NewEgg Preparing to Launch Canadian Counterpart

Living in Canada can avail unique experiences for a tech-head. It's hard to read forums and not see some reference to NewEgg, which of course has never offered shipping to Canucks. With a recent move, they even stopped accepting Canadian credit cards for products that were to be shipped to the US, so their Canadian support has been less-than-stellar up to this point.

Well, that changes soon. The company have just launched a Canadian version of the website, although it's simply a splash page at this point, with a note that it will launch sometime this year. I'm curious as to whether or not they will actually have warehouses in Canada or not, but given the fact that there has always been demand for a Canadian NewEgg, chances are they need one.

Though there are many large e-tailers in the US, NewEgg still remains the second-largest. In Canada, there is much less competition, and NCIX.com and a few smaller ones have been the leaders for quite some time. How NewEgg's entry into the Canadian market will affect them remains yet to be seen, but it's no doubt got them thinking.

Despite that, all I can say about the situation right now is, 'finally'.

We define an excellent shopping experience to be one that combines unsurpassed product selection, abundant product information and fair pricing. With thousands of tech products in stock and numerous tools to help customers make informed buying decisions (detailed specs, how-to’s, customer reviews and photo galleries), we have earned the loyalty of tech-enthusiasts and novice e-shoppers alike.

Source: NewEgg Canada

SteelSeries Acquires Ideazon

Ideazon, creators of some of the most unique gaming keyboards on the market, has just been acquired by SteelSeries, yet another developer of higher-end gaming peripherals. Both companies share similar goals, and develop similar products, so the acquisition seems to make a lot of sense.

SteelSeries themselves have grown rapidly in popularity over the past few years, and their products have been well-received, including on our own pages. They also sponsor gaming teams left and right, and their dedication to deliver high-quality peripherals is apparent. How this acquisition will affect either company is yet to be seen, but Ideazon's line-up doesn't seem to be changing much in the near-future.

It appears that Ideazon will remain stationed in North America, while SteelSeries remains in Copenhagen, Denmark, with other offices also found in Asia.

CHICAGO, July 29, 2008 - The leading manufacturer of innovative professional gaming gear, SteelSeries, today announced its acquisition of certain assets in Ideazon, Inc., the North American-based developer and manufacturer of gaming peripherals and technologies. This acquisition further strengthens SteelSeries' peripheral technology and will help expand the company's broad support within the gaming community.

Source: SteelSeries Press Release

Intel's Atom vs. VIA's Nano - Performance & Power Consumption

It's not often that we report on CPU competition between Intel and someone other than AMD, but that happens now. Our friends at PC Perspective have two platforms on hand, Intel's Atom and VIA's Nano, and pits them against each other to see which one comes out on top. The results might just surprise you.

Performance aside, the biggest issue here lays with Intel's implementation of Atom. They don't offer an open platform, and restrict what components can be used. It was their decision to omit PCI-Express, which means consumers are stuck with old-school PCI GPUs. VIA, on the other hand, welcome PCI-Express cards. That's the kind of support we need, and Intel needs to seriously re-evaluate their position on keeping a locked platform, especially after these initial Nano results.

In their tests, PC Per found the Nano to out-perform Atom in almost all regards. Granted, the chip was operating at 1.8GHz, compared to Atom's 1.6GHz, but some differences seen go beyond the scope of such a minor increase. Atom wasn't a total loss by a longshot though, as it was exceptional where power consumption was concerned. In the end, it comes down to a classic trade-off, power consumption or raw performance. If anything, it's really good to see VIA as serious competition in this market now. To come out of nowhere (relatively) and immediately compete with Intel's latest product, is a huge accomplishment.

Credit: PC Perspective

For an incredibly inexpensive and low power part, the VIA Nano L2100 CPU was very impressive from a performance perspective. Using just 20 watts or so of power at load the Isaiah architecture running at 1.8 GHz could handle our media encoding, our PCMark05 general purpose tests and even a little gaming.

Source: PC Perspective

NVIDIA Launches Mainstream 9500 GT

Summer. Time for fun, beaches, warm weather, and new GPUs! Well, new GPUs show face all the time, so it's not much of a surprise when a new one gets launched, but the latest entrant from NVIDIA might be worthy of attention if you are looking for a capable budget option. The 9500 GT is low-end in most regards, but it's price currently hovers around ~$75, which is at least $35 less than a low-priced 9600 GT.

The new card features 314 million transistors, clock speeds of 550MHz/1400MHz, 32 stream processors, and a 128-bit memory bus width. Our friends at HotHardware have taken the new card for a spin, and though it didn't come close to competing with the 9600 GT, it competed nicely with the 8600 GTS of yesteryear, which happened to debut at a much higher price.

Their results conclude that the 9500 GT is not going to prove to be a killer gaming card, although it is very capable. The 9600 GT delivered results almost twice as high as the 9500 GT in many of the tests, so the extra ~$35 - $40 it would take to equip yourself with one of those instead might be justified if you are at all planning to game regularly. But still, the lower power consumption, lower temps, size and of course, the price, might just make the card a real winner for some.

Credit: HotHardware

NVIDIA's new GeForce 9500 GT is the company's latest weapon in its arsenal of sub-$100 graphics cards but don't let the relatively low price fool you. Of course the card won't offer the same level of 3D performance as current high-end, more expensive products. However, its feature set is comparable to just about anything else on the market. And its power consumption is nice and low as well.

Source: HotHardware

July 29th Tech Roundup

• ASUS P5Q Pro - Hardware Canucks
• ASUS M3N78 Pro - Overclockers Club
• ASUS P5Q-E - ThinkComputers

• ECS GeForce 8800GT 256MB - Phoronix
• BFG GTX 260 896MB - Hardware Canucks
• Visiontek HD4870 - Overclocker Cafe'

• Maxtor BlackArmor 160GB External HDD - Digital Trends
• QNAP TS-209 Pro II NAS - PC Review
• Thecus N5200B Pro NAS - Overclockers Online
• Eagle Tech N-Series Pro HDD Enclosure - ASE Labs

• ASUS Lion Square CPU Cooler - FrostyTech
• Thermalright True Black 120 CPU Cooler - PC Perspective
• Spire CoolFlow III CPU Cooler - XSReviews
• Zaward Gyre CPU Cooler - XtremeComputing
• Cool IT NV Reference SLI Cooler - techPowerUp

• Lian Li V1010 - Ninjalane
• Lian-Li Tyr PC-X2000 - techPowerUp
• Raidmax Iceberg - Virtual-Hideout
• Corsair TX750W - Pro-Clockers