Published on Monday, May 31, 2010 by admin Our inbox quickly lit up this morning when we received notice about this NGOHQ article, discussing how NVIDIA had removed the heterogeneous GPU restriction on PhysX in their latest beta drivers. This struck us as a bit of an odd reversal of positions from NVIDIA, and now that we've had a chance to chat with them we finally know what's going on. As a quick ...

Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 by admin Hard disk systems have recently encounted a storage density ceiling. Most methods in use today have a limit of a few hundred gigabytes per square inch thanks to perpendicular recording. To try to keep storage density rising, scientists have looked at technologies from holographic storage to molecular polymers, but few have made it past the demonstration stage. In ...

Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 by admin In the race to get a USB3 capable mini-ITX motherboard to market, Gigabyte has today announced the first entry into the arena - the GA-H55N-USB3. Measuring a tiny 17cm x 17cm, this board is a stark contrast the the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 released last week. [ad#300x250_image_ads] USB3 connectivity is achieved via the onboard NEC uPD720200 host controller to two USB3...

Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 by admin A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs. If you're willing to pay the price premium and limit maximum capacity, today's SSDs are very fast and if you choose well, reliable. For a desktop PC this isn't a tough choice to ...

Published on Thursday, May 20, 2010 by admin Power and heat output are often issues which stride the minds of graphics card enthusiasts. Sufficient cooling and a beefy power supply are often a prerequisite if one wishes to invest in NVIDIA’s latest Fermi offering. So what happens when we catch word of a single slot graphics card containing a Fermi GPU? Hot on the heels of Galaxy’s custom GTX470 GC, the ...

Published on Thursday, May 20, 2010 by admin ASUS has been making great strides in the laptop designs over the past couple of years. It used to be that an ASUS laptop meant good performance with generally poor battery life at a reasonable price, but that all started to change with the launch of the original Eee PC. With the Eee PC, ASUS managed to usher in a whole new genre of laptop, the netbook, and with the d...

Published on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 by admin With the storage market expanding at a breakneck pace and solid state drives taking center space, people’s focus has very much been on internal storage solutions. There has been very little news regarding one of the mainstays of many users’ daily file transfer needs: the ubiquitous flash drive. The inclusion of USB 3.0 on many motherboards has somewhat restored ...

Published on Sunday, May 16, 2010 by admin Panasonic has announced its latest rugged notebook which is known as Toughbook 31. The rugged notebook has been designed to meet the military standard 810G for protection from six-foot drops, dust, shock, vibration, salt, fog and humidity as well as temperature extremes. The casing of the notebook has been fully sealed with magnesium alloy for improving water resistan...

Published on Sunday, May 16, 2010 by admin For a long, long time, Thermalright’s Ultra 120 Extreme was considered the best of the best when it came to air based CPU coolers. However as time marched on, new contenders with new ideas and cutting edge designs entered the fray and literally changed the way we look at the ubiquitous air cooler. New cooler designs come and go, but very few have the staying pow...

Published on Saturday, May 15, 2010 by admin Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9. In terms of board features, you get support for 6-core Gulftown processors, 4 way SLI and Crossfire X across 7 PCI-E 2.0 slots using 2 NF200 ch...

Published on Friday, May 14, 2010 by admin Cisco Systems is making home wireless networks easier for both savvy consumers and those who want simplicity. Cisco's Valet and Valet Plus use Cisco Connect software to set up a network in three steps and provide parent controls and a guest network. The Linksys E-series routers also come with Cisco Connect, but give users advanced features. Cisco Systems unveiled a...

Published on Thursday, May 13, 2010 by admin In terms of power supplies, it can sometimes become astounding at how much a company will charge for a unit, and whether it is valid, in terms of features and warranty/support.  So when Sparkle are announcing a 1000W Gold rated unit for just over $200, we sit up and take notice. This is Sparkle's first venture into the power supply genre of computing (previously, ...

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by admin If you wonder how tiny a PowerPC SoC (System on chip) could be, AppliedMicro has recently announced a new Power Architecture based processor that is claimed to be the world’s smallest form factor in the industry. Named as APM801xx, it consists of multiple SKUs clocking from 400MHz, 600MHz and 800MHz suitable for different applications ranging from WiFi access point,...

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by admin The worldwide leading innovator of audio, video, communications and IT products, Sony has announced the upcoming launch of its new updated, ultra-compact Sony VAIO P Series, which the company claims as its first laptop equipped with an integrated GPS, accelerometer sensor and Digital Compass. The new VAIO P full-featured notebook computer will incorporate Intel Atom C...

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by admin Back in 2006, technology newcomer Bigfoot Networks announced the Killer NIC, an unusual network interface card targeted at the high-end gaming market. With this coming fairly shortly after solid consumer-grade NICs became universally integrated in to motherboards, the timing wasn’t the best. At $280, neither was the price. [ad#300x250_image_ads] The Killer NIC...

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by admin Sources close to Seagate roadmaps have leaked the potential of a 3TB SAS drive being released this year. The quest for storage is almost a never ending saga.  Dubbed the Constellation-ES, the replacement for the Seagate Barracuda-ES, the drive is expected to arrive later this year with a 7200 RPM rotation speed, and a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.  A 1TB version of the ...

Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by admin AMD today have launched five new processors, to replace current products, ranging from the budget Athlon II X2 260 to the Athlon II X4 610. New Processor Speed / Mhz Cores TDP Price Processor Replaced Athlon II X4 640 3000 4 95W $122 Athlon II X4 635 Athlon II X4 610e 2400 4 45W $143 Athlon II X4 605e Athlon II X3 445 3100 3 ...

Published on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by admin Atom was designed to be a low-cost, low-power solution, but its value in the desktop space is debatable if you consider performance. We pit the cheapest Core i3 against Intel's Atom on a performance-per-dollar and a per-watt basis to see which is better. This is no apples to apples comparison here. The two products we're pitting against each other belong in differe...

Published on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by admin The newest product to be thrusted into Intel's server arsenal will be called Westmere-EX, and is set to directly compete with AMD's Mangy-Cours server chip which features 12 cores, and AMD's future Bulldozer architecture. In a webcast speech, Stephen Smith, vice president/director of PC client operations and enabling at Intel, announced the upcoming Nehalem-EX refr...

Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by admin Xigmatek has announced they will launch their latest Midgard chassis in the comming months, aptly named White Knight. Unmistakable to anyone who views it this case is finished inside and out in pure white paint. Lending credibility to its unique name in the world of computer cases. [ad#300x250_image_ads] The White Knight is a full steel chassis that is base...

Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by admin The Fermi cards have now been out (and only just available) for the just over a month.  Like the AMD 5xxx series, the first cards used reference PCBs and reference coolers - the only way you could distinguish between the different companies was by the branded sticker on the large chunky cooler.  Given time, and knowledge of the system, custom coolers were just aroun...

Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by admin Announcing high end products and 'Halo' type hardware is relatively easy for manufacturers - slap some snazzy artwork next to a few pictures, wring a few industry related endorsements, put the major selling points in big letters, write a website page for it, and maybe run a competition to let a couple of people win one.    For entry level boards, it's a different ma...

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by admin The nForce 2 was one of the best chipsets to come out of NVIDIA. It was NVIDIA’s second attempt at a desktop chipset yet it cemented NVIDIA’s position as a leading provider of core logic in the market. Oh how much has changed since then. Most of what made a chipset worthwhile is now integrated into the CPU. It used to be memory controller optimizations that k...

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by admin The whole 'fastest memory' halo product race is a bit of a farce. In terms of DDR3, Corsair started the race back in 2007 with their first set of Dominator modules, running at 1600Mhz, 10-8-8-24. This has been followed and bested, mainly by Corsair, but with sneak appearances by Kingston, G.Skill and Patriot (see below). Available as single sticks from the Cor...