ZOTAC also displayed an upcoming socket LGA1155 motherboard based on Intel Z77 chipset, in the mini-ITX form-factor, which is geared for overclocking, that's right, overclocking. ZOTAC has, in the past, designed a similar motherboard based on the Z68 chipset. This mini-ITX board draws power from 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS connectors, it supports upcoming "Ivy Bridge" Unlocked LGA1155 Core processors out of the box.

The LGA1155 socket (LOTES Black, powder-coated to prevent shrinking when subjected to subzero cooling), is powered by an 8-phase VRM circuitry, complete with a feature-rich controller, Pulse-made inductors, and driverMOSFETs (DrMOS), and High-C capacitors. The DrMOS chips are cooled by a high-density heatsink that shares some of its heat with the heatsink over the Z77 PCH, over a heat pipe.

Here is the first picture of Sapphire's socket LGA1155 motherboard in the works, based on Intel Z77 "Panther Point" chipset. Carrying the model number PT-CI7Z77, the board will probably carry the company's "Pure Black" branding. Its chipset and VRM heatsink designs have not been finalized, yet. To begin with, the LGA1155 socket, which supports upcoming "Ivy Bridge" processors out of the box, is powered by a 10-phase VRM. This VRM uses ferrite-core chokes, Driver-MOSFETs, and a secondary NEC-TOKIN multi-phase capacitor to condition power. Three other phases handle memory and miscellaneous power domains on the board.

The processor is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory. It is also wired to two PCI Express 3.0 long slots, which are auto-configured as x16/NC or x8/x8, depending on the second slot being populated. Other slots include a PCI Express 2.0 x1, and a PCI Express 2.0 long slot (gray), which is electrically PCIe 2.0 x4, and wired to the Z77 PCH. There are two legacy PCI slots, driven by an ASMedia-made bridge chip.

With the Ultrabook form-factor gaining prominence, there's an urgent need for notebook components to shape up, so is the case with storage devices. A little earlier this month, Crucial announced its latest M4 series SSD in the 2.5" SATA form-factor, which is just 7 mm-slim, as opposed to the ~9.3 mm thickness that's standard. It looks like more SSD makers are hopping into this trend, including Memoright, which launched its FTM Plus Slim series. For SSDs, slimmer 7 mm enclosures don't affect components inside, as SSDs are essentially a printed-circuit board with controllers, DRAM and NAND flash chips.

The FTM Plus Slim series have otherwise the same specifications as the regular (9.3 mm-thick) FTM Plus series. These drives are driven by SandForce SF-2281 controllers, with sequential transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s reads, 500 MB/s writes, and 55,000/50,000 read/write 4K IOPS. They take advantage of SATA 6 Gb/s interface to achieve those speeds. Like its thicker siblings, the FTM Plus Slim will be available in 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities.

Plextor, leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance digital media and storage equipment, announces the release of its latest Solid State Drive, M3 Pro, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas today.

The new M3 Pro Series offers improvements to the current M3S, including a significant boost in sequential and random read/write speeds. Other changes include high-grade 24 nm Toggle Flash, firmware updates, and a new 7 mm height form factor to fit ultra-slim notebooks.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the Accelerator Series solid-state cache drives.

The Accelerator Series is designed for desktop PC users who want to give their Microsoft Windows based PC a dramatic performance boost with minimal cost and hassle. Corsair's new line of SSD cache drives includes premium caching software from NVELO, for improved boot times and lightning-quick file access. After connecting an Accelerator Series SSD cache drive to their computer's SATA port and installing the caching software provided with the drive, users will see an immediate speed boost. No drive mapping, no reinstallation of the operating system or applications, and no complex file management is needed - the Accelerator Series SSD cache drive works in tandem with the customer's existing hard drive to provide optimized performance. Customers may see an improvement in file read/write speeds of up to 5x their current hard drive performance after installing a Corsair Accelerator Series SSD cache drive.

LaCie announced its latest peripherals featuring Thunderbolt technology today at the 2012 International CES. The new 2big Thunderbolt Series delivers speed, flexibility and capacity, while the eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series allows users to connect external eSATA drives to their new Macs. This announcement follows the unprecedented success of LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series and further asserts the company's commitment to deliver high-quality products featuring Thunderbolt technology.

"LaCie is proud to offer the widest range of storage solutions featuring Thunderbolt technology," said Erwan Girard, Professional Business Unit Manager, LaCie. "These products are some of the fastest and most flexible storage solutions on the market. They will dramatically accelerate the workflow of even the most demanding digital users."

HighPoint Technologies, Inc., an industry leading HBA and storage solutions manufacturer, has announced a new milestone in 6Gb/s SSD storage performance. Recent driver and firmware updates for the best-selling RocketRAID 2700 series of 6Gb/s SAS HBA's dramatically improve the performance of RAID and non-RAID SSD configurations.

As the cost-per-gigabyte ratio of Nand Flash Chips continues to improve, SSD's have become the storage device of choice for many PC enthusiasts, gamers and media professionals. Multi-SSD configurations, once regulated to ultra-high-end workstations and enterprise servers, are now realistic propositions for the high-performance personal computing market. HighPoint SAS 6Gb/s HBA's are the ideal storage companion for such configurations. The RocketRAID 2700 series has been performance tuned to support today's fastest 6Gb/s SSD's, boosting transfer rates by as much as 50%.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the industry consortium dedicated to sustaining the quality, integrity and dissemination of Serial ATA (SATA) technology, today announced the completion of SATA DevSleep, a new feature that reduces power consumption of devices. SATA DevSleep enables the development of ultra-portable computing devices based on SATA storage solutions that consume significantly less power than current offerings, resulting in longer battery life and enhanced ease of use.

DevSleep defines the lowest power state for SATA technology, allowing the PHY and other circuitry to be completely powered off, unlike existing partial/slumber states, which require a partially powered PHY. The feature allows devices to be always on and always connected without unnecessarily reducing battery life. For example, with DevSleep an ultra-thin laptop that would have previously needed to be put into standby to conserve battery life can now stay on and be immediately available for use.

Apart from the powerful little Mr. Clone 3.0 drive-cloning and docking device, Japanese company AREA also launched the SATA 6 Gb/s TwinTurbo Hybrid addon-card. 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s cards aren't new, but they either come in 2-port internal SATA, or 2-port eSATA forms, making you have to choose between the two types. This addon-card from AREA features two internal SATA 6 Gb/s ports, two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports, and uses a common 2-port SATA 6 Gb/s controller.

The ingenuity here is a simple jumper-based way of configuring those two SATA channels to individually work as internal SATA or eSATA. So now you can set the card to have two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports, two internal SATA ports, or one internal SATA and an eSATA, whichever way you'd like, by simply toggling two sets of four jumpers switching which way the data traces of each SATA channel end up. The card uses an ASMedia ASM1061 2-port PCIe SATA 6 Gb/s controller, which supports IDE, AHCI, and simple RAID modes. It connects to the host over PCI-Express 2.0 x1. Slated for May 2012, the AREA SATA TwinTurbo Hybrid will be priced at 2,980 JPY, or $38.

Japanese company AREA announced this nifty new gadget that can help you set up a quick external storage solution, or clone SATA drives in a jiffy. Called the AREA Mr. Clone 3.0, the device is a small box measuring 72 x 48 x 10 mm, with two sets of standard SATA interfaces (data + power) attached on its two longer sides, to which SATA drives (hard drives and SSDs in 3.5", 2.5", and 1.8" form-factors) can be simply plugged in. The device takes in an AC power input (includes a DC power supply to power connected drives and itself), it can connect to a host system using USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface.

Even without a host PC connected to it, the device can be used to clone hard drives. It will come handy when cloning drives for medium-large deployments, or moving from a slower HDD to a faster SSD. The device has its own control panel to manage and track progress of the cloning process. The SATA interfaces support SATA 6 Gb/s specification. Apart from a self-sufficient drive cloning tool, it can be used as a drive dock, connecting SATA drives (up to 6 Gb/s speed) to the host PC over fast USB 3.0 interface. Poised to release in May 2012, the AREA Mr. Clone 3.0 will be priced at 4,280 JPY, or US $55.

Thermal Solutions specialist GELID Solutions reveals its first tower case of its GAMER product line. This completely black painted 0.7mm steel ATX / Micro-ATX tower case is designed for gamers and includes a long list of features.

As thermal specialist GELID Solutions certainly offers solid cooling options for this case and provides locations for up to 8 fans. Two silent 120mm fans (rear and front) come preinstalled with the case. The case even enables to mount a 80mm or 120mm fan with a max. 15mm thickness onto the side panel. The DarkForce supports a 120mm or 240mm radiator at the bottom of the case and offers 8+1 slots for extra connection of peripheral devices.

RAIDON is releasing the new generation of SAS storage solutions, GR2880 and GR4880. These models can to be easily deployed while offering a stable performance and scheduled backup to the SMB. GR2880 and GR4880 offer remarkable SAS storage solutions, embed dual SAS host interface to the fastest data throughput for an extraordinary performance, also provides up to RAID 6 the highest RAID level protection to data from work station and data server for a secured operating environment.

Both models also provide snapshot function which only offered from high standard storage devices. This function will backup stored data in records from designation time, to prevent data encounters inevitable problems through capability of restoring primitive correct data from files of saved records.

Galaxy, better known for its NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards in the western world, sells more than that in its home country China, where it unveiled its Laser GT series consumer SSDs. Built in the common 2.5-inch SATA form-factor these drives use the SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and are driven by SandForce SF-2281 SSD controllers. Pictured below is its 120 GB model. The drive offers maximum sequential transfer speeds of 550 MB/s (read), and 500 MB/s (write), with 4K random performance of 30,000 IOPS reads, and 41,000 IOPS writes. It makes use of MLC NAND flash with 5,000 rewrite cycle life. The 120 GB Laser GT variant is priced at 1,399 RMB, that's about US $221.

The market for socket LGA775 is still far from dead as there are large inventories of cheap Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron chips left in the market, as well as buyers upgrading their DDR2 systems to those with DDR3, to benefit from the DDR3 fire sale. Gigabyte introduced a new revision of its GA-EG41MFT-US2H, revision 1.4, with an updated gigabit Ethernet chip. The micro-ATX motherboard uses 3+1 phase VRM to power the processor, a wide range of Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors are supported. The processor is wired to Intel's G41 northbridge. Surprisingly, its graphics controller gives out an HDMI connection apart from DVI and D-Sub. It is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 8 GB of memory.

Expansion slots include two PCI, one each of PCI-Express 1.1 x16 and PCIe x1. The ICH7 southbridge drives four SATA 3 Gb/s ports, and an IDE connector. The gigabit ethernet controller has been updated to RTL8111E, from the 8111D found on the older revision. Other features include 8-channel HD audio, Firewire, FDC, COM, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. Expect a sub-$100 pricing for this board.

Chinese data storage solutions provider Orico unveiled its new P5K line of portable hard drives. These drives feature rugged brushed-aluminum bodies. The drives are available in variants that feature both eSATA 3 Gb/s and USB 3.0, and those which feature just USB 3.0. Some of these variants even pack internal SSDs instead of HDDs, with a single "direct" PCB that holds both the host interface logic and the SSD. Unfortunately, these designs are still in the realm of CGI, and the manufacturer did not publish detailed specifications.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Got a few blank 5.25" drive bays that will otherwise never hold anything? Chinese company Orico, which specialises in small and medium business data storage solutions, has a few new enclosures for you. The company unveiled its latest 620xSS family of enclosures that fit into multiple (two or three) 5.25-inch drive bays, and provide 3.5-inch hot-swap ready drive bays. The hot-swap bays are key-locked to protect against accidental or unauthorised drive swaps.

Orico introduced an enclosure that converts two 5.25" bays to three hot-swap 3.5" ones, an enclosure that converts three 5.25" bays to four hot-swap 3.5" bays (vertical stacking), and an enclosure that converts three 5.25" bays to five hot-swap 3.5" bays (horizontal stacking). These enclosures are 'dumb', meaning they lack any local storage controller logic, or even port-multiplication logic. They rely entirely on the host for each drive's SATA connectivity. They just share the power connectors between drives. The enclosures, however, are ventilated by exhaust fans. Orico did not give out pricing or availability information.

Pioneer announced a new internal SATA Blu-ray disc burner drive in Japan, that's capable of burning Blu-ray XL (BDXL) discs at speeds of 6X. Carrying the model number BDR-207JBK, the drive can burn double-layer BD-R discs at 12X, and quad-layer BDXL discs at 6X. The drive features a few of Pioneer's proprietary technologies, PureRead2 and Peak Power Reducer. Slated for market availability in January, the Pioneer BDR-207JBK internal SATA Blu-ray disc burner is priced at 18,000 JPY (about US $231).

ADATA introduced a new value consumer SSD in its 300 Series, the S396 30 GB. Built in the conventional 2.5-inch form-factor, the drive makes use of the SATA 3 Gb/s interface. The drive offers sequential read speeds of up to 280 MB/s, up to 250 MB/s sequential write speeds, and up to 44,000 IOPS 4K random write performance. If those speeds hold up, the ADATA S396 30 GB should make for a decent entry-level SSD. Unfortunately, we don't have a price at hand.

Sapphire is working on two new entry-level motherboards for AMD FM1 and Intel LGA1155 platforms. The FM1 board, called the Pure White A55, is a budget micro-ATX board based on the AMD A55 FCH; while the LGA1155 board is the Pure Platinum H61P, an ATX board based on the Intel H61 chipset. The Pure White A55 uses a simple 5+1 phase VRM to power the AMD A-Series APU or Athlon II FM1 CPU. The FM1 socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory. The "Memory Free" feature stabilizes memory clock speeds, voltages, and timings if wrong settings make the system fail POST, at the push of a button.

Expansion slots of the Pure White A55 include one PCI-Express 2.0 x16, two PCIe 2.0 x1, and a legacy PCI. All six SATA 3 Gb/s ports of the A55 FCH are assigned as internal ports. Display outputs include HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub. Other connectivity features include 6-channel HD audio, gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. The board uses redundant BIOS on separate ROM chips, that protect it against bad BIOS updates. The Pure Platinum H61P uses a 6 phase VRM to power the LGA1155 processor. The socket is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory.

Hitachi Global Storage System has now taken the veil off not one but two 4 TB storage solutions, the Deskstar 5K4000 3.5-inch hard drive which we mentioned on Friday, and a 4 TB Touro Desk external drive. The 4 TB Deskstar HDD features a 3.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, 32 MB of buffer, it utilizes the CoolSpin technology (~ 5900 RPM) and is currently shipping in limited quantities in both OEM and retail versions. The retail package, which includes the drive, mounting screws, and install instructions, costs $399.99.

The 4 TB Touro Desk is equipped with one Deskstar 5K4000, has a black, textured body, a USB 3.0 interface, and offers 3 GB of cloud storage for free from HitachiBackup.com. This drive will ship in January and will cost $419.99.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of NAND Flash storage solutions, today announces their fastest 2.5" SSD to date, the SATA3 TeraNova. Targeted at the Pro/Enthusiast seeking extreme performance, the TeraNova is the fastest 2.5" SSD that SuperTalent has released to date. Featuring the SATA3 Interface and SandForce 2200 processor with optimized firmware, the SuperTalent TeraNova was built for speed.

By optimizing the transfer rate at various queue depths, the TeraNova delivers excellent performance in a variety of different conditions. Sure the TeraNova boots quickly and posts outstanding benchmark scores (over 500 MB/s for both read and write), but the TeraNova also excels in general responsiveness. Industry standard applications like Photoshop, Premier, Maya and 3DS Max, load, render and perform much faster when compared to countless other SSDs available on the market. The TeraNova also includes new features that enhance reliability as well. In the event of a sudden power loss, the TeraNova reacts, protecting valuable data from corruption before it powers off.

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.

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.

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.