Tech News

Hardware Roundup for July 14

Posted on July 14, 2006 11:15 AM by Rob Williams
    Cases & Enclosures
  • Thermaltake SilverRiver 2.5 Laptop Hard Drive Enclosure – The Tech Zone
  • Ultra MicroFly Micro Case – 3D Gameman
    Memory & Storage
  • G.Skill DDR500 F1-4000USU2-2GBHZ 2x1GB – Overclockers Club
  • Seagate 2006 Technology Briefing – Rojak Pot
  • Thecus N5200 NAS Appliance – Hexus
    Motherboards & CPU’s
  • Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 35w and X2 4600+ 65w – AMDZone
  • Biostar TForce 6100 – OCIA
  • ECS KA3-MVP Extreme – Motherboards.org

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IBM Says It’s Lucky to Get 10% to 20% Yields on Cell Processor

Posted on July 13, 2006 11:30 AM by Rob Williams

With a chip like the Cell processor, you’re lucky to get 10 or 20 percent. If you put logic redundancy on it, you can double that.” According to Reeves, Sony will be using Cell processors whether they have all cores functional or not. Reeves says that the PlayStation 3 requires at least seven of the eight cores operational.

Things are looking worse for the PS3 as each day passes. Really, with such low yeilds, you have to wonder if there will be even deeper routed problems discovered in the future.

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60% of XBOX 360 Gamers Use XBOX Live

Posted on July 13, 2006 11:20 AM by Rob Williams

According to the latest statistics, 60% of XBOX 360 users are using XBOX Live. That is a dramatic increase from the 10% attach rate with the original XBOX console. Of the 60% that are on XBOX Live, 75% use the XBOX Live Marketplace where over 30 million downloads have taken place. 65% of connected users visit the XBOX Live Arcade where more than 5 million games have been downloaded.

This is not really THAT much of a surprise. It’s a great service that just keeps getting better as time goes by, in my opinion. Hopefully it will keep up that way.

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AMD Begins First Revenue Shipments of AMD64 Products Manufactured At Chartered

Posted on July 13, 2006 11:16 AM by Rob Williams

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA AND SINGAPORE – July 13, 2006— AMD (NYSE:
AMD) announced that in June it began its first revenue shipments of
AMD64 processors manufactured at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing
in Singapore. AMD and Chartered ramped 300mm production at Fab 7 in
record time, hitting all major milestones and starting production at
mature yields. Initial shipments out of Chartered consisted of
microprocessors manufactured on 90nm process technology. The ramp of
volume production at Chartered combined with recent announcements in
Dresden shows that AMD will have the ability to intelligently scale and
flex production in line with customer demand.

You can read the full press release here.

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Hardware Roundup for July 13

Posted on July 13, 2006 11:14 AM by Rob Williams
    Cases & Enclosures
  • SilverStone Lascala LC20M – Phoronix
  • Vizo LUX-350SA-BK – MadBoxPC (Spanish)
    Motherboards & CPU’s
  • ECS 945G-M3 – GamePyre
    Etcetera, Complete Systems & Contests
  • Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 – Digital Trends

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New Research Promises 50TB on DVD-size Discs

Posted on July 12, 2006 1:15 PM by Rob Williams

The next generation of high density storage media may come from the most unlikely of places. According to professor V Renugopalakrishnan of Harvard’s Medical School in Boston, the research he and his team are working on promises storage capacities of up to 50TB (50,000GB) on a disc the same size as a conventional DVD.

This is absolutely amazing, no doubt about it. The future looks good in terms of storage though. We may end up at a time where we will never have to worry about a new HDD upgrade again.

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Microsoft to Release 80’s Games for XBOX 360

Posted on July 12, 2006 1:12 PM by Rob Williams

Microsoft announced today that due to the popularity of its downloading service for the XBOX 360, it will release one game from the 1980’s era every Wednesday for the next five weeks. Available for subscribers through XBOX Live Arcade, the games will be updated versions of classic arcade games such as Pac-Man and Frogger. The going price will range from $5 to $15 per game.

I have downloaded Frogger, and it seems quite good so far. I am upset that Contra is no longer listed, but at least Street Fighter is on the way.

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Hardware Roundup for July 12

Posted on July 12, 2006 12:35 PM by Rob Williams
    Cooling
  • Vapochill Lightspeed Dress-up Kit – BurnoutPC
    Memory & Storage
  • OCZ Technology PC3200 DDR Special Ops Edition 2048MB Kit – Big Bruin
  • Super Talent’s 2.5″ IDE Flash hard drive – Tech Report
    Motherboards & CPU’s
  • abit KN9 SLI – nForce 570 SLI – Hexus
  • AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (AM2) Overclocking Performance – TechSpot
    Etcetera, Complete Systems & Contests
  • Apple iMac Core Duo 17-inch – Digital Trends
  • Latest Turion X2 Notebook from Acer – AMD Board
  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS – ASE Labs
  • Ultra Power Supply Tester – 3D Gameman

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More AMD 65nm Updates

Posted on July 11, 2006 11:00 AM by Rob Williams

Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron processors will be getting 65nm Fab process treatments. Single-core AMD Athlon products will remain on a 90nm Fab process with no foreseeable 65nm future. With the new 65nm Fab process AMD will be able to increase frequency increases of 100MHz increments unlike the 200MHz increments of current products. This will be interesting as AMD can theoretically abandon all 2x1MB parts in favor of 2x512KB parts with 100MHz frequency differences.

Everything seems fine, except for these 100MHz increments. Are we going to be seeing ‘more’ processor models, because of the extra freedom? I think it would pay off to keep things simple, really.

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Intel Lays Down Path for 32-Core Processors

Posted on July 11, 2006 10:49 AM by Rob Williams

Recent reports suggest that Intel is working on research for 32-core CPUs by 2010. The new processor will contain a total of 24MB of last-level LL cache split among processor nodes. The CPU is anticipated to contain eight processor nodes with four cores per node and 3MB of LL cache to each node. Intel says that BBUL packaging method (which was actually announced back in 2001) will be just as crucial to attaining these specifications as is reducing transistor size.

Unless they make huge strides in production, this is going to be one large CPU. I guess this begs the question though.. which games will support it? :)

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95 AMD End-of-Life Products

Posted on July 11, 2006 10:46 AM by Rob Williams

DailyTech previously reported AMD’s end-of-life dates for remaining Socket 939 and 754 products. It appears AMD has released a few more PCNs with updates on mobile and server end-of-life (EOL), which includes single-core Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, Sempron, Turion and Opteron products. This brings the total number of EOL’ed products this quarter to 95.

Not that this will affect much, it’s interesting to see which have been EOL’ed. AMD is -really- starting to push AM2.

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End of Win 98 Support May Boost Desktop Linux

Posted on July 11, 2006 10:42 AM by Rob Williams

Microsoft kills off support for Windows 98 and Windows ME today, and ZDNet is reporting that the move will boost demand for Linux on the desktop. Unlike two years ago when support for Win98 was extended because Linux was seen as a serious competitor this time it seems there is no turning back.

Somehow I doubt that this will boost Linux use, unless it’s for a business.. maybe. It’s not like people are not allowed to use the OS anymore.. there’s just no more support.

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OCZ Technology Announces their Highly-Anticipated New Tempest CPU Cooler

Posted on July 11, 2006 10:38 AM by Rob Williams

Sunnyvale, CA—July 10, 2006—OCZ Technology Group, Inc. a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the anticipated release of the OCZ Tempest, the pinnacle of air and heat pipe CPU cooling technology. A perpetual commitment to the enthusiast community and previous experience in advanced cooling led to OCZ’s unveiling of the Tempest. The Tempest implements a state-of-the-art design to address the demanding cooling requirements of gamers and enthusiasts.

You can read the full release here.

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Hardware Roundup for July 11

Posted on July 11, 2006 10:35 AM by Rob Williams
    Cases & Enclosures
  • Thermaltake Kandalf LCS – Technic3D
    Cooling
  • Cooler Master Hyper L3 Socket 775 CPU Cooler – PC Apex
  • Enermax Marathon Enlobal – Phoronix
  • Zalman VF700-AlCu VGA Heatsink – FrostyTech
  • Zalman ZM-STG1 Super Thermal Grease – Big Bruin
    Memory & Storage
  • G.Skill 2x 512MB PC3200 – OC Inside
    Motherboards & CPU’s
  • Conroe nForce Chat – Thursday, 7-13-2006 – Bjorn 3D
  • nForce 4 590/570 SLI Intel Family Preview – Motherboards.org
    Video Cards & Monitor
  • World’s first pics of Vista D3D10 hardware? – Hexus

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Reverse Hyperthreading does not exist

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:49 AM by Rob Williams

Apologies to the fanbois, but I am about to kill some nice AMD dreams. Reverse Hyperthreading does not exist. It’s one of the bigger loads of bluff and bluster cooked up in a long time.

AMD doesn’t have any such technology. It would like to have it but even the upcoming K8L quad core won’t be able to present a dual or quad core as a single core to the Operating system.

I am one who personally won’t care either way if reverse hyperthreading comes to be, but it -would- be an interesting concept. If it’s not true.. then where did the idea originate?

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Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate Available for Download

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:47 AM by Rob Williams

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 RC has been released. Microsoft has been garnering a lot of attention recently with the public betas of its Internet Explorer 7.0 browser, so the Mozilla Foundation can now steal a bit of that limelight.

If you like to live on the bleeding edge, go check out what’s new. Firefox tends to be unstable enough as is, so I will hold off until an official release.

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Cutting out the Naughty Bits Ruled Illegal

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:43 AM by Rob Williams

Some of you may recall the lawsuit brought by several Hollywood directors against companies which edit movies for sex, language, and violence. The companies would trade consumers an off-the-shelf DVD for an edited one. Well, the CBC is reporting that Judge Richard P. Matsch has found that this practice violates US copyright law, and ‘decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an “illegitimate business.”

I was never one to understand this foolish censoring to begin with, but it’s good to know it’s actually not appropriate. Chances are, if you are watching a movie with such material, you don’t care either way. Else you would not be watching it.

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Interview Looks at How and Why Wikipedia Works

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:41 AM by Rob Williams

This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working. The interview was conducted via email in preparation of WikiSym 2006, the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, with the goal of furthering Wikipedia research.

This is not a pretty looking interview, but it’s packed with information for those who want to know the in and outs of the Wikipedia.

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Another Ornithopter Takes Off

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:39 AM by Rob Williams

Ornithopters have been around for a while, but a professor at the Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies has made progress with his. It flew for 14 seconds and covered a third of a kilometer. However it landed with a bit of a crash. Interestingly it uses a glow jet turbine from RC aircraft.

Fourteen seconds doesn’t exactly show much hope for the future of Ornithopters, but they are still very cool to watch.

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Linux Compatibility Hardware List Launches

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:26 AM by Rob Williams

In an effort to create a more definitive resource for the
collectivism of Linux-compatible hardware, Phoronix.com has announced
the creation of Phoronix LCH. Phoronix LCH is a community-driven
indexing system where anyone can contribute by sharing their Linux
hardware successes and failures. The database is completely free to use,
and Linux users are invited to participate, or those that will be making
the Linux jump shortly.

This is not the first of it’s kind, but it’s shaping up to be invaluable. Definitely check it out and add to if your hardware is not listed!

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Malibal Expands GPU Selections on 19” NVIDIA SLI Notebooks

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:22 AM by Rob Williams

Las Vegas, Nev., July 10, 2006 — MALIBAL, LLC, a world leader in innovative laptop design and development, today announced the addition of several NVIDIA® GPU options to its line of Veda Series™ notebooks. Available immediately, customers now have a choice between Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7900 GTX 512MB GPUs, Dual NVIDIA Quadro® FX 2500M 512MB GPUs or a single NVIDIA Quadro® FX 2500M 512MB GPU.

You can read the full press release here.

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Hardware Roundup for July 10

Posted on July 10, 2006 9:20 AM by Rob Williams
    Motherboards & CPU’s
  • AM2 motherboards both from MSI and ASUS – DNR Hardware
  • Foxconn 975X7AA-8EKRS2H Intel 975X – Viper Lair
  • Overclocking the Athlon AMD XP-M chip – TechDomain
  • Tyan Tiger i7520SD S5365 – Phoronix
    Peripherals & Power Supplies
  • Coolermaster eXtreme Power Duo 650W PSU – Pro-Clockers
  • Everglide s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones – Big Bruin
  • Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2 – XYZ Computing
  • Scythe Stealth Semi-Fanless Power Supply – ModTheBox
  • Super Talent 2GB MEGA Screen MP3/FM/Video Media Player – Bona Fide Reviews
  • Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD Player – Digital Trends
    Video Cards & Monitor
  • BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT, 7900 GTX and 7600 GT OC – Hexus
  • EVGA e-GeForce 7900GTX 512MB SLI Video Card – Motherboards.org
    Etcetera, Complete Systems & Contests
  • Canon PowerShot S3 IS – BIOS Magazine
  • USB Cafe Pad – MadBox PC (Spanish)
  • Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Review Part 3 – Rojak Pot
  • WSVG’s Intel Summer Championship – techFEAR

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DoD: Source Free Weekend On Now

Posted on July 8, 2006 10:46 AM by Rob Williams

The second Day of Defeat: Source Free Weekend has begun. This free trial period features all the new content added in the Summer Update to Day of Defeat: Source, including the new gameplay type (Detonation), new missions (Jagd, Colmar) and gameplay and technology enhancements. To join the ranks, visit www.steamgames.com and set up a free account. All Steam users also receive free access to the recently added Media area, which features the DoD movie shorts and a growing collection of game trailers.

If you have not played this great game yet, here’s your perfect chance. Step to it men!

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Creative Sound Blaster X-FI XtremeMusic Review

Posted on July 8, 2006 10:46 AM by Rob Williams

If you are serious about your audio or gaming you need to get off of the onboard sound and switch to The X-FI. There is a lot going for this card with all it’s little extras and the different gaming modes. I didn’t even get a chance to get into the cool things about EAX and Macro sounds. With all the benefits of this card I can’t see any reason not to at least buy this entry level X-FI sound card.

Check out the full review over at Modders-Inc.

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MSI Mega mPC 945 SFF PC Review

Posted on July 8, 2006 10:44 AM by Rob Williams

Dubbed the Mega mPC 945, MSI is offering a robust little unit which is built around Intel’s 945G chipset, and loaded up with integrated features that help it standout from the pack. We’ll run the Mega mPC 945 through its paces and size it up to see just what this Small Form Factor PC brings to the game. From design, ease of assembly to performance and features, we’ll try to give you clear picture as to just how “Mega” the Mega mPC 945 stacks up.

Check out the full review at HotHardware.

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