Content and news by Rob Williams

Matrox has begun shipping its four-screen graphics adaptor. The part is pitched at back-to-basics PCs that act as display and input terminals for apps running on a server. It expects the device to appeal to trading rooms and other financial institutions that favour multi-screen rigs.

Obviously, this is not suited for gaming at all, or for people with small desks. I think we are experiencing the ‘shaver’ phenomenon with monitors. Three blades were not good enough, and neither was four. Maybe next we will see 5 blades. Err.. monitors.

T-Mobile and Danger Inc. officially unveiled the Sidekick 3 today, 6 days earlier then we had expected. DailyTech reported that the Sidekick 3 had cleared the FCC less than 2 weeks ago. The Sidekick 3 will get a swanky debut at The Hollywood Palladium where celebrities and Sidekick fans alike will fawn over the latest in mobile communications.

In continuing Sidekick news, the new version has many various improvements over the previous gen. If you want to get ahold of one, head into your T-Mobile store on July 10. Or try your luck at finding one in a cab.

It’s no secret Google is on a mission to provide a complete online office suite of tools and because of this I find them in quite a bit of trouble. The fact is that Google is creating office products with a vast majority of features that have been around for decades and not really improving on the user’s experience. There is hardly a reason to use their applications unless you have a mission critical need of instant file sharing and collaboration, which again appeals more to the business crowd and less to the average consumer.

I would personally never bother with an online application like this. Stand-alone, installed programs work far faster and are there when you are offline. Without a doubt though, it will be interesting to see how popular Googles solution will become.

After two weeks of enduring endless calls, emails, radio interviews, denials from the thieves, runaround from the police, and numerous late nights, the Sidekick guy finally got a resolution. Tonight, the NYPD picked up Sasha, the girl that either paid for the Sidekick from a cabbie, on the subway, or got it from her mother—their story isn’t quite straight yet.

If you’ve been following this story at all, as many have, it’s good to see it is finally resolved. It’s surprising it worked out to the owners favor. Persistence really can pay off.

Dano2k0 created a fully internal water-cooled Xbox 360. Unlike previous water-cooled Xbox 360 mods, this one has everything inside the original Xbox 360 case, including the water reservoir and pump. Both CPU (Zern GPU block) and GPU (Koolance GPU-180-H06 block) are water-cooled, with internal Tank-o-Matic mini reservoir, 12v thermaltake pump and DD fill port on the plexi window.

This is an incredible mod. Not only does it pack in some great cooling action, it is one of the most amazing modding jobs seen on a 360. We’ve seen water cooled 360’s before, but this is completely internal. Source: Slashdot.

Penryn, also known by Intel’s lithography team as P1266, is a 45nm unified core set for launch in 2007 that is also expected to stay into production into 2008. Intel has already produced SRAM samples for 45nm CPUs, as demonstrated in the lithography shot on the right. Aside from the process shrink on Penryn, the major divergence in design from Conroe is the new material design. With P1266, Intel shifts away from Silicon Dioxide gate dielectrics — a process the company has used since the mid-90s — to High-k dielectrics.

It’s hard to imagine 45nm when Conroe hasn’t been released yet, but even past that we should see 32nm in late 2008. It would be nice to have this much knowledge about upcoming AMD processors :)

News Corp.–the owner of MySpace–has been working to address concerns about the safety of the many teenage users of the site, while not clamping down on the freewheeling and flirtatious interchanges that are the source of its appeal. Next week, the site will restrict how users older than 18 can contact those aged 14 and 15. Older users sending a message asking to become friends with younger users will have to enter the recipients’ actual first and last names or their e-mail addresses, rather than simply their user names.

While this seems like a good idea, what’s stopping an adult from creating a new account under a false date of birth? In the end, it really comes down to people sticking to better judgement, instead of letting a service decide for them.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA, Jun 20, 2006 (CCNMatthews via COMTEX News Network) — ATI Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:ATYT)(TSX:ATY), a global leader for PC graphics, has been selected as the exclusive GPU provider for all IRBIS desktop PCs, produced for back-to-school season by K-Systems, one of the leading manufacturers of PCs in Russia. IRBIS computers with ATI graphics processors will be available in major Russian retail networks and online at www.k-systems.ru.

You can read the full press release here.

Cases & Enclosures
• LanWar 2006’s 8 Best Case Mods – Think Computers
• Thermaltake Armor Jr. Aluminum Computer Case – TweakNews
• Zalman HD160 HTPC Case – PC Apex

Cooling
• Scythe Mine CPU Cooler – Big Bruin
• Silverstone Nitrogon NT06 CPU Cooler – Red & Blackness

Memory & Storage
• Memory Corp Biometric USB Memory Key – Trusted Reviews
• SyncMAX PC2-5300 DDR2-667 Express Memory – PC Stats

Motherboards & CPU’s
• AMD AM2 3500+ Overclocking Adventure – Virtual-Hideout
• Foxconn NF4SLI7AA-8EKRS2 – Motherboards.org

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Music Gremlin MP3 Player and Service – Digital Trends

Video Cards & Monitor
• ASUS EN7900GT – GamePyre
• Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT gDDR3 256MB – Guru3D
• Gigabyte GeForce 7300GT Turbo Force – Legion Hardware
• HIS and ATI tag team to deliver cool’n’quiet GT Crossfire – Hexus
• Leadtek WinFast 7950 GX2 TDH – Bjorn3D
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 Graphics Card – Rojak Pot

Etcetera, Complete Systems & Contests
• eMachines T6528 – HardOCP
• Lenovo’s ThinkPad T60p – BIOS Magazine

But not everything is superb, and that is especially true for the animations (that are quite jerky) and rag doll physics (which are exaggerated). This in itself isn’t too bad but the major problem is that it completely ruins the game’s wonderful immersion. When you see a body bend unrealistically in a small nook because the physics engine is too rudimentary or see Mr. 47, the main character, bend and open something at unnatural speeds, like a robot, you can’t help but feel that IO Interactive could have done a little bit of extra work to polish this aspect of the graphics.

Check out the review at Driver Heaven.

After 19 months, Nintendo has released an upgrade to the DS… but is it worthy? Nintendo paid attention to what people did not like about the original, and took care of it. We are taking a fresh look at the DS, and find out what the new revision has over the first.

EETimes is reporting this morning that IBM and Georiga Tech have demonstrated a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins. The ‘frozen chip’ was fabricated by IBM on 200mm wafers, and, at room temperature, the circuits operated at approximately 350 GHz.

It’s too bad that there are no pictures, or benchmarks to show off the true power of the beast. Either way, this is still an impressive feat.

A 14-year old girl and her mother have filed a $30 million lawsuit against the popular social networking site MySpace.com. The 14-year old claims she was abducted and sexually assaulted by a 19-year old man she met on MySpace.com. The suit alleges that because MySpace has no age or identity verification measures in place and does not prevent strangers from contacting users under the age of 16 that the site is negligent in the assault that occurred.

At what point did the girl think, “Wow, this is not the same guy I was expecting.” Even after clueing in, she would still get in the car? While I agree that age verification should be put into place on MySpace, a lot of this should be the parents responsibility.

On Saturday the 24th of June we at Bjorn3D will stress-test our Game Server by hosting a 64 people Battlefield 2 game.

The server will open up at 4:00PM Eastern and we will play for a few hours after that. Everyone helping us will have the chance of winning cool prizes from XFX. How do a XFX 7900GT VIVO, XFX Headphones + mic and a XFX gamepad sound?

Check out their site for more info!

Coming out of Norway this morning is the long awaited Opera 9,
after previous Beta/preview releases. Opera 9 is focused on being
efficient, productive, secure, stylish, and innovative. Some of the new
items in Opera 9.0 include Bit Torrent, content blocker, Widgets, site
preferences, and more. Here at Phoronix we have a few shots up of Opera
v9.0 under Linux.

The new version looks good… I may have to check this one out. I am doubtful it will drag me from Firefox, but it looks like a great release. You can check out a full pictorial at Phoronix, and download the latest version from Opera.

HOPKINTON, Mass. – June 19, 2006 – EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that it has acquired Newton, Massachusetts-based ProActivity Software Solutions Ltd., a privately held provider of content management software for business process management (BPM) . The acquisition is complete and is not expected to have a material impact on EMC revenue and EPS for 2006. ProActivity will be integrated immediately into the EMC Software Group. With its R&D operations in Netanya, Israel, ProActivity joins recently acquired Kashya and nLayers to form a foundation of EMC R&D in Israel, which EMC will continue to enhance over time.

You can read the full press release here.

Cases & Enclosures
• Sunbeam Tuniq2 Case – Overclocker Cafe

Cooling
• Cooler Master NanoFusion vs. Arctic Silver 5 – APH Networks
• Cooljag AMA-H AM2 Cooler – Pro-Clockers
• Thermaltake TR2-R1 Ultra silent AMD Athlon & Sempron heatsink – A1 Electronics
• Verax Quattro 1 Ultra-Quiet Heatsink – FrostyTech

Memory & Storage
• Corsair TWINX2048-4400PRO 2GB Memory Kit – MadShrimps

Motherboards & CPU’s
• Abit AT8 32x Crossfire 939 – Xtreme Computing
• Intel Core 2 – UK Gamer

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• NZXT Precise 650W ATX 2.0 SLi Power Supply – PC Apex
• Yesico Silentcool 560W – TweakPC
• VIZO Master Panel IDE + SATA Front Panel Interface – Extreme MHz

Video Cards & Monitor
• AVerMedia AVerTV CardBus Notebook TV Tuner – Think Computers
• Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT GDDR3 – Elite Bastards
• NVIDIA DualTV MCE Tuner Card – Digital Trends
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 – Driver Heaven
• XFX 7600GT XXX Edition – NV News

Building a new rig and can’t find a case that screams ‘gamer’? NZXT is a rather new company that’s making a splash in the case market, and they are releasing yet another new creation. This one is feature packed, looks great and it won’t even hurt the wallet.

Despite the horrible circumstances with heat and a crippling platform, the E6600 processor was pushed to quite extreme frequencies at a maximal bus speed of 450MHz, almost a new definition of “bottleneck”. A definition we had to withdraw a little later on as the heat almost took the overhand.

If a 74,000 3D Mark 01 score doesn’t get you excited, maybe a 13,600 3D Mark 06 score will? It certainly looks like if you ever manage to take a top spot at Futuremark, you will not last long with these guys around.

It is a cool thing to do and it seems everyone wants the part of the action. We saw Zalman doing it and now Corsair is set to follow suit. Its memory competitor OCZ has also been flogging its own Power Supply Units for a while and has had quite some success with it. Corsair is keeping quiet but it won’t be long before you see Corsair-branded Power Supply Units. We hear it wants to jump in to the high-end market rather than entry-level.

Though this comes from the Inq, there is likely truth in this. There was a Corsair branded PSU in their test PC at Computex, so it backs this claim up. I wonder if the PSU overclocks as well as the memory?