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
Lian Li is a well established case designer that through an extensive use of aluminum has created a unique and personal image. Lian Li has been designing sleek although angular cases, but angular is the last thing you can accuse Lian Li PC-888 of being. Lian Li's latest creation has been designed to look like a sail with a curved front. The case certainly has a special feel to it, not the least thanks to the anodized blue color theme. The unique design hides features such as a SATA RAID rack with hot-swap (4 disks) and fan brackets supporting up to 140mm fans. PC-888 will hardly come cheap but those who want to stand out at the local LAN party should really take a closer look.
Pictures and specifications are in the press release;
Pioneer subsidiary Technical Audio Devices (TAD) has partnered with living audiophile legends Bill Schnee and Doug Sax and will demonstrate what it claims to be a digital sound that rivals 2-channel analog audio. The new audio format takes advantage of the features and capacity of Blu-ray and during CES Schnee and Sax will play hand-picked tracks recorded and mixed live 2-channel high resolution digital format. The audio will be output through complimentary 24-bit/192Hz audio DAC and TAD Compact Reference monitor speakers.
If you want to know more about this exciting audio experience check out the press release below;
ASUS is riding the wave with its Eee brand and it has really been trying to build pretty much anything with an Atom processor inside of it and call it Eee Something, but it has finally come up with something more decent. ASUS has revealed its concept Eee Keyboard. Eee Keyboard is a neat and sleek keyboard that is in fact a fully fledged PC. ASUS hasn't just managed to fit all performance components into this slim formfactor, but also installed a 5" touch screen that can be used for för menu navigation or touchpad. But what makes it even cooler is that it can communicate with other monitors.
We already published the first pictures of BFG's coming gaming PC Phobos a while back. It showed among other the integrated 8" touchscreen that can be used to control the beefy hardware hiding inside the case. Beyond the hardware components BFG has used it has an iPod/iPhone dock, slot-loaded Blu-ray player, RF remote control and TV tuner. Exactly which components is up to you, but with prices starting at $3,000 for the cheapest model and $8,000 for the top model top model Phobos Elite these are not for the average Joe.
Detailed specifications can be found in BFG's press release;
ASUS S121 is one of the highly mobile and more exclusive notebooks ASUS will offer in 2009. The 12" display makes it a bit bigger than the budget Eee PC series. Even if its the exact same processor powering the computer, Intel Atom, there are some considerable differences between the two. S121 comes with up to 2GB RAM and sports both WiFi and Bluetooth but the biggest difference compared to ASUS' previous ultramobile computers is the longterm storage. Solid State Drives can be found in other models from ASUS, even its budget-oriented Eee PC-family, but ASUS S121 will take things to a whole new level.
The HDMI interface will be updated later this year and will actually bring some interesting news, unlike many of the previous updates that have anything but rocked our worlds. First of all it will introduce the smaller connector which has been seen around the web for some time. Even if the regular HDMI connector is still much slimmer than for example DVI you start to wonder how you will even fit cables on the next generation TVs. A smaller HDMI connector would certain help, hopefully with better attachment.
Scythe has started off the new year by announcing a new version of the critically acclaimed Mugen CPU cooler. Scythe Mugen 2 has a tower design similar to the first version but with more fins and a new aerodynamic layout called Multiple Airflow pass-through structure (M.A.P.S.) that is said to improve cooling performance. Despite the denser fins, Mugen 2 weighs 50g less than the precursor and with the boxed 120mm fan the cooler will offer both cool and effective cooling. MSRP is $39.50 excl. taxes.
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.
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