Reviews: Danamics LM10 - Liquid metal put to the test Today we bring you a world exclusive review of Danamics LM10, the world's first commercially available CPU cooler using liquid metal. We use a variety of stress tests and several different fans to see how it holds up to the competition. Date: 2008-12-04 - 22:12 | Comment
Articles: Intel Core 2 Duo: E0 vs C0 While waiting for the Nehalem platform to launch, Intel has updated its 45nm Wolfdale core from C0 to E0 stepping. We have taken a closer look at what the new stepping has to offer in terms of overclocking and power consumption. Date: 2008-11-11 - 19:11 | Comment
Reviews: Ikonik Zaria A20 Fresh face Ikonik is launching several new products and we will look at one of its more stylish cases. Tough Ikonik Zaria A20 isn't just a designer product but also offers some interesting features. Date: 2008-11-06 - 21:11 | Comment
Articles: Overclocking Core i7 at Intel 2008 Overclocking at Intel is a world unique event that happens on the fall, right before Intel is about to unveil the next generation microprocessor architecture. Liquid nitrogen, tons of hardware and a group of elite overclockers. It just doesn't get any better than that. Date: 2008-11-03 - 21:11 | Comment
Creative and its new Zii chip was looking real interesting before CES in Las Vegas. A report published by the Hurriyet DailyNews brings some light to a much darker story though. It seems that Creative has been suffering quite badly over the last year and posted a net loss of $19.7 million on sales of $736.8 million. It reported the lowest revenue in five years and the reason is said to be the plummeting sales of the its portable music players. At the end of 2007 Creative reported having 5,800 employees, by the end of 2008 the number was down to 3,100.
Apple has announced that it will drop its DRM protection for all of the songs listed at the iTunes Music Store. This means that all 8 million songs will be available free of complications, with another 2 million coming shortly. Additionally, Apple will rework its pricing scheme, but it was not clear as to how other than that older music will be cheaper than newer tracks. It has also enabled purchase via the 3G mobile network, which means that you don't need to find a WLAN to download tracks to your iPhone. All in all very good news since practically all users prefer music without DRM.
Seagate has announced that it will start shipping desktop harddrives using its new 500GB platters. The Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.12 1TB harddrive spins at 7200RPM and sports an areal density of 329 Gigabit per square inch. Even though the first drive of the series use only two platters, future models may use more platters. In theory, Seagate could launch a harddrive with 2TB of storage using only four platters. There is also models sporting 500GB and 750GB capacity, all sporting an industry-leading 160MB/s sustained data rate, says Seagate.
Additional information available in the press release below;
LaCie has been developing external storage solutions for many years and the sign of the manufacturer has always been a very sleek and appealing design. This is certainly true for its new Hard Disk Max series that enables capacities of 2TB in a small but sweet piano-painted case. Except from the clean design, Hard Disk Max offers some neat features like RAID 1/0 and a software package for formating and backups. The recommended price is $269.99.
As expected XFX has unveiled its first creations using graphics circuits from AMD. The manufacturer that was long faithful to NVIDIA has now started selling cards based on the Radeon HD 4000 family and as we have told you in the past and it hasn't just restickered some reference cards but put a lot of work into this. It has chosen to come up with its own solutions, especially the Radeon HD 4850 and 4830 models as these are shipped with a new cooler.
More information and pictures can be found in the press release;
NVIDIA GT215 is a chip that has not been found on any previously posted roadmap, but a chip that is supported by the GeForce 185.20 beta drivers. The equivalent of today would be NVIDIA "G95", which means that chip should land in between the GT214 and GT216 in the mid-range segment. Specifications are of course not available at this time, except from the fact that it will be made at 40nm. All of these chips are not expected to appear until the third quarter this year, which means there is still plenty of time before it arrives. [Source: Xfastest, site is down].
A while back we told you about how Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at zdnet was publishing information on the coming Windows 7. He last published an interesting review containing information on the news of Windows 7 to the installation process, which seemed to go smoothly. He has now followed up with a comparison between Windows 7 beta 1 and its two predecessors Windows Vista and Windows XP in a variety of tests.
NVIDIA GT212 is rumored to be the next high-end chip from NVIDIA. Most seem to indicate that this chip will be made with the TSMC 40nm manufacturing process, but the exact specifications have remained clouded. According to a source to hardware-infos, the chip will trump the 1.4 billion transistors of GT200 with another 400 million adding up to 1.8 billion all in all. They also claim that the number of shaders will be upgraded to 384 by adding to extra clusters of shaders and upgrading each cluster from 24 to 32 shaders.
Samsung is never slow with presenting new and exciting concepts and CES 2009 will be no exception. Over the last couple of years, the focus has been on presenting huge TVs. Even if size still matters (it's true) with our flat screen TVs, the focus has moved. The most important nowadays is to present the thinnest, but still big, flat screen TV and Samsung looks to bring home the cup once again with its new ultraslim series of HDTVs.
By the end of 2008 XFX confirmed that it will be making graphics cards based on AMD's ATI graphics circuits. XFX are apparently ready to launch its first Radeon-based graphics cards as pictures of the first two cards have appeared and they do reveal some interesting surprises. XFX has moved away from the reference designs and used a somewhat different black PCB paired with a specially designed cooler.
It's the eternal trend. Internet Explorer keeps losing ground, Firefox keeps gaining. Not even after Internet Explorer 7 Microsoft managed to affect the big trend. Firefox has remained steady in growth and by the end of 2008 it was up to a record high 20.78% while Internet Explorer hit a record low of 69.77%, according to NetApplications' measurements. NetApplications lists various reasons for this, all pointing to that people have been browsing more from home, rather than from work, which of course implies that many companies are using IE rather than FF, despite the security history of the two.
External storage will go through a change of generations when the new USB 3.0 interface hits the market. Third generation USB offers up to 10 times the transfer rates of USB 2.0, which in theory enables drives to transfer data as fast as 600MB/s. Several companies have demonstrated the technology, but during CES we will see retail products supporting the new protocol. Seagate will be showing off products from its FreeAgent series using Symwave's USB 3.0 controller, which will be the first USB3.0 capable storage devices from Seagate.
Overclocking the Core i7 920 can be a daunting task if you're stuck with the stock cooler from Intel, it doesn't have to be though. Reports have been going around that it is hard to get even above 3.2GHz with the Intel cooler, but that's not quite true. Many have been able to go much higher and forum user Lanparty decided to make a short video showing that the Intel cooler can handle more than you might think.
Slysoft, the makers of AnyDVD HD, has announced that it once again has managed to outsmart the movie studios by breaking the latest version of the Blu-ray BD+ DRM protection. Slysoft says that AnyDVD HD can make backups of any currently available Blu-ray movie, making it one of a kind. Maybe it is time for the movie studios to realize their is no unbreakable DRM, a bit like Electronics Arts has now that it will release its games to Steam and even remove DRM from selected already released titles. We seriously doubt it though.
A while back we reported about how the last VHS players had been made and now it becomes even clearer that the manufacturers are moving away from VHS as the last supplier of VHS tapes has shipped its last load of tapes. However, many companies are still making combo drives with VHS and DVD, or even VHS and Blu-ray, so the format may not be completely dead just yet, but it is surely closing in on the inevitable.
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Seagate Ships Desktop Hard Drive With World's Highest Areal Density - 500GB Per Disk
Winter? Hardware is blocking the windows
