovered, with shipments to the computer market expected to hit a record level this year, driven by the enterprise market as well as the arrival of the Windows 8 operating system.

HDD shipments in 2012 for the overall computer market, including PCs, are forecast to reach 524.0 million units, up 4.3 percent from 502.5 million units last year, according to an IHS iSuppli Storage Space Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.

Hauppauge Digital, Inc., the world's leading developer and manufacturer of TV tuners and HD video recorders, has launched their latest high definition video game recorder, HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition at the Gamescom, Cologne, Germany. HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition will have a list price of £159.99 and features high definition HDMI and Component video recording up to 1080p/30, plus HDMI 'no delay pass-through' so gamers can record their game play while playing on a TV monitor.

The HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition is a complete kit for gamers who want to record their Sony PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game-play in high definition. HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition has near perfect video quality and records HD video from either HDMI or Component video at up to 1080p/30. Gamers can share their best video game-play with friends on YouTube by using the included Showbiz application to record and then upload videos to YouTube. HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition allows any user to produce their own video movies from their game-play. All cables necessary to record game-play, including HDMI in and out cables plus a special PS3 Component video cable are included.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $12.5 billion and net income of $1.6 billion, or $6.58 per share for fiscal year 2012, compared to fiscal 2011 revenue of $9.5 billion and net income of $726 million, or $3.09 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, fiscal 2012 net income was $2.1 billion or $8.61 per share, compared to fiscal 2011 net income of $770 million or $3.28 per share. Both the GAAP and non-GAAP fiscal 2012 results include results from the company's newly acquired HGST subsidiary from the acquisition date of March 8 through the end of fiscal 2012.

For its fourth fiscal quarter ended June 29, 2012, the company reported revenue of $4.8 billion, hard-drive shipments of 71.0 million and net income of $745 million, or $2.87 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $872 million, or $3.35 per share.2 In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $2.4 billion, net income of $158 million, or $0.67 per share, and shipped 53.8 million hard drives. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $193 million, or $0.81 per share.

During the week of Computex 2012, five overclocking records have been achieved with G.SKILL high performance DDR3 memory by several renowned extreme overclockers.Read on for details of the five records.

G.SKILL International Co. Ltd., the world's leading manufacturer of extreme performance memory and superior solid-state storage, has teamed up with ASUS, MSI, EVGA and GIGABYTE and will be hosting an industry-first, "G.SKILL World-Class Overclocking Invitational" with G.SKILL's extreme performance DDR3 memory at the Computex 2012.

G.SKILL invited up to 8 professional overclockers from across the world, including legendary overclockers from the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia and Japan. Collaborating with 4 industry leading motherboard brands, G.SKILL aims to smash all overclocking world records by using ultra high performance motherboards, VGA and the fastest DDR3 memory, the "TridentX".

ASUS continues its industry lead in performance, superior design, quality and ease of use with its latest Intel Z77 chipset based motherboards. ASUS is excited to announce our Z77 line of motherboards has reached new performance heights. These include reaching the 7 GHz clock speed threshold on the ASUS P8Z77-V DELUXE motherboard, as well as five new world records on the ROG Maximus V GENE, with more to come. These new records all showcase the benefits of ASUS' superior engineering and design, use of the finest materials and components, and industry leading user-friendly DIY features.

Achieving 7 GHz and beyond on the P877V-DELUXE

ASUS' internal overclocking group and performance team are excited to reach a 7 GHz CPU clock frequency on the P8Z77-V DELUXE, using a 3rd generation Intel Core i7-3770K processor with 16 GB of DDR3 clocked at 2800 MHz. Employing LN2 cooling, they were able to push the new processor to the limit and beyond, demonstrating the performance tuning abilities of ASUS Z77-based motherboards. The milestone also establishes that channel boards from ASUS are capable of very impressive overclocking feats thanks to their class leading Digi+ VRM power and control design. In addition our close cooperation with the enthusiast community has resulted in the P8Z77-V DELUXE easily exceeding 3GHz memory frequencies with all four DIMMS populated thanks to optimized trace layouts and superior UEFI tuning options.

Team Katana Japan set a new 3DMark 11 Extreme Preset single-GPU world record using their Radeon HD 7970 graphics card clocked at staggering clock speeds 1747 MHz (core) and 1971 MHz or 7.884 GHz effective (memory). These clock speeds were sustained using volt-modding (to maintain the right voltage stable), and liquid nitrogen cooling. The volt-mod was designed to override the OCP (over-current protection), and over-heat protection of the graphics card's VRM. The target core voltage was 1.895V.

The setup went on to bag a 3DMark 11 Extreme Preset single-GPU world record, where it scored X3757.69 points, bagging 1st Rank in HWBOT's "GLOBAL 1X GPU RANK" and "Radeon HD 7970 rank". Find the validation here. The GPU remained in the range of -145.0 °C (idle) -137.0 °C (load). The rest of the setup included a Core i7-2600K clocked at ~5.00 GHz, ASUS Maximus IV Extreme (P67), and a 1200W PSU.

Hauppauge Digital, Inc. (NASDAQ: HAUP), the world's leading developer TV tuner products, has announced that Broadway, Hauppauge's live TV streamer for the iPad and iPhone, now has TV recording support. With this new feature, Broadway can record TV programs locally and then stream it to an iPad or iPhone at a later time. "Broadway" is a stand alone "box" which allows live TV to be watched on an Apple device in the home through a WiFi connection, or anywhere in the world via an Internet connection.

Broadway has-2 built in DVB-T Tuners supporting Freeview allowing users to watch one channel and simultaneously record another. Broadway also connects to cable or satellite set top boxes. Once connected to a TV source, Broadway can tune into a TV program and then either stream the live TV program to an iPad or iPhone, or, with the new feature, record the TV program to a locally attached storage device and then stream the recording at a later time.

Memory overclocking feats over 3000 MHz, aren't new. Last month, we've seen G.Skill and and GIGABYTE achieve a whopping 3736 MHz on the dual-channel AMD "Llano" platform. The duo has now cracked the 3000 MHz mark with four modules, achieving 3077 MHz. The record (>3000 MHz with four modules) was set by Coolaler, using an Intel Core i7-3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor, and GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H motherboard. The memory of course was four 4 GB G.Skill DDR3-2600 MHz modules. The entire setup was air-cooled.A video of the feat follows.

Seagate has become the first hard drive maker to achieve the milestone storage density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch, producing a demonstration of the technology that promises to double the storage capacity of today's hard drives upon its introduction later this decade and give rise to 3.5-inch hard drives with an extraordinary capacity of up to 60 terabytes over the 10 years that follow. The bits within a square inch of disk space, at the new milestone, far outnumber stars in the Milky Way, which astronomers put between 200 billion and 400 billion.

On 27th February 2012, the highest DDR3 memory frequency record was smashed again by the well-known Swiss overclocker, Christian Ney. Using G.SKILL extreme RipjawsZ memory kit, Christian Ney has achieved the astonishing score of DDR3 3736MHz with 4GB high capacity memory stick. "It was a lot of fun while tweaking G.SKILL memory. You can feel the unlimited potential and always want to go higher and higher" said by Christian Ney.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that its SGI ICE 8400 high performance compute (HPC) system with AMD Opteron 6200 processors achieved the top performance number for 64-, 32-, 16-, 8-, and 4-socket configurations for the SPECMPIL2007 benchmark. The SPECMPIL benchmark is SPEC's "benchmark suite for evaluating MPI-parallel, floating point, compute intensive performance across a wide range of cluster and SMP hardware," according to the SPEC website.

The SGI ICE 8400 platform with AMD processors is a completely open platform optimized for HPC workloads and runs an off-the-shelf Linux operating system for application compatibility. Although the ICE platform is able to comfortably support multi-petaflop sized installations, design considerations allow cost effective solutions down to a half rack. Single- or dual-plane integrated InfiniBand can be cabled into four different topologies, including hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all to all, and fat-tree, allowing flexible network customization for a variety of workloads.

The protests to the widely condemned SOPA & PIPA "antipiracy" censorship bills have been a resounding success. They have gone viral with many, many websites blacking out and putting up protest pages, with big players taking part such as Wikipedia, Google, EFF, Reddit, Craigslist, Techdirt (greyed out) and many more taking part. Unsurprisingly, the bills' backers have not shown any sign of backing down (yet) but were prompted to make statements "wondering what all the fuss is about" to play down the damage done to their play for power, since they have recently made changes to them, such as removing the DNS blocking provisions - for now. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) senior vice president of communications Jonathan Lamy called the protests 'stunts': "It's a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users and arm them with misinformation. It's time for the stunts to end and those who claim to care about rogue website theft to back up their rhetoric and work with us on meaningful solutions." This is the same RIAA that sued their own customers with extortionate "settlement" letters remember.

That Dodgy Intel Ivy Bridge DX11 'demo' at CES 2012 (UPDATED)

Word has been flying round the internet about Intel's dodgy Ivy Bridge DX11 'demo'. Intel's Mooly Eden, VP, PC Client Group was attempting to demonstrate a racing game on a prototype laptop - 'ultrabook' - fitted with an upcoming 22 nm Ivy Bridge processor with a racing wheel attached and allegedly rendering DX11 graphics. However, as is very apparent at the start, it's actually a video, because the control panel for the free VLC video player pops up for a few seconds. Eden then 'drives' a car and after a few seconds puts up one hand and then the other, because as he says "they are driving it from backstage". However, there was no one driving the game "backstage", as it was just a video and Eden doesn't say anything about this at any point in the presentation.

This gives conspiracy theorists lots of ammunition, as perhaps the game was actually played on a high powered desktop PC with NVIDIA or AMD discrete graphics cards? What game was it? Eden doesn't say. "IB can't really do these graphics!" they cry and so on. Sure, man 'didn't' go to the moon, either... However, we believe that while yes, there was a bit of deception going on, it was nothing more than a white(ish) lie. Why? Because Ivy Bridge comes out in April and people aren't going to forget this demo. They will immediately put IBs DX11 graphics to the test with similar games and if it doesn't deliver, Intel will have a lot of egg on its face. Here's what Intel had to say about this demo in an official statement:

Voltage Pictures, producers of movie Hurt Locker attempted to use a reverse class action tactic to extort hundreds of millions in 'settlement' claims aka extortion demands over alleged 'losses' due to 'piracy' - something that has never and can never, be quantified and proved. However, their attempt has failed miserably - plus read on for how Voltage Pictures did a little content 'theft' of their very own to make the movie.

The idea was to use the services of the US Copyright Group (USCG) to extract personal subscriber information from ISP's via subpoenas and then send demand letters averaging US $2,000 to hapless victims, with the hope of racking in a grand total of around US $94 million - way more than the film ever made, about US $12.6 million.

The USCG quickly unloaded lawsuit claims against 47K members of the unwitting American public, even as Voltage Picture spewed a stream of vitriol suggesting that the children and families of file sharers would hopefully "end up in jail".

explained DailyTech, putting it very well. Yes, let's get the kiddies in the name of corporate copyright and profit...

Kingston Technology Europe Ltd, an affiliate of Kingston Technology Company Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced that the Romanian overclocking team, Lab501 achieved three new world records with the world's fastest dual channel memory kit, the Kingston HyperX KHX2544C9D3T1FK2/2GX, during a live overclocking session.

The three new records for RAM modules were set on the 3rd of December 2011, by Matei "Matose" Mihatoiu, Tudor "Monstru" Badica and Razvan "Micutzu" Fatu, the three Romanian overclocking champions from the world renowned Lab501 team. The records were achieved in an overclocking event organized in the eMAG showroom in Bucharest, Romania, in front of approximately 100 overclocking enthusiasts and two local TV crews.

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.

In mid-September, earlier this year, a team of overclockers sponsored by AMD set a new Guinness Record for clock speed by a silicon processor, setting an AMD FX-8150 processor to run at a staggering 8429.38 MHz. If anything, the coveted Guinness Record feat helped cement the general notion that AMD FX processors are good at overclocking. Sadly, AMD's record didn't last long, with renowned overclocker Andre Yang breaking it with his 8461.51 MHz feat. At this point we don't know if Andre had Guinness covering his feat to he could officially break AMD's record. AMD wouldn't mind it at all, because the new record was set using an AMD FX-8150, too. Andre did it single-handed, or at least he is the only person in the "Submitted by" field on the CPU-Z Validation page.

According to the validation page, 8461.51 MHz was achieved using a base clock speed of 272.95 MHz, with 31.0X multiplier, and a brutal core voltage of 1.992V (almost 2 volts!). As with AMD's record feat, an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard was used. A single 2 GB Corsair-made memory module was used doing 909.8 MHz (1818.16 MHz DDR) with timings of 9-9-9-24T. Like with AMD's feat, only two out of the FX-8150's eight cores were enabled. More details are awaited.

AMD today announced revenue for the third quarter of 2011 of $1.69 billion, net income of $97 million, or $0.13 per share, and operating income of $138 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $110 million, or $0.15 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $146 million.

"Strong adoption of AMD APUs drove a 35 percent sequential revenue increase in our mobile business," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "Despite supply constraints, we saw double digit revenue and unit shipment growth in emerging markets like China and India as well as overall notebook share gains in retail at mainstream price points. Through disciplined execution and continued innovation we will look to accelerate our growth and refine our focus on lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud."

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 fourth quarter ended September 24, 2011. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $28.27 billion and quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.3 percent compared to 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 63 percent of the quarter's revenue.

The Company sold 17.07 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 11.12 million iPads during the quarter, a 166 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.89 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 6.62 million iPods, a 27 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Intel Corporation today reported third-quarter results, setting new records for microprocessor units shipped, EPS, earnings and revenue, which was up 28 percent year-over-year.

"Intel delivered record-setting results again in Q3, surpassing $14 billion in revenue for the first time, driven largely by double-digit unit growth in notebook PCs," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. "We also saw continued strength in the data center fueled by the ongoing growth of mobile and cloud computing."

ColorFire released its new Xstorm HD 6850 graphics card. ColorFire is a sister-brand of Colorful, which focuses on AMD Radeon-based graphics cards, as Colorful specializes on NVIDIA GeForce ones. Shortly after its introduction, the ColorFire team led by overclocker Carl from China was able to break a 3DMark Vantage record for the Radeon HD 6850. The overclocker achieved P27751 points, some 3810 points ahead of the previous record-holder. The card sustained overclocked speeds of 1500 MHz core and 1275 MHz (5100 MHz GDDR5 effective) memory, and backed by an Intel Core i7-980X clocked at 5.7 GHz, with the entire setup being cooled by liquid nitrogen. The HWBOT validation can be found here.

The Xstorm HD 6850 from ColorFire features the same mid-range exorbitance characteristic of Colorful. It features a PCB with a strong VRM, making use of high-quality components; and a large cooler. It features 1 GB of memory, a 4+1 phase VRM, dual-BIOS, OCP unlock switches, and consolidated voltage-measure points. The VRM uses high-grade chokes and POSCAP capacitors. The cooler uses a large (quiet) fan to cool a big heatsink to which heat is conveyed by three heat pipes.More pictures of the setup and card follow.

Overclockers Elmor and kinc last gathered to set a singl-card 3DMark Vantage world record, the duo and SF3D got together in Sweden to set another record, of the highest multi-GPU 3DMark Vantage score with a single processor. Vantage multi-GPU records are lead by multi-processor (dual LGA1366) setups. The team achieved a Vantage score of P75892 points. For this feat, the team used a single Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition processor 6213 MHz (177.5 MHz x 35.0) with all cores and threads enabled, backed by 4 GB of dual-channel memory by ADATA clocked at 887.5 MHz (actual), running on ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard with ROG Xpander to enable 4-way SLI capability.

Leading the graphics department were four ASUS GTX 580 DirectCu graphics cards clocked at 1105/1301/2210 MHz (core/shader/memory). The setup was powered by two Antec HCP 1200W PSUs. Liquid nitrogen cooling was the weapon of choice, the CPU was cooled by SF3D OC Inflection Point LN2 evaporator, and four Kingpin Tek-9 6 Slim evaporators for the graphics cards.

Overclocker Roger "splmann" Tanner from OCaholic.ch community, with help from Matthias "Mat" Zronek from Overclockers.at, set a new MAXXMEM² memory bandwidth world-record. The challenger broke a record previously set by SF3D. The new record stands at 30,514 MB/s memory-copy; 30,114 MB/s memory-read; and 27,497 MB/s memory write; with a latency of 32.5 ns, leading to a cumulative HWbot.org score of 2711.5 MAXXMEM² marks.

The record was achieved using an Intel Core i7-2600K processor, Corsair XMS3 Dominator GTX2 4 GB kit, and ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard. The CPU was clocked at 5489 MHz (107.6 MHz x 51), memory at 1148 MHz (2296 MHz DDR), with latencies of 7-7-6-21, and 1T command-rate.