Latest News - Page 3117

If the TweakTown powers that be would allow me to do it, this post would simply say "Wow" followed by the trailer... but, we'll discuss it is a bit first. Battlefield 3 is obviously out and the first DLC Pack for it comes in the form of Back to Karkand. Back to Karkand features four of the most loved maps from Battlefield 2: Strike at Karkand, Sharqi Peninsula, Gulf of Oman and my personal favorite, Wake Island.

The expansion pack also sports new weapons, vehicles, persistence, and the return of the classic Conquest Assault. Better yet, those who pre-ordered will get Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand for free... yep, no extra charge. Those of you who didn't pre-order can purchase it on the same day for $14.99/1200 Microsoft Points.

The trailer is just awesome, I really wish the Battlefield 3 trailers were done in that way, it just looks... amazing. What I'd like to know is what is this "enhanced destruction" about, is it more than what we experience in Battlefield 3? If so, why? Is this something they'll switch on with an update to BF3? I hope so.

We've seen quite the frey of final revision X79 motherboards being readied up to coincide with the big Sandy Bridge-E launch in just a little over a week from now, but MSI's X79MA-GD45 has just been exposed and should peak interest for many particularly due to one bold attribute - it is built around the Micro ATX form factor.

I bet you're already thinking of how cool it would be to have so much power hiding inside a nice compact mATX chassis for your gaming pleasure. The board doesn't disappoint in the features dept. either and should be quite the solid board with the use of MSI's Military Class III components all round.

Taking a good look at the pictures, we can see there are four DDR3 slots and a couple PCI-E x16 slots for SLI or CrossfireX goodness. The board has two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and four more SATA 3.0 Gbps ports along with a couple USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O and two more via headers. A Clear CMOS button is conveniently provided on the rear I/O along with 7.1 channel audio (including both S/PDIF coaxial and optical outputs) and Gigabit ethernet.

For a bit there we were scratching our heads a bit on what Barnes & Noble had up their sleeve for us come its scheduled November 7th event, but it's all out in the open now thanks to the crew over at Engadget working their magic and getting all the hot details for us.

It does indeed look like Amazon's Kindle Fire will be getting some company with B&N planning to reveal its new "Nook Tablet" in a few days time, and beginning shipments from November 16th.

The said tablet will come in at $249 and promises 'the best in HD entertainment'. It looks much like the Nook Color and measures 8.1 x 5 x 0.48-inches, weighing in at 400 grams. It features a 7-inch (1024 x 600) VividView IPS touchscreen display and is powered by a 1.2GHz OMAP4 dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.

If you're holding off on picking up a copy of Battlefield 3 due to your current VGA card being indefinitely not up to scratch to handle it, ASUS has just the ticket for you convenience wise, and may well save you some cash at the same time.

This page from ASUS direct details a couple bundles they're now offering which comprise a graphics card or sound card, and a Battlefield 3 coupon that can be redeemed on Origin.

The graphics card bundle comprises ASUS' GeForce GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II TOP with a BF3-themed Lanyard and of course the coupon for the game thrown in too.

So this is where Matrox has been hiding, it has been in a love dungeon with Shuttle and they've been getting jiggy with it, and the results? A new mini PC, powered by a Matrox M-Series multi-display graphic card that powers the new Shuttle XPC H7 5820S mini PC. The M-Series PCI Express x16 boards support up to eight DisplayPort or single-link DVI monitors at resolutions of up to 2560x1600 per display.

But, get this, a second M-Series card can be combined within the H7 5820S workstation which allows integrators to use a wide range of multi-display installations in corporate, digital signage, security surveillance, process control, stock markets, share traders, crazy-insane monitor lovers and other professional environments.

One of the best features, is that its only 19 centimeters (7.5-inches) in height, which means its quite the mini PC indeed. The Shuttle XPC H7 5820S mini PC sports an Intel Core i7 processor with up to six cores and up to 16GB of DDR3 memory. The high-performance H7 5820S can be incorporated with one or two M9128 dual-monitor, M9138 triple-monitor, M9140/M9148 quad-monitor, and M9188 octal boards.

Ah, the Commodore. I have such great memories of thee. But, Commodore USA's C64 computer recreations have been quite good since last year, and now we have the third variant, the C64x Extreme. This unit sports the 80s flair, but 2011-specced. Inside, it features an Intel Core i7 quad-core CPU capable of turbo boosting to 3.3GHz.

Also, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, Intel HD integrated graphics and a decent 2TB. On the outside, where this thing looks quite amazing, we have two USB 3.0 ports, three USB 2.0 ports and an eSATA port. Also included is HDMI, 3.5mm S/PDIF, VGA and DVI. Apart from the kitchen sink, the C64x Extreme also includes Bluetooth, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, an Ethernet port and even a DVD-RW drive.

The only downfall is it comes with Linus Mint 11 pre-loaded, and will only fully support Windows once the company's "retro inspired" Commodore OS Vision becomes available. While it looks insanely cool and will most likely being a nostalgic tear to your eye, it will also kick you in the balls and rob you, too. It'll set you back $1,500. But, to you, it might just be worth it. I'll be down on the ground holding my nads in pain, while dreaming of this amazing beast.

While still a few weeks away, we're able to give you a little peak at a kit that's going to see the light of day later in the month when X79 launches. The new RipjawsZ series from G.Skill are designed for the new Intel platform and look absolutely fantastic following that Black / Blue design we've seen from the company before.

Consisting of four 4GB modules, the up and coming kit brings with it a total of 16GB of DDR3 RAM running at PC3-17000 or 2133MHz DDR. Taking a closer look at the modules we get a better idea what's going on with the timings. As you can see we've got a 9-11-9-28 setup that requires a grand total of 1.65v.

Unfortunately there's not much else we can share with you at the moment since the kit of course falls under the whole X79 NDA. Pricing and that is also yet to be announced so really all we can do is leave you with another picture of this sexy, sexy kit.

The name of the upcoming 23rd James Bond film has been confirmed: Skyfall. Skyfall features the great Daniel Craig donning the role of James Bond once again (for the third time), with leading ladies confirmed as French actress Berenice Marlohe and Naomie Harris.

Skyfall is being directed by Sam Mendes, most famous for 1999's American Beauty in which he won an Oscar. Mendes has said that the storyline will take Bond to London, China, Turkey and Scotland. Skyfall will see Bond's loyalty tested to M, his superior, while espionage headquarters MI6 faces an attack.

Dame Judi Dench returns as M, and Skyfall will also co-star Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Javier Bardem as the villain of Skyfall. Best of all, it will be released in the UK on 26 October 2012, which is less than a year from now.

The flooding in Thailand is set to cause an even more drastic shortage of hard drives according to researchers at iSuppli. Roughly 660,000 Thailand residents are out of work after the country shut down 14,000 factories, including those that Western Digital and Seagate use. Shipments of hard drives are set to decline 27.7-percent from 173 million units in Q3, down to 125 million in Q4.

Both WD and Seagate have adjusted their shipment estimates, as well as raising prices to meet revenue forecasts. Average hard drive prices will increase by 10-percent according to iSuppli (not here in Australia where we're seeing a near 100-percent increase), but certain models have increased by as much as 20 to 40-percent. WD has been more directly impacted by the flooding, with analysts reporting that they will lose market share to Seagate, who has roughly double the shipment forecast for the current quarter.

Of course, there are stock reservers by most vendors to avoid disruption in desktop and notebook shipments for months, but ASUS aren't so fortunate. ASUS expects to ship 4.1 million notebooks, 600,000 Eee Pads and 1.2 million Eee PCs in Q4 2011, down from 4.3 million, 800,000 and 1.3 million in Q3. Part of that forecasted decline can be blamed on the production halt in Thailand.

AMD have just announced a new restructuring plan that is set to cut 10-percent of their workforce over the next few months. The new plan [of sacking employees] and implementation of operational efficiency initiatives designed to strengthen AMD's competitive positioning. By cutting their work force by 10-percent, AMD can save approximately $10 million in operating expenses during Q4 2011.

That sum will expand out to $118 million for 2012, the workforce layoffs will be global and not centred on just one or two sections of AMD's global footprint. It's expected to be completed by Q1 of 2012, with other restructuring plans to continue into 2012. AMD are also saying they plan to save another $90 million off its expenses in 2012, by undertaking various operating efficiencies, but they did not elaborate on that.

AMD's total operating expenses are estimated at $610 million for Q4 2011, with the savings factored in. AMD also wants to improve productivity, reduce the time it takes to release products to the market and better align themselves with key industry trends.

We recently saw quite the breath taking overclocking record out of an AMD FX-8150 CPU from world renowned overclocker Andre Yang, cranking it up to a whopping 8.46GHz, above that of AMD's own previous record (at 8.43GHz).

With only 30 odd MHz separating it, Andre Yang has given it another crank and has produced a new record result, taking the processor to an incredible 8584.8MHz exactly; 123.3GHz higher than his previous achievement. We're still waiting to see the new overclock result appear on CPU-Z's validation database, but its authenticity looks good enough for us.

A bit about how the massive overclock was achieved, Andre used the same Crosshair V Formula for the job, though the core voltage was bumped slightly for this new record to 2.076V (up from 1.992V on his previous). Of course, extreme cooling measures were used for the task at hand; liquid nitrogen. But considering you can go one better by opting for liquid helium which liquefies at -269 Celsius (vs the -253 of nitrogen) in astosphere pressure, there's possibly higher clock rates to be seen from Bulldozer yet; not to mention the upcoming B3 stepping which may well improve overclockability even further.

If you read my mini Editorial yesterday, you'd see that I'm not happy with the state of the gaming industry right now. Today is another day, and with it brings the news that Valve has delayed Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta, after feedback given by professional Counter-Strike 1.6 players. The closed beta was planned for last month, and now has no start date.

Professional CS 1.6 players were invited by Valve to come and play the game and offer their thoughts. Valve's Chet Faliszek explained that their early access was granted because they could "talk intelligently about the game", versus the masses where constructive feedback can be quite hard to come by.

Faliszek didn't say when the closed beta will begin, but when it does begin, around 10,000 people will be invited to participate. "After that we'll grow it in steps as we get a test server infrastructure and scalability," he explained. For a full read of this news, where there are lots of quotes and snippets of news, check out the source.

Opera Software have just rolled out a small update to their mobile browsers which includes some new features as well as the usual optimizations such as improved network performance and lower memory usage. Opera Mini 6.5 and Opera Mobile 11.5 now sport enhanced bookmarking functionality with a small star in the address field that lets you quickly save those links you want to keep and add them to your Speed Dial.

Opera have also added in a built-in data counter, found in the "Help" menu, the counter lets you monitor your data consumption, which could be very useful for data conscious users. Tracking your data consumption on your mobile plan is usually hard, requiring that you sign into your providers website or use an app to monitor it, but having it built into Opera (which is where a majority of your browsing will be done) is very handy indeed.

On top of this, it will gel well with Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo compresses web data by up to 90-percent before sending it to your phone. This is great for those on low data plans, mixed in with the data counter, you could keep a tab on your consumption very easily.

Most people not familiar with IT (and even some who are!) think that Apple's, and more specifically, Mac OS X are impenetrable, Terminator-like machines. But, they are not. Not only can spyware and malware attach to your browser, and not through an executable, but now there's news of a newly discovered malware threat that targets Mac OS X systems.

It comes in the pirated copies of image editing software "Graphic Converter". The malware is known by DevilRobber or Miner-D, and attempts to steal personal information and uses your machine's GPU to generate Bitcoins. If you didn't know what Bitcoins were, they are a digital currency that can be exchanged by online by users without the need for an intermediary bank or payment service.

Intego, a security vendor, says that the malware was a combination of a Trojan horse, as it is hidden inside other applications; a backdoor, as it opens ports and can accept commands from command and control servers; a stealer, as it steals data and Bitcoin virtual money; and spyware, as it sends personal data to remote servers.

For those of you who don't know, there is a 400m-wide asteroid called "2005 YU55" that will fly past us (and in-between the Moon) on November 9. It will fly past at just 324,600km away, which is 0.85 the distance of the Moon itself, it won't kill us; but it is close enough to be news-worthy.

According to NASA, the "trajectory of asteroid 2005 YU55 is well understood", so there's no dangers whatsoever. The asteroid won't have any gravitational influence on Earth, so it won't make volcanoes go off or cause Earthquakes, etc. But, our gravitational pull might re-direct 2005 YU55. This is something NASA don't really cover, because it will [of course] most likely cause panic.

Also remember, that on the same day, FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) along with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be running a nationwide event coordinated by those agencies and administrations. Come November 9, there will be a test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) in which the test will be heard on the radio and seen on local, cable and satellite TV.

If you think back to 2009, you may remember a teaser trailer from Piranha Games for a new MechWarrior title. But recently, they announced MechWarrior Online, a free-to-play multiplayer mech simulator set in the Battletech universe.

In a dev blog, Creative Director of Piranha, Bryan Ekman, explained how the company's attempts to secure a publishing deal redefined and ultimately derailed the MechWarrior project they had planned. The original game was pitched as an Xbox 360/PC release, but "the scope and budget required to develop a console reboot needed the support of a PS3 SKU and we just couldn't convince publishers to take risk."

Now we have MechWarrior as a PC-exclusive, it will feature a first-person cockpit view, and Ekman hopes to include joystick support. Ekman has also bragged of urban combat zones and "information warfare" as MechWarrior Online's two big design pillars.

Seagate currently have their GoFlex external drives using the 1TB platter technology, but they feature 5400 RPM and are not as fast as the usual 7200 RPM drives. But, with 7200 RPM drives, there's usually less GB per platter. Seagate don't want this, and neither do we.

Seagate will now intro a bunch of new drives sporting the 7200 RPM spindle rate, with 1TB platters on a SATA 6Gbps interface. The new drives will have a model number ending in M00x which represents the new drive and its 7200 RPM speed.

Tech wise, platter capacity plays quite a big role in just how much storage a hard drive can hold, but it can also impact performance. Areal density is key, which is a measurement of how many bits are squeezed into each square inch. The more bits per square inch, the more data passes under the drive head with each revolution of the platter.

A few days ago we reported about the battery life issues hurting some iPhone 4S customers, but now Apple have confirmed they have found a few problems that are leading some iPhone users to experience less-than-expected battery life with iPhones powering its latest iOS 5. Apple said in a statement to AllThingsD:

In the past few weeks, there have been various reports not only from tech sites, but from users, that their battery life on the iPhone 4S has been less than stellar. The problems seems to stem from what network a user is on, usage patterns and other factors. Apple has of course been quiet about it (don't want to hurt those precious iPhone 4S sales or make people think Apple products aren't invincible!) but the support forums are filled with posts on the issue.

Any reason to show off some more Sandy Bridge-E / X79 related goodness is a good one, especially now with it being one of the hottest topics thanks to the launch right around the corner. And thanks to Biostar we can give you some more of it with pics and details on their upcoming TPower X79 motherboard for the next-gen LGA-2011 platform from Intel.

The board, while being by Biostar who tend to be renowned for delivering a more no frills, lower priced piece of hardware, looks to be quite strong by design overall, with no real shortcomings over the many other X79 motherboards we've been lucky enough to see pre-launch; unless of course you compare it directly to something like ASUS' Rampage IV Extreme.

The TPower X79 uses an impressive looking 8-phase DuraMax VRM power setup with active phase control and direct FETs. There are two 8-pin EPS connector points on the board along with the 24-pin ATX as well as an optional 4-pin Molex used for added PCIe slot stability. The board also sports POSCAP capacitors in the CPU area along with a high quality clock generator. This together with Biostar's history of producing more simplified OC'ing motherboards that gave some record-setting results gives reason to believe the TPower X79 could be a real force to be reckoned with in the overclocking stakes for Sandy Bridge-E.

Google have rolled out their new Reader design over the last few days and it now sports the Google+ features that were mentioned a week ago. Reader now features a new look that is cleaner, faster and nicer to look at. It also includes the ability to +1 a feed item (which replaces "Like"), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (this replaces "Share" and "Share with Note").

Google say that integrating Reader with Google+ helps them streamline Reader overall, so with the rollout, Google have cut away friending, following, shared items and comments and replaced them with similar Google+ functionality. Google are loving the new layout and have also rolled the layout onto GMail also. Personally, I use Reader every single day for my news here at TweakTown and I really don't like the new layout.

It rocks on a tablet and it has a very Android 3.0/Honeycomb feel, but I don't like it on the Mac/PC. I have two browser windows open at once, one on the left side of my screen, one on the right. The legacy Reader was awesome - it was spaced out perfectly, the new Reader rocks if you're only looking at the single window, but if you're using side-by-side windows, it just doesn't feel as good. But, that's my thoughts.