Latest News - Page 3201

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - IN WIN were showing off a whole range of new products during the show including ones which we have reviewed recently, but the one which really caught our eyes was an upcoming chassis called the Silencer.

Right now it is still in the prototype stage and it may not go on sale until sometime in early 2011, but if it does I reckon that would end up selling a bunch of them. As the name suggests, the Silencer aims to totally eliminate sound produced by fans and other moving parts inside the system by deploying a range of noise cancelling and dampening technologies throughout various sections of the case.

What first got out attention was the somewhat odd gap between the back of the case and the other back of the case, err yeah that didn't make sense. It directs sound to the back of the case the way hot air extraction normally works, but instead the sound is caught by a special layering of foam position and cut in a certain way that the sound is absorbed.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - AMD has being pushing the whole Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming thing for a good while now and despite some minor connectivity issues, it has been accepted with generally lots of excitement in the industry.

First up AMD launched Eyefinity with three monitor support, but now the latest video cards are able to support up to six monitors - and 12 in the case of a solution from PowerColor. We walked by the AMD booth today and then of just walking past it like most booths, I stopped and was really impressed with the dual Eyefinity6 setup that the folks over at AMD prepared for the show. AMD had its booth setup in a way so that folks could sit down and watch people race each other on the 'big screen' in Dirt 2. Super cool.

I just need to justify spending all those dollars on getting this setup for my lounge room. Rock on AMD!

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Again we are back with Ramsom from Thermaltake and this time he showed us another of their highlight products at this year's show and it is the Armor A30.

Stated as being crafted for battle, the A30 is a rather unique sized case that should end up being very suitable for gamers on the move. Inside you can fit two standard desktop size hard drives as well as two 2.5-inch drives such as SSDs. What is even better is that for such a compact and good looking case, it even is even able to support full size video cards such as the ATI Radeon 5970.

The sample we saw was only a very early mock-up that was handmade to display during the show, but still Ramsom tells us development is going really well and it should hit the market in around three months for around 130 USD.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Ramsom from Thermaltake showed us one of their highlight products at this year's show and we are talking about the impressive new Jing CPU cooler.

Jing is a Chinese word which directly translate to quiet in English. Quite suitably named, the Jing even when having its two cool looking 120mm green fans with specially designed blades running at full speed of 1300 rpm, the thing only has a noise level of 16dBA. The guy sitting next to me tells me that is about the same amount of noise electricity makes as it passes through circuits, in other words, it's silent or jing for your Chinese lesson today.

Ramsom tells us that the cooler should be out on the market and selling like hotcakes in about two months. If the ratings and such stay the same, it's sure to come out looking really good in our test graphs after Chad puts it through the usual paces.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - During our stop at Cooler Master we caught up with a guy by the name of TERRY who spent some time introducing us to CM Storm's latest and greatest gaming mouse called the Inferno.

This is a new gaming mouse that is due to come out by the end of this month and it was designed heavily with MMORPGers in mind. Besides looking the part in its very stylish black dress, it has no less than 11 programmable buttons that are also very scriptable too.

The mouse will also ship with accompanying software that allows users to go in and setup combo scripts that perform certain function in game real quickly, as opposed to trying to do it the slow old fashioned way. It was also mentioned off camera that professionals could also use the gaming software to have certain scripts run in applications like Excel and others.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - HardOCP the other morning had a breaking news post about EVGA's entire motherboard team leaving. Over the last couple of years EVGA has gained a very good reputation for their motherboards. Most if not all of these designs came from the same team that was at one point pumping out great designs for EpoX (remember the EpoX BP7+ 100 that was the only thing on the market to compete with ABIT and ASUS' designs?)

On our way out of the city today Cameron and I caught wind of where the team was headed. It's looking like the EVGA motherboard team will be setting up shop at Sapphire. With AMD Fusion coming in 2011 this has the potential to turn into a big deal for Sapphire who has been borrowing other teams for their motherboard product designs.

It looks like Lars and the boys over at Semi Accurate broke the story before we were able to get back to the Taiwan office. Hit the News Source button below to read their take on things.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - We managed to meet up with Bill from Sapphire who was on hand to tell us a little about some of their new technology that allows 3D multi-screen Eyefinity gaming. Off camera Bill commented that the green team shouldn't be having all the fun and it is good to see Sapphire giving some new things a try on their own accord.

Basically the technology uses AMD Eyefinity that we should all know and love by now and 3D monitors from Zalman that use polarizing technology, which also means you don't need those big heavy active shutter glasses.

We had a look through the light weight polarized glasses and the 3D did look pretty good, but NVIDIA's approach is quite a bit better. Having said that though, it is still good to see Sapphire giving new things a try.

Cisco made the statement that they expect internet traffic to quadruple by 2014 during their annual Visual Networking Index. The huge growth of video traffic is being named as the driving force behind the growth, with both businesses and consumers running tons more video traffic with everything from YouTube to videoconferencing. Cisco stated that video will account for 91% of total consumer IP traffic by 2014, with it taking over the top spot from peer-to-peer traffic as the top generator by the end of this year.

With the increase in traffic, service providers are going to need to find a way to keep up with growing consumer demand of elevated bandwidth. Senior VP and General Manager of Cisco's Service Provider Group Pankaj Patel stated, "Service providers are faced with evolving bandwidth and scalability requirements as residential, business and mobile consumers continue to demonstrate a healthy appetite for advanced video services across a variety of networks and devices," Patel said in a statement. "IP networks must be intelligent and flexible enough to support this tremendous variety of traffic growth."

Cisco, the top vendor of switches and routers and a growing player in the video teleconferencing market after acquiring Tandberg, also expects the telepresence market to boom from $3 billion to $10 billion by 2014 as businesses continue to rely on teleconferencing to keep travel costs down and streamline their businesses.

Apple has created a lot of waves by announcing that as of June 7th, the days of the unlimited data plans for iPhones and iPads are over. Under their old plan, a $30 charge brought you all the Youtube Clips, movie streams, and downloads your device could handle. The new plans shake down as you see below:

If you go over on the 200mb plan, you are charged $15 for another 200mb. For the Data Pro plan, overages cost $10 per GB you use.

However, this isn't the only thing with Apple device users up in arms. The new tethering option that iPhone and IPad users were looking forward to is getting a change. Before, tethering cost $30 a month for 5GB of extra tethering data on top of your regular data usage. Now, tethering is only $20, but counts against your 2GB of usage.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Indilinx, a leader in consumer performance solid state controllers has a product that we have all been waiting to see. Code Named Jet Stream, this SATA 6G controller was once thought to be hitting e-tail shelves in early 2010 but has been pushed back to 2011, possibly late 2011.

Replacing the 16 channel Jet Stream in 2010 will be Barefoot 2, a product we know little about. Barefoot 2 will be an 8 channel controller with a maximum capacity of 512GB and well...that is really all I have at this time other than 2010 is the ETA and the words very soon came to the surface a few times.

The move to push Jet Stream back actually has more to do with Intel moving support for native ICH SATA 6G than anything else. With Intel out of the 6Gbps game now Indilinx doesn't want the headaches currently playing out with other SATA 6G products on the market already. We have experienced more than a few of those in our test lab already so even though we don't like hearing about a product delay we can understand the reasoning behind the move.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Last week we visited ASRock who gave us an exclusive look at some of its new technologies including the Vision 3D HTPC and AIWI, but one thing we didn't have time to check out when we went to their office was an interesting new feature that will be bundled for free in ASRock's new P55 Extreme3 motherboard package.

ASRock has developed a simple yet smart little device that allows users to easily add two USB 3.0 ports to the front of their case. The device is really just a small bracket that fits into a spare FDD-sized opening at the front of your case and then a cable from the bracket runs to one of the USB 3.0 pin connectors on supported ASRock motherboards.

Something simple, but it's a great idea especially if you don't like fiddling around at the back of your system and besides, who doesn't like free? Chris Lee from ASRock told us in the video above that its P55 Extreme3 mobo will go on sale in next week or two.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Crucial today introduced a new addition to their Ballistix line of products. In this revision Ballistix gets a new look from a new heat spreader, gains a temperature sensor and a downloadable utility to log data from the drive just as a Formula One car would monitor and report data from its sensors.

I was talking with a few members from Crucial today and asked about different skins for the new Ballistix utility and received a wealth of information about what is to come in the future. Crucial has high hopes for this product and it may one day be a must have for all overclockers and system tweakers when it includes data logging capabilities for several other devices in your system. As for now the utility is a bit plain but does show promise. One of the best things right now is that it does work as advertised (tests going up soon) and it is free with the purchase of the new Ballistix memory.

• Crucial® Ballistix™ modules with thermal sensor provides real-time temperature monitoring with downloadable utility

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - During an ASUS press event earlier today we ran into a brand new and unseen concept motherboard from the Taiwanese company called the Immensity.

It is an Intel X58 Express based ROG board for the latest Socket 1366 processors and what's real interesting about is that it comes with not only a Lucid Hydra processing chip onboard, but also a discrete GPU. And we aren't talking any standard Intel IGP, but a mid-range GPU from either NVIDIA or AMD, I don't think the actual choice has been made at this stage of the game, remembering what we saw was a very early concept mockup. I also doubt it is even working right now.

Kris from ASUS claimed that by adding in the onboard discrete GPU, users should see up to about a 20% increase in performance by combining it with your traditional discrete GPU in form of a usual PCI Express video card. Also since Lucid's much talked about Hydra chip is installed, you'll be able to mix and match any video card from ATI and NVIDIA and run them in Hydra dual or triple graphics mode.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Now this is pretty cool people. We just saw that AMD spoke about its Fusion APU chips at its Computex 2010 press conference, during it at the end Rick surprised us a little by giving attending press the world's first public demo of Fusion APU actually up and running.

Not only though was it running, but it was running Aliens vs Predator in DX11 mode with rather impressive visuals. It was interesting that Rick noted that only last fall did AMD showcase this same game at one of its DX11 press conference, but already they have the APU silicon working in what we would consider a seemingly fairly advanced state.

AMD's first Fusion APU hardware will ship in the first half of 2011 if everything continues to go to plan as it seems it is now from the surface.

I am glad to see USB 3.0 ports finally coming to market in more and more notebooks, desktops, and mainboards. The increase in the number of USB ports making it to the market means that we are seeing more and more USB 3.0 gadgets land as well.

Pretec has announced what it claims to be the world's first USB 3.0 memory card reader called the P240. The official name for the device is the P240 USB 3.0 High-Speed Multi-Card Reader. The card reader supports SDHC, SDXC, CF and other memory card formats.

The device has the full 5Gb/s USB 3.0 bandwidth for moving lots of data from high capacity memory cards to the computer. The card reader is set for sampling next month and will enter mass production in August.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Walking around the show floor today we spotted a company that we hadn't heard of until now called ADOMAX Technology and this Taiwanese company specializes in producing unique mice and keyboards as well as HD web cameras.

During our stop at their booth we got an introduction firstly to their touch keyboard prototype. It's a product unlike many others that doesn't use keys like on a normal keyboard, but instead relies on touch. It also comes with a touch sensitive mouse area meaning it would be rather suitable say in the lounge room for instance where you only want one device to handle input on your TV. ADOMAX mentioned that its target audience will be for consumers with PS3 gaming consoles and those who watch TV on their computers. Unfortunately the sample we saw today was only a mockup as the product is still in the development stage, but we will be interested to try it out when it goes on sale later this year.

Similarly we were also introduced to another touch input product, this time the ADOMAX touch mouse. This sort of technology is similar to the Apple Magic Mouse for Mac computers, but this difference with this one is that it not only works on Macs, but also Windows 7 and Vista machines.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - A-DATA today gave us a taste of their next generation solid state drive that may one day reign as their flagship product. We can't really start quoting numbers right now since A-DATA has the Marvell SATA 6G controlled drive in RAID 0 at their booth but look for that to change in a couple of days.

I guess it really wouldn't be that fun of a news post without some numbers but I will only show you these with a bit of a disclaimer. SSDs are not all that great in RAID 0 without being optimized. This is early hardware with even earlier firmware. To add to the complications the drives are being tested on an HBA controller with a Marvell SATA 6G chip so none of the numbers are going to be as accurate as what we put up in the lab.

At this point SSD enthusiasts are thinking RealSSD C300 clone since both drives use Marvell controllers but this is where you and even I would be wrong. The ADATA S501 uses a different Marvell SATA 6G SSD controller built for the enterprise market.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - One of our stops today was at the Dolby suite at the Grand Hyatt where we caught up with Keith who spent a little of his time telling us about one of its latest audio technologies called Dolby Mobile.

The technology has actually be on the market for almost one year now, but it's only recently that the consumer has a fairly wide range of choice for picking out a cell phone that has been tested and certified by Dolby to provide a solid listening experience.

Not only that though, but Dolby Mobile is also able to create a virtual surround sound experience from any set of headphones that are plugged into a phone with this tech and also improve the audio experience with a set of enhancements that improve things like bass and depth in the perceivable audio waves.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Synaptic is the company behind some of the touch pad tech we take for granted to day on notebooks and netbooks. The company is behind much of the gesture supporting tech that is on notebooks and netbooks we all use.

At Computex the company has shown off a sweet new tech called TouchPad-IS that is capable of accurately recognizing up to four fingers. The technology can also recognize the difference between fingers and the palm of your hand to eliminate accidental activation when you hit the track pad with your hand.

Synaptics is also demonstrating a new track pad that has no dedicated buttons for clicking. The track pad itself clicks providing a larger space for gesture control.

COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 - Our storage guru Chris who is also in Taipei for Computex 2010 is going to go into detail about what he saw at OCZ's suite at the Grand Hyatt a little later on.

Once we heard from him that they were showing off an enterprise server system that was able to push almost 1GB/s through its storage system, we had to take the video camera up and get a closer look at what was going on.

Jessica from OCZ introduced their Computex demo system that consisted of eight of its brand new Deneva SSDs. This new model is based on the SandForce SF-1500 controller that is using a custom SAS interface and SLC flash memory.