Latest News - Page 3116

Earlier today, MSI shot us an e-mail with some teaser shots of their various boards. Instead of an update to that post, this motherboard deserves its own spot on the news page just because it looks like a boss.

Enter, MSI's Big Bang XPower II, which features eight DIMMs, ten SATA ports (!), a slew of PCIe ports enough to plug in eleventy million cards, X-Fi MB2 on-board, and what stands out on its military black theme, is a row of 6 bullets that make up a magazine as a heatsink. We have never seen this before, except for oh wait, Gigabyte's G1 Sniper boards, but hey, two can play at this game, right?

The board itself is so big that MSI have had to change their underwear from ATX to XL-ATX to accomodate the extra girth.

The increasing global shortage on hard drives from the Thailand floods is causing PC vendors who are searching for HDDs to look into gray markets, which is in turn causing hikes in gray market prices from US$45 to over US$100 for a 500GB HDD and from US$35 to US$60-70 for a 320GB model, according to Taiwan-based PC supply chain makers.

Because the HDD industry's future is unknown, vendors are looking anywhere they can to source drives to fill their inventory. DigiTimes source claims that brand vendors are going into a "panic" to fill their HDD inventory. Most have reportedly placed orders to HDD makers with combined volume already double or triple their usual demand, but since HDD makers can only reply that they have no more inventory, or cannot provide supply status, it leaves vendors with one choice: the gray market.

Another issue is Japan-based HDD motor supplier Nidec has had close to 2,000 sets of equipment damaged by the floods which may take more than two years to fully recover. The same sources claim that Nidec are currently seeking equipment from related industry players, but the claims have not been confirmed by Nidec. Sources claim that once this machinery is submerged in water, the machines require a total replacement.

Microsoft don't do things small, and today was no exception. Customers can today experience new Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), with a selection of new, sleek and stylish smartphones from HTC and Samsung starting at just $49.99. The Samsung Focus S and Focus Flash are available today at AT&T and are the latest additions to the Windows Phone portfolio, joining the HTC Radar 4G available at T-Mobile USA Inc.

Microsoft designed Windows Phone around one simple concept: People belong at the center of the phone experience. This is where Microsoft go all-out and have put real people inside a gigantic six-story phone in NYC's Herald Square to bring to life the phone's key features and experiences. Included was a life-sized "Plants vs Zombies" battle highlighted the phones rich Xbox LIVE gaming experience.

The Music + Video Hub was bought to life by the Far East Movement performing a concert for hundreds of fans, and while "connecting people" was shown by a NY-based man proposing to his girlfriend from inside the Me Tile of the giant six-story phone.

Forget just wanting my two front teeth for Christmas, this puppy has just gone straight to the top. All I want for Christmas is OCZ's newly announced RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS solid state drive. This devil combines a proven cutting-edge PCI Express-based architecture and OCZ proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 flash virtualization layer with premium NAND flash components that deliver exceptional 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS, as well as increased transfer rates of 1900MB/sec reads and 1725MB/sec writes.

Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management for OCZ Technology Group says:

My inbox this morning had some glorious news, a tease of the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E boards from MSI. Included, was the super high-end Big Bang XPower II board, all the way down to the smaller micro-ATX X79MA-GD45. If you like pics, there's a bunch below:

First up is the X79A-GD65 8D, which does look quite pretty. It sports various features such as the usual quad-channel DDR3, but includes THX TruStudio PRO sound, CrossFire X and SLI support. It also includes eight SATA ports and eight DIMMs if you're RAM and Storage crazy like most of us.

Next up is the X79A-GD65, only featuring four DIMMs and six SATA ports. This is obviously just a step down from its stronger, bigger brother.

Buffalo is now preparing shipments of its BDXL-format supporting "BRXL-PCW6U2-BK" external/portable Blu-ray writer.

The unit connects via USB 2.0 and includes support for both 3-layer (100GB) and 4-layer (128GB) BDXL discs. The drive runs measurements of 145 x 19 x 153 mm with a weight of 340 grams. It will ship with a couple built-in USB cables whereby one acts as the data path and the other for power.

As for write speeds, the drive can do up to 4x for BDXL media, 6x for BD-R (single- and dual-layer), 2x for BD-RE, 8x for DVD-R/+R/+RW, 6x for DVD-R DL/+R DL/-RW, 5x for DVD-RAM, 24x for CD-R and 16x for CD-RW.

Panasonic has made a couple announcements today with two new Lumix series cameras - the DMC-GX1 Micro Four Thirds and DMC-3D1.

Beginning with the former, the GX1 sports a Venus Engine image processor with a 16.01MP Live MOS sensor and a sensitivity of up to ISO 12800. It includes a Contrast AF focus system with 0.09 second (Light Speed AF) autofocus and the use of a dust reduction system, as well as One Push AE and the iA and iA Plus modes for automatic shots.

The LCD on the new GX1 is touch-enabled, being 3-inch (460,000-dot) in size. The camera is capable of recording video at up to 1080/60i and will come in two colour options - black and silver. There will also be two differing kits on offer from Panasonic for this model, the DMC-GX1-K which comes with the 14-42 standard zoom (priced at $800) and the DMC-GX1-X which has the Lumix G X Vario PZ 14-42mm / F3.5-5.6 ASPH. / POWER O.I.S (H-PS14042) lens (at $950).

After using my Samsung GALAXY S II for the past week, I have fallen in love with its Super AMOLED Plus display. Hearing this news today, is great. Currently, the display technology standard that powers most PCs and TVs is LCD. LCD of course, has its issue such as limited viewing angles, poor colors, motion blur and input lag.

Most people don't seem to notice it, but its there. When compared to an IPS panel, or CRT set, it is instantly noticeable to most people. There are various types of LCD technology in mainstream use today which attempt to solve the issues, but none fix all of them. TN panels are cheap to buy, relatively fast (they're the ones that power 120Hz screens) which reduces motion smear and input lag, but the shortcomings are viewing angles and color accuracy. Good for gamers, but not great for video or picture work.

IPS displays have the opposite characteristics, making them perfect for professional photography work, where accurate colors and vibrant pictures are required. AMOLED can step in and swoop up all of these problems and throw them away offering bright, crystal clear displays with wide viewing angles and excellent motion smoothness. This is thanks to LEDs having extremely fast response times. But.

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit is currently filming and Jackson is uploading Production Videos onto Facebook, with Production Video #4 from the set of the Hobbit being uploaded today. The video goes into the 3D side of things where its revealed The Hobbit is being shot in 5k resolution, 48fps and 3D. Intense, and I'm loving the high-res shoot.

The movie is being shot on digital cameras, and directly to hard drives (SSDs by the look of them) at 128GB in size. To get an idea of 5k, think of your TV with 1080p, and then imagine a Windows desktop on it. Increase what you can fit on that screen by five times, and you're nearly there. It's hard to show the scope of it, but as the market moves toward it (with the help of movies like this and James Cameron's upcoming Avatar sequels), it is a great thing for the industry.

Jackson actually says, that people who have seen scenes of The Hobbit in 48fps, say that it's "like the back of cinema has had a hole cut out of it, where the screen is, and it's like you're looking into the real world." I would agree, as an avid user of 120Hz for games, it adds a total different dimension of fluidity into the game (and in this case, movie).

AMD's Bulldozer just wasn't enough to not only topple Intel, but to impress customers enough to grab it while it was hot. AMD knows they need to turn it around, we know they need to turn it around and you know they need to turn it around. AMD has always focused on performance-per-watt, and while Fusion has pulled this off, Bulldozer when overclocked is pushing past an astonishing 400W.

The Bulldozer team needs to put their hard hats on and get dirty, with 2012 rolling into view, it needs to happen very soon. Piledriver is an update to current Bulldozer cores and the expected advantages are increased core capacity by up to 25-percent, making more cores available more of the time. Reduced power requirement, making Piledriver more efficient, real world performance boost by somewhere around 10-percent, making each core do more.

Will this be enough for AMD to at least catch up and possibly take a few swings at Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge? Can they bring it before Ivy Bridge, or at the same time? Can AMD release it at a competitive price point, seductive enough to draw customers into their web of CPU goodness? Bulldozer was roughly the same price as an Intel 2600K motherboard/CPU combo, so they really failed in that way.

The first fifteen minutes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 are available, but get in quick because Activision will most likely take this down ASAP. I don't to spoil it for anyone, but I watched the entire thing and wow. It just looks like the previous 3 - 4 COD titles.

No improvement in graphics, movement, lightning, textures, shadows, anything. Even the text on the screen is the same. One of the stand outs for me: "You've been hit, get to cover", yes, the game even tells you that you've been shot (when shot 3 - 4 times) and tells you to get to cover. I'm not surprised at the technology in the game, but after playing Battlefield 3, this just looks so, so, so old.

Really? This is the best selling FPS franchise of all time and this is how it treats its players? Simplified, corridor shooter at best, with lame, old graphics. But, it'll sell like Jesus' finger nails at a Church function. Watch the video before its pulled, remember there's spoilers.

This is what I like to hear! With NVIDIA currently on a roll with their Tegra range and Tegra 3-powered devices starting to roll out any day now (in the form of ASUS' Transformer Prime), we now have some GeForce-related new. Rub your hands together with glee! Rumor has it that NVIDIA are flushing the channel of 500-series GPUs, and should introduce some more price cuts soon.

Price cuts on 500-series of GPUs has been happening slowly, but NVIDIA believes that their next-gen 'Kepler' GPU based on a 28nm process is ready and has a strong suspicion that AMD won't be ready with their 7000-series Radeon cards until after Santa does his rounds this Christmas. NVIDIA wants to push hard for a Christmas launch, and you won't hear any complaining from me!

NVIDIA could do a few things here, launch the 600-series before Christmas and use the promise of 'something more from NVIDIA, but it is not here just yet', to try and grab a few of those GPU fans that were leaning toward a Radeon-flavored GPU, and keep them licking that sweet, green NVIDIA pie. Then we have the bundles NVIDIA are pumping out with partners, bundling games such as Mafia II and Batman: Arkham City - this is great, and it keeps customers coming back.

[US residents only] Acer are using Facebook to launch a campaign where users can enter to get a free Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook. In order to enter the competition, users need to 'like' the sweepstake page and enter their relevant contact information.

International Facebook users need not apply, as this is a US-only competition. Acer will give away one Ultrabook per day all the way through to December 31st. That is a total of 60 Ultrabooks during the campaign. Pretty kick ass if you ask me! Acer are giving away the cheapest $899 model, which sports a 13.3-inch screen with a resolution of 1366x768, an Intel Core i5-2647M, 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

Also included in the Ultrabook to fill it out is a 20GB SSD with a 320GB 5400RPM HDD, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and weighs in at just 2.98lb. You can enter the competition, here.

Rainbow 6 series' new title has been confirmed today called Rainbow 6 Patriots and is the latest Tom Clancy first-person shooter which won't see the light of day until 2013. This marks a five-year gap in between Rainbow Six console releases as the most recent of them was Vegas 2 in March 2008.

The wait is possibly at the fault of Vegas 2, which was criticized at the time for being too similar to the original Rainbow Six: Vegas, released in November 2006. The setting for Patriots hasn't been confirmed with the only nugget of information to go on is that it "captures the reality of modern-day terrorism". The game is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal, "with the support of" Ubisoft Toronto and Ubisoft Red Storm.

The single-player portion of the game is said to sport a dynamic storyline with multiple playable characters with the franchise doing a GTA V and apparently going in a "bold new direction". Ubisoft creative director David Sears says:

GIGABYTE wants to have something that is more functional than the competitions' UEFI setup programs, and this is where GIGABYTE 3D BIOS steps up and into the ring to have a swing at things. When you hit DEL at POST to load up the setup program, it starts up the 3D BIOS home screen. On the home screen, you find a 3D rotatable image of your motherboard.

Cool, right? Well, you can use your mouse to spin the board around and check it out - certain parts of that motherboard image can be clicked to open up settings related to it. Let's say you want to click on the SATA ports on that image, click it and the program will open up SATA controller settings. Clicking on the memory slots brings up the memory tuning settings window. Very, very cool.

The visual elements all look spiffy, including smooth fonts, curves and lavish use of alpha. The fine tuning pages don't look like a re-skinned, mouse-enabled version of the old interface, but now include genuine GUI elements like sliders, tickboxes, radio buttons and tabs. A video demo of this is available below:

The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive have released a critical report labeling China as the "most active an persistent" country in the world when it comes to cyber-espionage. Oh snapz is what our VGA editor would say, and I would agree with that statement. Russia also slipped into the list, together with China are "the most aggressive collectors" of U.S. trade secrets, overall.

The purpose of the report is to highlight the increasing importance cyber-espionage plays in the undermining of both private and government interests. Robert Bryant, the U.S. Counterintelligence Executive, claims cyber-espionage is a "national, long-term strategic threat to the United States" and that "failure is not an option" when it comes to dealing with those matters. In the report, there is a special focus on the undesirable consequences stolen trade secrets may impart upon the U.S. and partner economies.

The Chinese government has been accused multiple times for noteworthy acts of both high-tech and low-tech espionage. This includes infamously penetrating Google's servers, corroborating with a Ford engineer working as a spy (the engineer is a spy! TF2 joke), gaining unauthorized server access at a long list of companies that include Yahoo, Northrop Grumman, Adobe, Symantec, ciphering information from British Unive

Google completed their Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows them to crawl and index the web from fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Google have just announced that they're making quite a significant change to their ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35-percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

Obviously, in today's world, information is power. But information can be from today, last week, the last minute, or thirty years ago depending on the search terms. Google's algorithm needs to be able to work out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Google have a bit more info on it, so if you're interested, check it out. As with most things like this, it is a great read and good to know if you're asked for a random fact one day.

Well, this is beginning to get interesting. Apple are positioning themselves nicely right now, trying to secure HDD stock and supply. The story unfolds as an explanation of how business works, which helps explain Apple's position. Explaining it as a purchasing system, which creates huge advantages for the biggest, cashed-up companies, such as Apple.

Each buyer has a certain amount of money (and power) and can place big orders that the supplier could not ignore. So if the buy says "Forget everyone else you are dealing with, I want to order 1.2 million units in 2011 and I'd like them dropped off with me at the rate of 100,000 a month, but I won't be buying them until I sell them...Oh, yes, and I won't pay for them until 3 months after I sell them", then the supplier has no choice buy to drop their pants and bend over. (KitGuru's words, but they were so good I had to use them).

Dell have been doing this for years and countless other companies, too. Both sides are aware of the practice, and are compliant with it. But, throw in a massive reduction on supply and the rules are changed, completely. The supplier now has the power and with demand so high everywhere else, it [the supplier] has the power to 'give a story' to its regular customers, while they shop around for massive profits.

Zynga's next entry in their "Ville" franchise, which includes FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille, is CastleVille. The latest game allows players to built mini-empires from castles, craft art and armor and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world. The game was created by the Zynga Dallas team, which was part of Zynga's acquisition of Bonfire Studios.

The game starts off by letting you choose your character and build your look. Zynga Dallas director Bill Jackson says that this is the most expansive character building feature to date, with dozens of looks to choose from. The games objectives is for you to build the castle of your dreams and transform the the unexplored land into your own kingdom. There are many characters you'll meet along the way, who are all involved in the storyline of the game.

Duke is the first you'll meet, who will help you build your castle and is from a neighboring kingdom. Yvette is a beautiful songstress, Giselle is a lovely maiden, then we have the friendly village Viking, George. Filling the characters out we have Sonja as the sexy pirate, Rafael as a playboy woodsman and finally, Tom as the rough dragon slayer.

You would think that a company the size of Activision would not let this happen so close to launch, especially since Elite was announced so long ago now. Alas, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Elite will not launch on PC with the game, and will be released sometime after the game itself.

This is due to the developers saying the PC is "insecure", where they're worried people will hack the system. Those statistics can't be hacked, it would cause the world to implode and would be equal to the consequences of dividing by zero! Beachhead Studio head Chacko Sonny says: