June 2nd Tech Roundup

• ECS A780GM-A - Bigbruin
• ASRock A780FullDisplayPort - Phoronix
• ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution - InsideHW 

• XFX GeForce 9600GT XXX Alpha Dog Edition - TweakTown
• Palit 9600 Geforce GSO Sonic - TechwareLabs
• ECS 8800GT 256M - Virtual-Hideout
• Visiontek HD3870x2 Overclocked Edition - Overclocker Cafe
• Acer P243W Widescreen Monitor - Overclockers Club

• G.Skill Pi 4GB PC2-8500 - Virtual-Hideout

• Thermaltake BlacX SE Hard Drive Dock - OCIA
• Lamptron Noise Reduction Kit - Tech-Reviews
• Cyber Snipa Stinger Gaming Mouse - BurnOutPC
• OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator - Overclock 3D

• ThermalTake Water Temperature Monitor - Fusion Mods
• ZEROtherm Zen FZ120 CPU Cooler - LegitReviews
• Thermaltake MaxOrb EX CPU Cooler - TweakTown

• Raidmax Iceberg Elite - techPowerUP
• NZXT Tempest - XSReviews

• Yuin OK1 Earphones - techPowerUP
• Thermaltake ProWater 850i Giveaway - TechwareLabs

Solid State Drive Prices Set To Plummet, Analyst Says

CNET News.com analyst Brooke Crothers speculates that the long-awaited drop in solid state drive prices may finally be within reach. Making this happen, Crothers suggests, will be Multilevel Cell (MLC) technology, which enables SSD capacities above 100GB, competitive with the 80GB hard drives common in current laptops. In fact, it’s suggested that we could see MLC drives as large as 256GB by early 2009.

Since the introduction of MLC technology to the solid state drive product category, manufacturers have flocked to the technology, including Samsung, Toshiba, and STEC. Even Intel is preparing to enter the market for high-capacity SSDs, based on its own multilevel cell technology. However, Intel warns that with MLC designs, performance is slower than Single-Level Cell (SLC) designs, and can’t tolerate as many write cycles. And if anyone’s ever had a flash drive go dead on them, they know that once the data is gone, there’s no salvaging it. Adopters would still do well to keep meticulous backups of SSD data on a reliable mechanical hard drive, even if the drive doesn’t spin all the time.

"Compared to the price you're paying today for a 64GB drive. You'll get a 128GB of storage for less than half the price (of the 64GB drive)," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of MLC-based solid-state drives.

Source: CNET News.com

MediaDefender Attacks Revision3 Servers Mistakenly

 The best justice of all is poetic justice. If you don’t agree with me, check out the recent case of MediaDefender’s DoS attack on Revision3 servers. For the uninformed, MediaDefender is a company that simply exists to harm P2P networks, wherever they exist, typically contracted by groups like the RIAA and MPAA to flood torrent tracking sites with bogus torrents – they believe that by attacking the technology itself, they can stem the tide of pirated music and movies served via BitTorrent and other P2P networks, despite the potential for legitimate applications of P2P and BitTorrent technology, such as Revision3’s.

When Revision3’s servers discovered that they were being flooded with bogus torrents (that is, torrents that didn’t point to Revision3’s own media), they began to remove the torrent listings, prompting the initiation of a DoS attack by MediaDefender’s servers. Of course, in this case MediaDefender didn’t just attack any two-bit torrent-tracking site – they attacked a legitimate business that simply happened to be using BitTorrent technology to serve its customers. Never mind that the tactics MediaDefender used to try to shut Revision3 down were illegal under 18 different federal statutes. It’s our hope that Revision3 will seek to prosecute MediaDefender to the fullest extent allowed by law for this grossly errant and aggressive behavior on their part --  since a basic precept of American justice is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Though I suspect the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists may yet be at work on that one as well...

“We’d noticed some unauthorized use of our tracking server, and took steps to de-authorize torrents pointing to non-Revision3 files. That, as it turns out, was exactly the wrong thing to do. MediaDefender’s servers, at that point, initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files stored on our server. And that torrential cascade of ‘Hi’s brought down our network,” said Louderback.

Source: DailyTech

Unlock Hidden Capabilities On Some GeForce 9600 Cards

Back in the day, the stories of hidden capabilities conveniently locked away for the enterprising modder to discover typically came from the AMD camp, with the 256MB Radeon 9500 Pro cards that could be software-modded to unlock Radeon 9700 performance, or the Radeon 9800 which could be effectively turned into a 9800 Pro with a simple pencil mod to connect a laser-cut bridge.

Now NVidia has their own sleeper performance part, in certain GeForce 9600GSO cards manufactured by Galaxy. As it turns out, all it takes is a BIOS flash to unlock extra pipelines on the card, converting it into the functional equivalent of a GeForce 8800 GTS. We’re providing a quick link to the blog that has the how-to, but be sure you’ve got a good pop-up blocker…and even that may not be enough to save you from the insidious pop-ups on the site. Got Patience?

Thanks to CrunchGear for the tip.

I am sure enthusiasts are familiar with the term "soft-modding". The days (of turning 9800SE into 9800Pro; 6800NU into 6800GT) are back! This time round, the spotlight is on the GeForce 9 series, namely the 9600GSO. In this extraction of the original guide, we will show you how to softmod a 9600GSO into a 8800GTS 512MB.

Source: www.LLY.get.to, Via: CrunchGear

Microsoft To Require Hardware Makers To Certify Drivers For Windows 7

It’s reassuring to know that Microsoft hasn’t turned a completely deaf ear to the anguished cries of users forced to migrate to Windows Vista, only to find that some of the hardware or peripherals they’ve recently invested in are now useless due to a lack of Vista driver support. To avoid the headache (and heartache) that Windows Vista caused among users because of hardware providers’ inadequate or nonexistent Vista driver support, Microsoft will now require that hardware makers test their drivers on both Windows Vista and Windows 7 before their products can even receive a ‘Certified for Windows Vista’ badge.

Here’s the rub: Drivers don’t actually need to pass Windows Logo testing for the new operating system in order to receive Vista certification – but the hardware manufacturers must still hand the results of said testing over to Microsoft, ensuring that Microsoft will be able to gauge progress toward working drivers for the new OS before it actually arrives. In another bit of recent good news, any device driver that worked under Windows Vista will also work with Windows 7, so the industry won’t face a similar setback to the one encountered with Vista when Windows 7 finally hits.

In a long explanation (download PDF) of the Windows Logo Program, Microsoft spelled out the new requirement. "Beginning with the release of the first beta of the next operating system, all Windows Vista client and Windows Server 2008 submissions must include a complete [set of] test logs for the new beta OS," the company said in the document.

Source: ComputerWorld, Via: CrunchGear