Content and news by Rob Williams

“ATI is touting the TV Wonder Elite as one of the first TV tuner cards to be certified by the Imaging Science Research Labs (ISF RL). Similar to the way THX certifies a home theater receiver for using specific components and having certain specifications, the ISF RL has worked in conjunction with Microsoft to develop an industry standard for video quality specifications for use with Windows XP Media Center Edition.”

Check out the full review at Design Technica.

“Measuring 22” tall, 8” wide, and 19” deep, the Temjin TJ06 is by no means small. At 24 lbs, this full tower case isn’t light, either. The case can accommodate standard mATX, ATX, and even E-ATX motherboards, making it a contender in the desktop, workstation, and server markets.”

Everybody needs a back breaking tower! Check out the full review at Tech Report.

“Sunbeamtech was kind enough to send over some of their best and brightest… A collection of just a few of their case lighting products. We’ll take a quick look at products including their Lazer LEDs, Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lights, and a Blue LED Fan.”

Check out the review of these products at Big Bruin.

” MARKHAM, Ontario–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 3, 2005–ATI Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:ATYT) (TSX:ATY) has been selected as a finalist for Company of the Year (Large) for the 2005 EE Times Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards. ATI was selected for successful leadership in the electronics industry based on both product success and employee performance. EE Times (www.eetimes.com) is the premier technology and business newsweekly for the creators of technology. EE Times print editions reach more than 200,000 electronics professionals worldwide and each month more than 5 million pages on its online editions are viewed by electronics professionals from more than 100 countries.”

Way to go ATI! Read the full Press Release at the official site here!

“Immediately you will notice that the Leadtek PX6800 TDH is built from the green PCB of yesteryear. I found the placement of the RAM curious since I rarely see RAM situated in a 45 degree in relation to the card layout. This peculiar layout is due to Leadtek’s “Ultra Cooling System” where the RAM is placed in a radial pattern around the GPU cooler which is designed to vent air across the RAM.”

Green PCB? Odd RAM positioning? Is this a conspiracy? Find out at PimpRig.

“MARKHAM, Ontario–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 2, 2005— At this year’s premiere game development show, the Game Developers Conference (GDC), ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY) (NASDAQ:ATYT) will have a range of activities supporting the development community. The ATI booth, technical talks and a mobile developer event will be highlights of this annual event, preparing developers for an exciting year ahead in which the industry is anticipating handheld gaming will gain significant traction, console transitions appear to be on the horizon and desktop performance is now a reality in notebooks.”

The whole PR can be had here.

If you are wondering what mid-range PCI-E graphics card you should get, Bit-Tech is here to help. They are comparing three cards: BFGTech GeForce 6600GT OC, Club3D Radeon X700 Pro 256MB and the HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO edition 256MB.

“The mainstream sector is a very important area of the market for both ATI and NVIDIA – we evaluate three mainstream PCI-Express video cards from BFG, Club3D and HIS to find out where our money lies.”

Check out the full comparison at Bit-Tech.

“The timing of the latest announcement marks a slight acceleration in song download activity. It took around 41 days for Apple to sell 50m further downloads after passing the 200m mark. The next 50m downloads were sold in 36 days. It’s difficult to be precise because Apple didn’t say when exactly it sold its track numbers 200m, 250m and 300m, but it’s clear songs are being downloaded more frequently.”

Welp, that’s more music than I have. Check the full article at The Register.

“The Logitech V500 Cordless Notebook Mouse is without a doubt, the sleekest mobile mice I have ever laid eyes on. The stylist, ultra-thin mouse blends uncompromising performance with the ultimate in mobility. Like a high-end sport car, the V500 is loaded with innovations – an expandable chassis, a touch-sensitive solid-state scrolling panel, and 2.4GHz wireless technology – all wrapped up in a sleek design that will turn heads.”

This is definately a great looking mouse.. but how does it perform? Only one way to find out.

There are Intel Developer Forum reports all over the place today. After all the announcements yesterday, there are even more today, although some not as exciting.

AnandTech

Inquirer
The Register
Legit Reviews
Hexus

Each one of those sites has some great information discovered from the IDF. I am sure even more info will become available as time goes by.

“The Vortec 500 shares the spotlight with the Vigor 500, but where the Vigor left off, the Vortec continues. The Vortec 500 features a fully light-weight Blue aluminium housing that not only looks great, but also enhances the overall performance of the entire system. With two large blue LED fans keeping the interior cool, there is no worry for overheating. Two blue acrylic windows enhance the overall look giving gamers the edge on the competition.”

It’s unreal how many different ways you can make a ‘simple’ PSU look cool, and this ones not quite like any others. Check out the full review over at PC Modding.

“Yes, while we appreciate these are only optional extras for a computer water cooled heatsink system we do think that the H20 temperature indicator is a very handy item for all H20 cooler heatsink systems as it will allow you to adjust the fan speed on your radiator /s for optimum cooling performance to speed / noise of the fan or fans. Especially handy during the hot summer months and then down again for winter.”

Check out the full review at A1 Electronics.

“If you’re only interested in cooling, and your case already does an adequate job of keeping your hard drive cool, this is not a required purchase. On the other hand, the Cool Drive Lite does shield some of the hard drive noise, and the included fan is essentially silent so if you’re building a silent PC, you might want to give the Cool Drive Lite some consideration.”

If you want to keep your HDD’s cool, check out the review over at Viper Lair.

“Most of the above listed features are standard with the majority of quality power supplies, but the 85% efficiency is by far the highest rated value of any currently available PSU. Much like the fanless design, this is big news. Mechanically, efficiency is the ratio of useful energy delivered by a machine to the energy supplied for its operation. In power supplies, the rest is given off as heat. The industry standard is currently close to 70% with quality units ranging between 75%-80%. 70% vs. 85% may not seem like much, but consider this mathematically ideal situation: using a 300 watt load (more than adequate even for high-end systems), an 85% efficient PSU will give off 45 watts as heat; a 70% efficient PSU will give off 90 watts as heat – that’s twice as much! So, even 15% of extra efficiency translates into half the heat output.”

Look ma, no fans! Definately a cool looking PSU. Check the full review at Mikhailtech.

Anandtech is reporting back from the IDF (Intel Developer Forum), with the latest news on the new Pentium D chips. D is obviously for “Dual-Core”, and it’s promising some impressive efficiency and speed.

The 90nm chips, which also feature a 2*1mb cache, will be launched with three versions, ranging from 2.8GHz – 3.2GHz. Also revamped is the P-Extreme Edition, which launches at 3.2GHz speed, with 2*2 threads, meaning to per core. Check out all the latest reports on this over at AnandTech.

“The top of the range chip will be the new Extreme Edition which operates at 3.73GHz and has a 1066MHz bus. The new Extreme Edition differs not only by supporting 64-bit operating systems, but also with its cache size, which has actually been reduced in total by 512KB. The reason for this is that the older 3.46GHz had 512KB of Level 2 cache and 2MB of Level 3 cache, while the new 3.73GHz processor only has 2MB of Level 2 cache. The micron process used on the die has also shrunk to 90 nanometre compared to 130 on the 3.46GHz part.”

There’s no benchmarks to be had, but there is a lot of indepth details to both these top end CPU’s. Check out the full look at TrustedReviews.

“Rules? It’s simple! Contestants will sign up in our forums and post this trigger line “Corsair rules the world!” that will automatically enter you into the contest. Winners will be picked via raffle style draw. One entry per sign up, contestants agrees to sign up for Corsair’s monthly news letter via e-mail. 4 Winners, 4 Prizes, 4 Gigs! (1GB kit will be award to 4 winners). Prizes are new in the box, shipped directly from Corsair! Contest ends on March 15th with winners being announced March 16th. Good luck!”

You must want a stick of Corsair ram! Check out MVKTech and enter!

Logitech has always been known for making great computer peripherals. They are the world leader in Webcams, and make great Keyboards, Mice, Speakers and tons more. But how about their gamepads? PC gamepads are incredibly difficult to get right, especially for a gamer who is expecting console equivalent feel and design. Read on to see how their RumblePad 2 controller fares in our review.

Logisys has really been building up their line of modding products with great stuff. With each new case they release, it always seems to improve on their previous ones, in both accessibility, as well as style. The Janus case is certainly no exception.. this case is great. What’s so great about it, and how does it compare to other cases out there?

“Since memory modules of the same density are used, ATI had to retune the R480’s memory controller to properly address the additional memory with a minimal performance impact, without this the added memory would have introduced additional latency, hampering performance. Physically, you’ll see the return of double-sided memory, as the 512MB X850 XT card has memory modules on both sides of the board’s PCB. Other than this change however, the X850 XT 512MB HD looks practically identical to previous X850 XT boards, right down to the same dual-slot cooling.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how this card performs compared to it’s 256MB counterpart. ATI claims that it gives considerable performance increases in games like Doom III, HL2 and FarCry. Check out the full report over at Firing Squad.