Technical Newz: May 2010

Monday, May 24, 2010

A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs.

In the race to get a USB3 capable mini-ITX motherboard to market, Gigabyte has today announced the first entry into the arena - the GA-H55N-USB3.

Measuring a tiny 17cm x 17cm, this board is a stark contrast the the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 released last week.

A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs.

If you're willing to pay the price premium and limit maximum capacity, today's SSDs are very fast and if you choose well, reliable.

Last month we mentioned NVIDIA's plans for their upcoming drivers: the 256 series of drivers (don't ask us why they jumped from 197 to 256).

Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers.

Apple recently updated their MacBook Pro range, leaving the entry level MacBook and the niche MacBook Air looking rather left out. Now it is the white plastic MacBook's turn to be brought back to terms with its aluminum siblings. Like the 13” MacBook Pro,

Today we're partnering up with the experts at CyberLink to introduce the principles underlying 3D video, how it is created, and how it's displayed. Our main interest is Blu-ray 3D, so we'll be exploring the tech your 3D-enabled home theater might include.

A Single Slot GTX 470 from Galaxy

Power and heat output are often issues which stride the minds of graphics card enthusiasts.

Sufficient cooling and a beefy power supply are often a prerequisite if one wishes to invest in NVIDIA’s latest Fermi offering. So what happens when we catch word of a single slot graphics card containing a Fermi GPU?

Sceptre’s 27” X270W-1080P LCD is targeted primarily at PC gamers and desktop productivity segments of the market.

ASUS has been making great strides in the laptop designs over the past couple of years. It used to be that an ASUS laptop meant good performance with generally poor battery life at a reasonable price, but that all started to change with the launch of the original Eee PC.

Yesterday HP launched three new Value LCD monitors, the S2031, S2231 and S2331 coming in at 20” 21.5” and 23” respectively. These are essentially entry-level models with average specifications and connectivity.

Gateway has announced the NV59C and NV7 series of notebooks featuring 15.6” and 17.3” screens respectively. These models will be Gateway’s two pronged attack on the crowded mainstream notebook market.

Pakistan has blocked Facebook over "Draw Mohammed" Day. The Facebook page at the center of the dispute -- "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" -- encourages users to post images of the prophet on May 20 to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of South Park for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit.

Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9.

Do you have a growing family at home slowly eating away at your bandwidth? Maybe you're a web surfing fanatic looking for a little more speed?

After launching many consumer and business notebooks last week, HP have announced a further addition to their growing notebook family.

British adventurer and pilot Neil Laughton poses in his Parajet Skycar in London on Tuesday. Laughton and his Parajet Skycar Expedition team on Wednesday are kicking off a 3,600-mile journey from London to Timbuktu in the vehicle, which is essentially a dune buggy with a fan motor and paragliding wing attached. Creators call it the "world's first bio-fueled flying car."

Back in 2006, technology newcomer Bigfoot Networks announced the Killer NIC, an unusual network interface card targeted at the high-end gaming market.

With this coming fairly shortly after solid consumer-grade NICs became universally integrated in to motherboards, the timing wasn’t the best. At $280, neither was the price.

Sources close to Seagate roadmaps have leaked the potential of a 3TB SAS drive being released this year.

The quest for storage is almost a never ending saga. Dubbed the Constellation-ES, the replacement for the Seagate Barracuda-ES, the drive is expected to arrive later this year with a 7200 RPM rotation speed, and a 6Gbit/s SAS interface. A 1TB version of the 2.5" Barracuda-ES is also expected to arrive around the mid year point.

AMD today have launched five new processors, to replace current products, ranging from the budget Athlon II X2 260 to the Athlon II X4 610.

Atom was designed to be a low-cost, low-power solution, but its value in the desktop space is debatable if you consider performance. We pit the cheapest Core i3 against Intel's Atom on a performance-per-dollar and a per-watt basis to see which is better.

The newest product to be thrusted into Intel's server arsenal will be called Westmere-EX, and is set to directly compete with AMD's Mangy-Cours server chip which features 12 cores, and AMD's future Bulldozer architecture.

I'm very proud of companies like ASUS and HTC. These aren't your tradtional consumer electronics companies. They have their roots in the OEM business, working hard but for very little recognition.

It’s been a criminally long time since we’ve had a display review, partly because we’ve been changing and revamping our test bench with some new things you’ve been asking for,

The Fermi cards have now been out (and only just available) for the just over a month. Like the AMD 5xxx series, the first cards used reference PCBs and reference coolers -

Announcing high end products and 'Halo' type hardware is relatively easy for manufacturers - slap some snazzy artwork next to a few pictures, wring a few industry related endorsements, put the major selling points in big letters, write a website page for it, and maybe run a competition to let a couple of people win one.

The nForce 2 was one of the best chipsets to come out of NVIDIA. It was NVIDIA’s second attempt at a desktop chipset yet it cemented NVIDIA’s position as a leading provider of core logic in the market. Oh how much has changed since then.

The whole 'fastest memory' halo product race is a bit of a farce.
In terms of DDR3, Corsair started the race back in 2007 with their first set of Dominator modules, running at 1600Mhz, 10-8-8-24. This has been followed and bested, mainly by Corsair, but with sneak appearances by Kingston, G.Skill and Patriot (see below).

Galaxy have pleasantly surprised us, and the folks at vr-zone. To the table, they bring their GTX 470 GC, a 100% non-reference design graphics card utilising an NVIDIA GeForce Fermi 470 GPU.

So far we’ve looked at three different mini-ITX motherboards here at Anandtech over the past 6 months. While each of the products we’ve reviewed have ticked a certain number of boxes,

We’ve already looked at a number of systems with Intel’s CULV platform, but interestingly, all of them have been of the dual-core variety.

The first generation of HP ENVY notebooks were unfortunately let down by comparisons to the superior Apple MacBook Pro laptops which they shared a large amount of styling with and unfortunately shared the rather steep pricing.

Launched last December, Google Goggles is capable of recognizing the user's snapshots and translating them. It runs on Android smartphones equipped with cameras. Google Goggles can also match snapshots with popular search returns for landmarks, book covers, artwork, places and even corporate logos.

Supermicro have launched today their second generation of GPU computing servers, using NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs.

Intel’s second-gen Atom platform, Moorestown, positions the chip giant to have a killer smartphone and MID platform in 2010. The old Atom Z5xx drawbacks seem fixed. Why does Moorestown rock, and will it be enough to let Intel advance in this market?

Designed specifically for people who are actively navigating their social lives, Kin blends the phone, online services and the PC," reads Microsoft's release touting the phones' release date and price. "With Kin, you get full, rich PC-like browsing. You can pan, scan and zoom in and out using touch gestures. And browsing is social..."

The March 2010 launch of Intel's hexa-core Core i7-980X gave us a good reason to revisit the LGA 1366 interface. Today, we're looking at four new X58 Express-based motherboards that tie USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s support in to Intel's flagship platform.

Corsair have announced today that they are expanding their Nova SSD range to include both the 32GB and 256GB models.

Several months ago, I wrote about my little experiment with Clarkdale, where I built a small form factor system, based around a Core i5 661 CPU, an Asus H55 motherboard and a Radeon HD 5850 graphics card.

Michael Gartenberg, partner and analyst with the Altimeter Group, said he didn't know if Nintendo's run has ended for the moment, but that their profit drop "shows has fast-moving this market is. What was 'state-of-the-art' can quickly become 'so what?'" he said.

No, it’s not the new Indilinx JetStream controller - that’ll be in the second half of the year at the earliest.

And it’s definitely not Intel’s 3rd generation X25-M, we won’t see that until Q4. The SSD I posted a teaser of last week is a modified version of OCZ’s Agility 2.

Okay, I lied a little. Biostar announce their new tech as ‘BIO-unlocKING’, a feature on their latest 8xx series motherboard to unlock the quad core Thuban based processors (such as the Phenom II X4 960T) to their hexacore variants.

Buzz about an Android Twitter client began in mid-April when the company announced its pending arrival at a developer conference, fueling speculation about whether it would be a fresh composition, like BlackBerry's version, or a co-opted, "official" third party app like Atebit's Tweetie, now called Twitter for iPhone.

Macs will become an alternative and viable game platform... and there is nothing you can do about it.

Boy, was there an outrage over Valve’s decision to port its popular games and offer its Steam distribution for the Mac. Since Steam is estimated to account for 70% of online game purchases, this is one major announcement. But if you think about it, such news was just a matter of when, not if. As much as you may be a PC game enthusiast, you will have to live with the fact that Macs are running more and more games. But it does not take much to predict that Macs will never become enthusiast gaming machines. Valve and Apple are working on the bigger piece of the pie.

I had a lot of stuff come in this morning. First the iPad 3G, then Zotac's next-generation ION box and a bunch of NDA'd CPUs.

Apple has acquired Intrinsity, a chipmaker that created the key speed technology in the iPad's A4 processor. With Intrinsity's technology, the Apple iPad runs about a third faster than most mobile processors. Buying Intrinsity shaves Apple's cost and lets it shape the A4 chip in the iPad. An analyst said Intrinsity's tech is useful "for a while."

Symantec will be able to offer a complete encryption security package with its acquisition of PGP and GuardianEdge Technologies. CEO Enrique Salem said the acquisition of PGP and GuardianEdge will let Symantec expand its market. The PGP products will be integrated into the Symantec Protection Center to give Symantec a competitive edge.

Popular motherboard manufacturer MSI has announced the next weapon in their motherboard arsenal - the MSI Big Bang-XPower. Like other second generation X58 motherboards, the XPower will feature SATA 6G and USB 3.0 teamed up with a slew of overclocking features in order to captivate the enthusiast market.

After Acer acquired Gateway in 2007, they started releasing their products in sets of two, with a Gateway version of the most popular Acer models.

Two months ago NVIDIA unveiled its next-generation ION GPU. Sporting either 8 or 16 SPs (or CUDA cores if you bleed green), the next-generation ION is strictly a GPU while its predecessor was a chipset with integrated graphics.

Today, Sapphire have announced the latest in their lineup of ATI 5xxx series graphics cards - the passively cooled HD 5550, dubbed the 'Ultimate'.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Our Other Blogs

Followers

Blog Archive