OCZ Introduces Elixir Gamers Keyboard

OCZ has today announced their first-ever gaming keyboard, the Elixir, which falls into the also-new Alchemy line of gaming products. The Elixir is the very first product under that line, but future products will follow, such as mice, keyboards other than this one and whatever else their labs feel like conjuring up.

I had a chance to see this keyboard at Computex last month and from what I saw, it's a solid product. It looks good, has "gamer" colors, a soft arm rest and ten bright blue keys used for your macros. I believe the software included with the keyboard will have been built in-house at OCZ, just like the software for their Neural Impulse Actuator, so you know it should work well.

The keyboard also features seven Internet-related keys and another eight for multi-media. Happily enough, it also includes a space bar, which should come in handy. The absolutely best part? Well, it could be the $29.99US price tag. Seriously. My $25 Logitech keyboard will soon be getting a nice upgrade once these become available.

The Elixir is a high-quality keyboard featuring the necessary features such as 10 tri-mode programmable macro keys, mode selection, a pop-up menu shortcut, and Windows Media Players optical controller. The sleek design of the Alchemy Elixir Series will maintain your comfort throughout long gaming sessions with its membrane tactical keys made from 100% rubber-coating for no-slip comfort and ergonomic design.

Source: OCZ Elixir Product Page

Hackers On Planet Earth Conference Next Weekend in NYC

For our readers in the New York area who are still not aware of the HOPE conference happening next weekend, take this as one of your last reminders! The 'Hackers On Planet Earth' conference will be happening between July 18 - 20th and will be the seventh of its kind. Sadly, it also appears to be the last. As the 2600 staff seems to be cryptic with their answers, it's unknown if this is truly the last one, or if there will be a successor under a different name. We'll have to wait and see.

I'll be attending the conference, and invite any of our readers to come along. We could meet up, have some laughs, drink too much... all the good stuff that should happen during a trip to NYC. Our own Matt Serrano will be attending one day as well. Since the last post I made, the entire list of speakers has been made, all divided by day, time and room.

The three primary rooms are named after notable technology-enthusiasts throughout the ages, including Grace Hopper, the creator of the first computer compiler, Alan Turing, another computer scientist who was responsible for the concept behind computer algorithms and Joe "Joybubbles" Engressia, a blind phone phreaker who could actually whistle the 2600 Hz tone with his mouth. Each room has a story behind it, and many more stories will be shared during the conference.

Pre-registration is done with, but you can still register at the door, for $75. Seems expensive, but it's not really that possible to leave the event and not feel like it was fully worth it. You can check out the full talks list here and here.

There will be three days and nights of speakers along with all sorts of activities to keep you entertained and enlightened. We have a tremendous amount of space for us to make use of and it's all right in the middle of the city, across the street from Penn Station. You still have time to get involved in this historic event, whether by attending, volunteering, speaking, or creating something new that none of us have thought of yet.

Source: Hackers On Planet Earth Conference

Voodoo "Unboxes" the Envy 133

It was only the other day that the veil was taken off of Voodoo's new Envy 133, and now Rahul Sood, CTO for HP's Gaming Business, has posted numerous "unboxing" pictures on his blog. You may just want to grab a towel to wipe off any potential drool.

This thing is gorgeous, and even the packaging is well-thought-out. The experience is designed to mimic one like opening a luxurious box of chocolates, or jewelry, or a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, and I have little doubt that whoever purchases one will get a serious tingly feeling all over during the process. Aside from the box, other close-up shots are included as well, including the one below.

The only thing to really confuse me is the fact that the power button is inline with the rest of the keyboard, near where the DEL key usually sits. I could see this causing some potential issue, so I'm curious how they decided to prevent against accidental shutdowns. But, this is undoubtedly the best-looking 13" notebook on the market, and yes, I do want one.

The lesser-known fact about this notebook is that it takes advantage of DeviceVM's SplashTop, the instant-on Linux environment. As it seems, Voodoo's attempt looks far better than anything to date, which makes sense given the notebook it's to appear on.

Since we're taking orders on the new Envy 133 now, we thought it would be a good time to demonstrate the packaging and the contents that come inside the box. Our packaging expert Allison worked with our ID folks to design the Envy 133 presentation box to look somewhat like a Tiffany box. It lifts up like a hat box to reveal a wonderful presentation, including the Envy 133 wrapped in a microfiber polish sleeve.

Source: Rahul Sood's Blog

Centrino 2 Launches Monday

Intel's newest mobile platform, Centrino 2, will launch on Monday, July 11. Among the improvements, the new platform will include support for 802.11n, WiMAX and DDR3 RAM, as well as faster 45nm processors which reach speeds of up to 2.8GHz.

One thing to note is that the first available chipsets will only include nVidia and ATI's dedicated graphics, not Intel's integrated systems. The new platform should increase performance and battery life across the board compared to the older generation of notebooks.

As notebook shipments have begun to significantly outpace the sales of desktop computers, each new notebook platform launched by Intel becomes more important to the company. This Monday July 14 marks the launch of Intel’s Centrino 2 platform, previously known by the code-name Montevina. The launch comes weeks after Intel had planned due to a problem with Intel’s own integrated graphics for the platform.

Source: DailyTech

Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop HDD, Mobile 500GB 7200RPM

It hasn't even been long since we first saw 1TB drives hit the market, but here Seagate goes and throws 50% more storage into the same amount of space. Seagate claims that this bump is the largest ever, in the over fifty years that hard drives have been around. Of course, this is all thanks to the much-touted perpendicular magnetic recording.

The new Barracuda 7200.11 features four platters (at what would be 375GB each) and promises a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s. We'll have to wait for the reviews to see just how accurate this measure is. Like Seagate's other higher-end drives, this one will feature 32MB of cache, which I actually have found to make a reasonable difference in my personal machine for copying smaller sets of files.

In addition to the new Barracuda 7200.11, Seagate also announced a new flagship Momentus 7200.4 500GB, a mobile offering that offers both lots of storage space, in addition to fast 7200RPM speeds that we are used to on the desktop. It took a while to happen, but you can now be a mobile warrior and actually have the storage and speed you'd like. Neither of these two products have suggested prices, but we'll find out next month when they are launched into the market.

Update: Seagate tells us that the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will carry an SRP of $450. No pricing information available for the Momentus drive yet, however.

The debut of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB, the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs, marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives - a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

Source: Seagate Press Release

Amarok 2.0 Alpha 1 Released

It's been a relatively long-time coming, but the first 2.0 alpha release for the popular Linux audio player, Amarok, has now been released. Since 2.x is highly dependant on KDE 4 libraries, that desktop environment is required in order to run it. Those of you, like me, who would rather stick with 3.5.x for the time-being, will have to miss out. The good news in all of this, though, is that the future player will work on Windows and OS X.

What's new though is brand-new graphics and 'innovative user interface'. At first look, I'm really skeptical, but I'm going to hold off on my opinions until I get a chance to spend some good time with it. I've been using Amarok 1.x for so long now, I'm almost scared about taking such a leap forward, because there's definitely a noticable difference here.

But I digress. Also new is a nice Internet service framework, allowing fantastic integration with popular music services, like Last.fm, Magnatune and others. I assume that these will simply run better and be easier to navigate than 1.x, since those services were available there. There's lots of good stuff though, so you will need to either read through the news post or get on downloading and testing it out. I'm so tempted to finally install KDE 4 just for this reason...

Don't miss several UI innovations like the Plasma powered Context View, new space efficient playlist, and amazing PopUp Dropper! The new Context View allows you to show all the context information you care about. We expect a lot of Plasmoids to be provided by the community in the first months after the release of Amarok 2.

Source: Amarok 2.0 Alpha

New Technology Could Make the Internet 100x Faster

A group of Australian scientists at the University of Sydney have developed a new technology that could hopefully one day speed the Internet up without costing a dime. They use photonic integrated circuit boosts instead of fiber optic cables which can guide data in one picosecond, which the researchers describe as "a small scratch on a piece of glass."

The main issue with the claim of hoping to speed up existing networks is the fact that ISPs have a much slower data backbone, and there is a cost investment to replacing existing equipment. Realistically, the future is there, it's just a matter of getting to it, which takes more time and money initially conceived.

As of right now, the technology has been proven to achieve speeds of up to 60x faster than Australia's Telstra network. If it continues to improve, hopefully we'll hear more good news about it.

University of Sydney scientists say they have developed a new technology that could speed up the internet - and not cost users an extra cent.

Source: NEWS.com.au

July 10th Tech Roundup

• Gigabyte EX38-DQ6 - Club Overclocker
• ECS P43T - Pro-Clockers
• Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G - Overclockers Club
• ECS A740GM-A - Digit-Life

• OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 Platinum - Neoseeker
• OCZ Rally2 32GB - Madshrimps

• Revoltec LightMouse Portable - Technic3D
• Sennheiser PC 350 Gaming Headset - Digital Trends

• Thermalright IFX-14 CPU Cooler - Bigbruin
• OCZ Vendetta 2 CPU Cooler - Pro-Clockers
• Aerocool Modern-V LCD Fan Controller & Temperature Monitor - DragonSteelMods

• Apevia X-Supra Special Edition - techPowerUp
• Antec Three Hundred - Tech-Reviews
• Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W - Bjorn3D
• SilverStone Decathlon 800W - Phoronix

• Alienware M15X Gaming Notebook - ThinkComputers
• Pioneer Elite X-Z9 Home Theater System - Digital Trends