Content and news by Rob Williams

“HITACHI GLOBAL STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES was the first manufacturer to announce hard drives supporting the new 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, but there’s more to Hitachi’s new Deskstar T7K250 drives than a faster interface speed. For starters, the latest Deskstar rolls with 125GB platters that are more than 50% denser than the company’s older 80GB platters. This drive is also the first from Hitachi to support Native Command Queuing.”

Head over to Tech Report for the in-depth look!

“Three or four degrees difference over the Zalman cooler may not seem like much, but to an enthusiast that may mean the difference in a decent overclock and a great overclock. Naturally when compared to the stock cooler on the 3.4 there is no surprise in the huge temperature difference, but it does give a great example of how much more efficient the XP-90 is.”

Check out the full review at Viper Lair!

Fremont, CA (May 25, 2005) – Corsair® Memory, Inc., a worldwide leader in high performance memory and cooling products for enthusiasts and overclockers, today is pleased to announce expansion of its popular flash memory products. Adopting the industry’s popular speed designation, the new Corsair Secure Digital (SD) and type I Compact Flash (CF) media are now rated at blazing fast 60X (9 MB/sec) or 80X (12MB/sec). Designed with the advanced users and photo journalists in mind who demand performance with uncompromising reliability, Corsair’s new high speed flash memory products are compatible with most popular digital cameras and handheld devices.

12MB a second! Now that’s serious transfer speed. Corsair states that they are available immediately through Newegg, ZipZoomFly, TigerDirect, Fry’s Electronics and other Corsair authorized resellers.

“Packing support for NVIDIA’s SLI technology via nForce4 SLI core logic, along with support for dual-core Opteron, the ZMAXd2 crams even more into the same space, doubling the CPU and graphics power with help from a new 400W power supply, specially developed by IWILL for the unit.”

If you are looking to build a killer SFF PC, check out this review. Dual CPU’s and SLi? Crazy! Check it out, at Hexus.

“OCZ surpasses themselves with their latest DDR entry. The Platinum PC5000 is the fastest rated memory and provides cutting edge performance. If you have the cash to spared, don’t even think twice. But sadly, we’re not all rich.”

Expensive, but turns out to have great benchmarking results. Read all about it at InsaneTek.

“On 18th of May, 2005, ITJournoAsia posted an interview titled “To Write A Right BIOS – The Rojakpot.com Way”.

In this interview, ITJournoAsia’s Aaron Koh grilled our very own Adrian Wong about being one of the few Asian tech writers to actually publish a book! Check it out!”

Check it out over at Rojak Pot!

AMD has had their share of new CPU releases lately, and more are coming. Recently, they released the Venice and San Diego chips, with a 90nm core, added SSE3 support, and has superb overclocking potential. They also use less power, which means lower temps! Read on as I put the Venice 3200+ through a slew of benchmarks.

“We know that we’ve got an opportunity to provide IT the types of controls that they need for this concept that we call the ‘million dollar document,’ which is one of those documents or spreadsheets that (contain) a million dollars or more worth of IP (intellectual property),” Chris Capossela, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Information Worker unit, said during a meeting at a recent company-sponsored CEO summit here. “Those have got be something that IT could control. But we still want people using Excel to be able to build them.”

Read about it at News.com.

“Several months ago, a small start up company by the name of AGEIA brought a new term into the lexicon of PC gaming enthusiasts. A new product was outlined with promises of being “the next big thing” for gamers and developers alike to bring about a world of realism like we have never seen before. We all first heard about the PPU, or Physics Processor Unit, and its first form, the AGEIA PhysX processor.”

This is an in-depth article, and explains clear what AGEIA’s PhysX is all about, and even includes screenshots. You can check it out here.

“Computer users already anxious about viruses and identity theft have a new reason to worry: hackers have found a way to lock up the electronic documents on your computer and then demand $200 (about R1 200) over the Internet to get them back.”

Wow.. this is asinine. Symantec compared it to having a goon come into your house, and put your valuables in a safe, and hide the combination code. Anti-Virus companies, such as Symantec are already working on updates to their software, for this ‘ransom-ware’. Read more at iol.

” The story takes place two years after the disaster on the Mars facility run by the United Aerospace Corporation (UAC). The UAC accountants found out the nameless marine from Doom 3 forgot to pick up the petty cash drawer from the depths of Delta Labs, so they decide to mount an expedition to go and recover it. It hardly matters that the previous lab was drawn into the barriers of Hell itself, lost thousands of personnel, and nearly doomed the human race to extinction. A buck is a buck. Well, that’s not really the precedence behind the expansion to Doom 3, Resurrection of Evil, but it is equally absurd.”

Overall, they gave the game a super painful 4.5/10 score. You can check out the full review over at NetJak.

“Microsoft’s MSN division will enhance its search engine in the next couple of weeks by adding a local search index for finding business directory listings. Later, the company will supplement this with MSN Virtual Earth, a free new service that will pinpoint places in maps and satellite images.”

Ok, that sounds nothing like Googles recent dealve into sattelite maps. Ok, it sounds EXACTLY like a rip off of it. But, it will be nice if they make it even better.. we’ll see. Read about it at Yahoo News.

“The latest tactic for the 100,000-members of the Spread Firefox movement is to make commercials. Funnyfox, three humorous video clips showing web surfers using the browser for the first time, is the slickest contribution to date. Designed to be emailed to friends, the videos — one of which shows a user’s head falling off — have proved so popular extra servers had to be set up to cope with the load.”

Haha, great stuff. There are three web-mercials to watch, and you can check them out at Funnyfox. You can also read the source article at Wired.com.

“BFG is a relative newcomer on the computer enthusiast scene, making a name for themselves with high quality and performance-centric NVIDIA based video cards. Their commitment to the enthusiast remains unrivaled with their products being some of the fastest in their class. Recently, BFG decided to pursue new product areas, with motherboard products among them.”

BFG makes awesome video cards, so it’s cool that they are expanding their horizons. In the end, it turns out to be a great board as well! Check out the full review at Hard|OCP.

“The Thermaltake Sonic Tower cooler arrives in a see through plastic box as many other Thermaltake products I have layed my hands on. There’s a black box at the bottom with all the necessery screws, nuts, brackets, installation guide, and so on in it. Features and specifications are printed on the red piece of paper. In the right picture you will for the first time see how huge this cooler is with your own eyes, it’s a beast!”

Check out the review at R&B Mods to see why they call it the Tower!

“The Samsung SF-565P not only sports the copying, faxing and document scanning features you’d expect from an MFP, but it also features a fully-fledged monochrome laser printing engine. The Samsung SF-565P’s major selling points are its claimed 17ppm laser printing and copying speed, speedy 33.6k fax modem and spacious 250 sheet paper tray. All of these are features that will gladden the heart of potential users, especially those with a lot of paper to chew through. Let’s see how this Samsung MFP measured up in our test lab.”

Head over to PC Stats for the full review.

“Yes, it is a big heatsink and requires that you have some room (OK, a lot) around your CPU socket, but the Big Typhoon’s design keeps it from have any clearance problems with components on the motherboard. Overall, I think Thermaltake did an excellent job with the Big Typhoon!”

Check out the full review at Lan Addict!

“Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.”

This sounds like a legal disaster waiting to happen. Of course, BitTorrent has many legal uses, but a search engine that would also allow you to acquire commercial software.. is not going to go over well. We’ll see how it goes once released though. Read the full article at Wired.

“Kim Stowe talks briefly about their plans for the upcoming PC game physics hardware chip.
Last March, a company called AEGIA made headlines with their plans to release a PC hardware chip that would improve physics in games. Now Gamecloud has a brief update from the company’s spokesperson Kim Stowe about their plans for the chip.”

Small interview, but it says a lot. They already have 18 Developers/Publishers looking to use the PhysX technology. They even expect the first incarnation to be released this coming Christmas as an Add-In card, which will likely end up being for PCI-E 1x. Check out the full interview at Game Cloud.

“For most of its history, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. was dismissed as little more than an x86 clone chipmaker, producing processors that mimic the features and capabilities of those from industry leader Intel. But in the past two years, AMD at times has shown up its much larger rival by introducing innovative microprocessors that forced Intel into the unfamiliar position of reacting to competition.”

AMD’s CEO also mentioned that he hopes for a third of the CPU market within the next two or three years. If things keep going the way they are, that could happen easily. Especially if large companies, such as Dell, finally get a clue and include AMD as an option. Read the full article at Information Week.