Intel Releases Ultra-Fast X25-M SSD

Unless there is some sort of revelation with regards to the traditional hard drive soon, SSD is likely going to become the future of storage. If you ask a hard drive vendor, they'll tell you that SSD might be the future, but the traditional hard drive will still be the ultimate choice. It's hard to disagree, since right now, you can score a 1TB drive for under $200, whereas a 64GB SSD is 50% higher than that.

What's helping the progression is fierce development though, especially from Intel. They offered insight into their SSD's a few weeks ago at IDF that laid out a great outlook, and today, we see the launch of one hardcore-fast product, the X25-M 80GB SSD.

Our friends at the Tech Report have taken the new drive for a spin, and overall their opinions are good. The drive has top-of-the-line read speeds, but lacks quite a bit where write speeds are concerned, common of MLC-based drives. The end result was around 70MB/s write, which pales in comparison to some hard drives out there. Hopefully we'll see this issue tackled over the course of the next year, because it's an important one on a product that costs 10x more per GB.

Price is another problem for solid-state drives, and with the 80GB X25-M slated to sell for just under $600 in 1,000-unit quantities, Intel's first entry in the market won't be cheap. At that price, the X-25M sits between budget MLC-based models and their more expensive SLC-based cousins, which seems about right to me. After all, the X25-M was often faster than Samsung's SLC-based FlashSSD, which costs nearly $800 for only 64GB.

Source: The Tech Report

Is S3's Chrome 440 GTX Worth a Look?

ATI and NVIDIA... that's who usually comes to mind when we think of graphics processors, and it's obvious why. Both companies offer sensational products when compared to the competition, and unless Intel's Larrabee really does kick the serious ass that they are claiming it will, then the GPU reigns will remain with both ATI and NVIDIA.

But what about S3? They've been unable to take over either the green or red side, but it's hard to when their products are all of the value nature. techPowerUp takes a look at their new 440 GTX, but don't let the name fool you. GTX might usually represent a standout card, but the 440 GTX falls well below even the Radeon HD 3850 in terms of overall specs, and comes in at $69.

So, how did it perform? Well, not so bad actually, but it's still going to be a hard decision to choose it over the competition. For $70, you can get a comparable ATI or NVIDIA card with better driver support, but if you must simply own something other than ATI or NVIDIA... your choices are already a bit limited, right?

The card has one analog VGA, one DVI and one HDMI port. This configuration is certainly the optimum for a card in this segment. VGA to allow CRT users to use this card without going through the hassle of an adapter. Dual-link DVI for the LCD users and HDMI for all media PC scenarios. Just like ATI, S3 has integrated an audio device on their card, so your big screen will receive an audio stream from the graphics card without the needs of an external audio in cable.

Source: techPowerUp

Intel Roadmaps Shows Lack of CPU Launches in 1H 2009

If you enjoy looking at huge diagrams inside of PDF files, then you are in luck. Japanese site PC Watch somehow got a hold of a large collection of PDFs that outline Intel's future plans for a variety of product-lines, from processor, chipset and beyond.

After a quick look through a few of the different documents, I didn't notice anything extremely out of the ordinary, but the diagrams definitely verify a lot of what we were thinking. The first Nehalem launch parts are still clocked at 3.2GHz, 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz, with follow-up parts in... Q3 2009? Yes, you read that right.

In Q3 of next year, Intel will launch a handful of new processors, including mainstream Quad-Cores and Dual-Cores, although none of the roadmaps include exact clock speeds yet, understandably so. Nehalem's 32nm successor, Westmere, is still slated for 2010, which is when we'll begin to see desktop six-core processors. It's clear to me that Intel is no longer toying with the idea of an Octal-Core, at least right now, which I'm sure most people will be fine with.

For a real time-killer, definitely head over to that link and download all of the documents. It is sure to keep you busy for quite a while.

Price line and say, the first to introduce quad-core version of the "Bloomfield (Bloomfield)" is the top brand Extreme system SKU (Stock Keeping Unit = products) 3.2 GHz (8MB/QPI 6.4Gtps/DDR3-1066 ), The traditional top-level price of 999 dollars. Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (3GHz/12MB/FSB1333) the same level, a special high-cost QX9770/9775 (3.2GHz/12MB/FSB1600) from the 1399/1499 dollars is cheap.

Source: PC Watch

Concept Art for Larrabee's Launch Title Released

Intel's upcoming Larrabee architecture (which we've looked at in-depth here) is still a long way off, but that isn't stopping the company from teasing us with concept art from Project Offset, whose game developer they acquired earlier this year. You can see one of the artsy shots below.

The multi-core 'GPU' is still a mystery for the most part, because while we understand the basic architectural benefits, we can also see potential downsides. So even with concept art, it in no way gives us insight into what to expect from the GPU or the game, but it's certainly looking good so far. Older teaser videos of Project Offset were amazing, and if Larrabee can power something like that, then Intel might not have such a hard time selling their product after all.

To coincide with these images, the game's developers will be relaunching their community forums, both for comment on these new pieces of concept art and also to discuss the direction of the game. Why they were closed in the first place is anyone's guess, but at least now we'll be able to keep better track of the game, and hopefully begin to understand exactly what Larrabee is capable of.

The other piece of news Offset and Intel will announce on Monday is the relaunch of Offset’s community forum at 10 AM PST. We hear the Offset team is “excited” to be back online and touch base with users again. That is, of course, because Offset hopes to get user feedback on the game title it is developing.

Source: TG Daily

Do Monster Cables Actually Serve a Purpose?

Whenever I hear the word "Monster Cable", I clench my fists, because I know what kind of rip-offs their products are. It can be debated, but it's been proven before over and over that a standard cable is almost always just as effective, as long as you are dealing with cable in feet and not meters (most people don't need meters).

Well, could I be wrong? CrunchGear took a jaunt to CEDIA over the weekend and noticed Monster was walking around with a mobile station, showing people how much better their cables are over the competition. They compared all the cables with one heck of a video noise analyzer, and lo and behold, they did prove that their cables are better.

But while their cables did indeed prove their worth in being able to transfer much more data than the competition, the fact remains that this kind of bandwidth is generally just not needed for the vast population. There is a cutoff, but most people aren't going to see video noise. However, I will admit it's nice to see that Monster does indeed have a product designed for the enthusiasts, but it still seems to only apply with long cables (longer than 10 feet).

The way the engineer explained it to me is that viewers will not notice the difference in short runs because of the loss can be compensated by the HDTVs processors. Apparently, with longer cables, the extra noise is more noticeable and therefore the need for higher-quality long digital cables arise.

Source: CrunchGear

Tech Roundup - September 8, 2008

• Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme - Legit Reviews
• Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H - Motherboards.org
• Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H - Digit-Life
• Intel Atom Disk Encryption Performance - Phoronix

• HIS Radeon HD4870X2 - Overclocker Cafe
• Leadtek GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB Extreme - TheTechLounge
• Palit Radeon 4850 Sonic - MikhailTech
• ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Edition - TweakTown

• Kingwin Elite Series USB 2.0/eSATA External SATA HDD Enclosure - ClubOC
• Mapower MAP-TB32 Dual SATA RAID Enclosure - Big Bruin
• Thecus N5200BR NAS Server - Legit Reviews
• Vizo Mirrorbox Card Reader - techPowerUp!

• NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse - Overclockers Club
• NZXT Avatar Gaming Mouse - TweakTown
• NZXT Sentry LX - Overclockers Online
• Razer Goliathus Speed Edition Mousepad - Bjorn3D
• Razer Lycosa Gaming Keyboard - Overclock3D

• ASUS Lion Square CPU Cooler - Hardware Logic

• BFG Tech ES Series 800W Power Supply - Think Computers
• Xilence XQ LinearPower 1200W - Technic3D

• Acer Aspire One - InsideHW
• ASUS Eee PC 901 Netbook - Tech Report