Samsung Announces Blazing Fast 256GB SSD

Sick of hearing about SSDs? Don't feel bad, so do I. But this latest announcement is too good to pass over. Late March, Super Talent wowed us with their 256GB SSD, and how couldn't we be impressed? That's massive in the SSD realm. So was the price though, at $6,000.

That wasn't the only "downside" though, as the read and write speeds were not overly impressive, at 65MB/s and 50MB/s, respectively. Well, somehow, Samsung upped the anty so far, we can barely see it anymore. They've just announced their own 256GB SSD, but improved speeds to 200MB/s read and 160MB/s!

Go ahead and take a minute to sink that in. At those speeds, it's 2.4x faster than a standard hard drive. At those rates, file copying speeds would be incredible, but it would of course depend on the target medium. If you are copying a file off of this SSD to a standard hard drive, the raw speeds of the SSD won't mean much. But regardless, speeds like these are putting us in the right direction.

Pricing is of course not mentioned in the press release, but it wouldn't be surprising to see it hover around $8,000, or higher.

"With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage," said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Source: Samsung Press Release

ASUS Takes Gigabyte's Energy Saving Dispute to the Taiwan FTC

It's not too often we get to see two motherboard manufacturers duke it out, so things should soon get interesting here. In case you are unaware, Gigabyte held a private media event in Taiwan a few weeks ago where they were unveiling their P45 offerings and others to members of the press. At the same time, they slammed ASUS for their "fake" EPU energy saving technology.

That was a bold move, because last I checked, calling another companies' technology "fake" is hitting below the belt... especially if they don't have the information to back it up. Some of what they said might very well be true, but the way it was presented rubbed ASUSTeK the wrong way, understandably.

So now ASUS is taking Gigabyte to the Taiwan FTC to get it straightened out. Their main argument is that Gigabyte doesn't have the schematics of their technology, so it's impossible that they could rightfully make such claims. This sounds reasonable, especially since Gigabyte was targeting ASUS' P45 offerings, which are not publicly available yet.

With Computex happening next week, it's going to be fun, and interesting, to listen to both companies bicker. We'll be there, so if anything interesting comes about, you'll know about it.

During a company-sponsored media event earlier this month, Gigabyte delivered a presentation in which it compared its own DES technology against EPU and also questioned the validity of some of the claims and performance figures Asustek has published. Asustek has reacted to this presentation by saying that Gigabyte does not have a full understanding of its engineering design and methods and so the accusations made were false.

Source: DigiTimes

Hypersonic's Avenger AG2 Now Available

We posted a review of Hypersonic's brand-new 12-inch notebook two weeks ago, and were impressed overall. It's not the best-looking machine on the planet, but the pricing was right, and so was the performance (understatement). Well, the machine has now launched, and is available with many different configuration options.

Stock pricing a little bit higher than I originally anticipated, and the website itself seems a little confused as it quotes the "stock" price at two different values, but once entering the configurator, it's at $1,359. That configuration includes a 2.1GHz T8100 Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive and other usual goodies. There are two reasons the pricing is higher than expected. First is that the 1.66GHz CPU we expected didn't make it in there, and also the default hard drive is much larger than what we thought it would be on the stock machine.

What is pretty much identical, though, is our "as-tested" machine. We were quoted the machine at around $1,599, and after we set the same options, the machine comes out at $1,598. However, that's with 4GB of RAM and a 32-Bit OS, so it will cost an additional $20 to allow yourself to actually use all 4GB.

If you are looking for a notebook that's comes in a smaller package but packs a wallop, check out their site and our review for all the details.

While other sub-notebooks, such as the Lenovo X300 or the Apple MacBook AIR build for better battery life, Hypersonic packs a powerful Penryn processor along with lots of RAM and a large hard drive. That's the trade off, though. Better battery life or a faster machine? There's no such thing as both unless you have a battery the size of the notebook itself.

Source: Hypersonic Avenger AG2 Review

May 26th Tech Roundup

Motherboards & Processors
• ASUS P5Q and P5Q3 Deluxe - Tech Report
• ASUS Striker II NSE 790i SLI - APH Networks

Displays & Video Cards
• ASUS 3870X2 - Bjorn3D

Peripherals & Gadgets
• mStation Orb 2.1 Stereo - Techware Labs

Cooling
• APACK ZEROtherm ZEN FZ 120 CPU Cooler - TweakTown
• Koolance CPU-330 Water Block - Legit Reviews
• Noctua NH-C12P Cooler - Hardwareoverclock Austria
• OCZ Technology Vendetta 2 CPU Cooler - Big Bruin

Chassis & Power Supplies
• OCZ EliteXStream 800W - Hardware Canucks
• OCZ EliteXStream 800W - Overclockers Club
• Thermaltake Armor+ MX Case - 3DGameman

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Energy Efficient Computing with Intel - TweakTown
• XPSP2 vs XPSP3 Performance Comparison - DragonSteelMods