Latest News - Page 3218

SilverStone has brought out a new external storage enclosure today dubbed the DS221.

The DS221 is a 2.5-inch unit which supports up to two 2.5-inch HDDs with the ability to make use of RAID 0/1/JBOD. Connectivity to a PC can be either via eSATA or USB 2.0.

The enclosure is 100% tool-less with a robust door locking mechanism.

EXCLUSIVE - Last Friday we visited the ASUS headquarters here in Taipei and got a look at some of their upcoming products.

Our fourth and final preview from the ASUS visit was a look at the upcoming Maximus III Extreme motherboard based on the Intel P55 Express chipset.

The exciting part of this preview was not so much the motherboard itself, but one of the key selling point features that it includes. You may or may not have heard about it, but ROG (Republic of Gamers) Connect is an interesting inclusion to the Extreme model that allows overclocking and BIOS adjustments on-the-fly from another system.

EXCLUSIVE - Last Friday we visited the ASUS headquarters here in Taipei and got a look at some of their upcoming products.

Second up we get a look at the second generation HD media player from ASUS, the new O!Play Air HDP-R3. If you didn't know, the consumer market is totally flooded with Realtek based HD media players such as this one. For ASUS to have a chance at selling a decent number of these devices, they had to spend plenty of time on the drawing board and come out with a product that could actually differentiate itself from all of the others.

The Air HDP-R3 does a fairly good job at doing that by adding in 802.11n wireless directly to the device as well as putting in a handy card reader. ASUS also spent considerable time tweaking the user interface of the device with some new thumbnail views and direction tips and so on.

EXCLUSIVE - Last Friday we visited the ASUS headquarters here in Taipei and got a look at some of their upcoming products.

First off the blocks is a pretty amazing piece of technology that is able to effectively emulate surround sound from one single center speaker bar that sits in front of you just below your monitor.

We were introduced to the Cine5 by ASUS product manager Ives Chiu in the video we have uploaded below. Sadly our videos are only uploaded with two channel audio, so you won't hear the full effect of the product as intended, but you should get some idea of the audio positioning. Hit the play button.

Let me paint a picture - you've read our Radeon HD 5970 video card overclocking article here and you can't help but feel excited about the potential power that you're able to achieve from it. So you start going around and hunting one down, wondering which is the best to buy. So you go over to Newegg and find this. The XFX HD 5970 Black Edition, not only does it sound fancy, but the price tag of $709.99 and the specification saying Core Clock 725 MHz (up to +30% with OverVolt Tool) and Memory Clock 4GHz (up to +20% with OverVolt Tool).

So with everything looking good, the video card arrives (probably after a month due to stock issues) and you throw it in your system and figure since you've just thrown together a nice X58 testbed with 6GB of memory, it's time to install Windows 7 64-bit and get into some serious gaming action over the holidays. So with everything installed, drivers done, thrown on some games, ran a 3DMark to make sure everything's where it should be and you say "Okay, I don't need any more power, but let's fire up the Special XFX Overvolt tool anyway and overclock this sucka..."

Opening up the XFX Overvolt program you find yourself denied! Hmm, this is weird you think, so you get in contact with XFX and the conversation goes a little like this: (note that his conversation involves Australian dollars and hasn't been edited)

Years ago, the speakers that I had connected to my computer for gaming and movie watching were the JBL Creature II speakers. I liked the way the speakers sounded and they looked really cool too. They always reminded me of the ghosts from the Pac Man cartoon when I was a kid.

JBL has announced the new Creature III speakers are now available. These are the follow up to the speakers I used to own. The new speakers are available at the Apple store or Apple.com only at a MSRP of $129.99.

The 2.1 speakers have satellites that measure 3" x 3" x 2 3/4" with 1 5/8-inch drivers. The sub measures 9" x 9" x 9" and has a 3-inch driver. Each satellite speaker has 5W of power and the sub has 15W. the new version still reminds me of Pac Man ghosts.

I am not into the social networking scene at all. I really don't want to know what my friends had for breakfast or the results to the umpteenth poll they have taken. I don't like Twitter. I want more space to say what I think. Twitter is wildly popular though and as such, it was only a matter of time until other sites popped up like Twitter.

Microsoft ha s unveiled its own Twitter style site today called MSN Juku in China. The software giant calls the service a "local innovation developed in China." Users can interact with contacts on Live Messenger with messages of 140 characters or less.

Juku is in beta right now and is likened as much to Plurk as Twitter. Other features of Juku include games and users can win prizes from playing the games. The little blue paper airplanes really remind me a lot of the blue Twitter bird.

The height of SD Card performance is about to increase with a new specification version 4.00 on the horizon, said to be ready by spring of next year.

The jump will go from a current maximum of 104MB/sec to a whopping 300MB/sec, but this of course means the hardware reading the card will need to be updated to take advantage of the much higher speeds as well.

The higher speed is accomplished by changing the data transfer scheme from parallel to serial using low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS). This also means the number of pins on the cards themselves and in the readers will increase from the current nine in order to get the speed increase. It's been said the new cards, despite having more pins, will be able to operate in current hardware, only the speeds will of course be limited to a max of 104MB/sec.

My hobbies aren't exactly green. I like fast computers and fast cars, both of which don't scrimp on consuming power in the form of electricity or gas. If you prefer to be green in your computer use, NEC has a new display for you.

The display is LED backlit and is called the MultiSync EA222WMe. The display has the same brightness as other displays while consuming 20% less power. The screen uses 52% less power than previous generation NEC displays and produces 61% less heat.

The display is ENERGY STAR 5.0, TCO 5.0 and EPEAT Gold compliant. The screen resolution is 1680 x 1050 and the LCD has a 30,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. The screen brightness is 250 cd/m2 and the display has a 4-way ergonomic stand.

Ah the wonders of the rumor mill and the leaks of big companies. Toady while cruising the Internet I stumbled upon an interesting article. It supposes that AMD has a new low-end (you might call it value) DX11 40nm GPU ready for release in the beginning of 2010. The new GPU is called Redwood and fits most of the information we have. There will be 400 Stream Processors (meaning 80 "fat" and 320 "thin" following the Vec5D architecture) 1GB of GDDR5 (128 Bit interface) and should not need external 12v power.

However there are, as with many leaks, inconsistencies.

The first thing that leapt out at me when looking this over is the Texture Fillrate listed by GPUz. It shows as 103.3 GTexels per Second. Quite a feat considering the 5870 only achieves about 68 GTexel/s . This could be nothing more than an incorrect reading by GPUz though.

If you've paid any attentionto the release of ATI's new DirectX 11 video cards or DirectX 11 in general, you would've heard about DiRT2 getting a DX11 face lift for the PC. With the demo just showing up in the past 24 hours and incorporating two tracks and a built-in performance benchmark, Radeon HD 5000 series users really have something to get excited about.

If you're not a HD 5000 series user though, there's no need to be disappointed. Anyone interested in a new rally game to play is going to want to get in on the action, you just won't be able to enjoy it in all its DX11 glory.

We've got even better news though for those HD 5000 users. If you're wondering how the games going to run on your new DX11 enabled video card, you can check out our DiRT2 DX11 Performance Analysis where I've tested the game at the two highest presets at resolutions starting at 1680 x 1050 and ending at that glorious 2560 x 1600 resolution.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Everyone is trying to get into the all too lucrative Smart Phone Market. This is being proven true by the announcement of Creative's Zii phone concept. The company known for bringing quality audio to the world of computer gaming and also known for its rather underhanded crippling of their own audio cards running under Windows Vista are now showing off a proof of concept phone.

This new phone is being dubbed the Zii Trinity for now. It does not appear that creative will be selling these directly to the public but is being shown off as a proof of concept and design in the hopes that some OEM will pick up the idea and run with it. For software potential manufacturers will have the choice of Android or Creative' s own Plazma. For hardware it supports quad-band GSM/EDGE as well as tri-band, 7.2Mbps 3G over HSPA but still carries the ZMS-05 chip that provides 1080p video decoding and hardware accelerated OpenGL ES 3D. This, on the surface seems to put it in a class equal to (maybe slightly above) the vaunted iPhone 3G S.

I will wait to see if anyone grabs onto this one though, after all NVIDIA has the current Terga and Tegra 2 hitting the market and these two SoCs are quite attractive in terms of performance and features, not to mention battery life. Still it could be a low cost, open alternative to the hardware in the iPhone in 2010.

With ATI set to launch the new Radeon HD 5500 and 5600 series at CES which starts on the 7th of January and the HD 5400 series later that month, the company is about to flood the market with a huge amount of low-end cards.

Word has come through that in the HD 5600 series alone ATIs partners will have the option to use as many of the six variances they want. Why we don't know 100% what the different variances include we've been told it's a combination of connectivity and memory. It's probably fairly safe to assume that we'll end up with an Eyefinity version along with 512MB and 1GB versions. Within the series we'll no doubt see two model names which should consist of the HD 5650 and HD 5670 simply by going off past trends.

As for the HD 5500 and HD 5400, we have been told that ATI will offer between two and three variances which means a total of six variances in those bottom two series and another six variances in the HD 5600 series bringing us to a grant total of 12 new video cards.

Every day I try to somehow snag a Fermi sample from one of the many companies we work with here at TweakTown. The problem is for the first time over the weekend we heard the 'M' word come out of a partners mouth in regards to the release. What's the 'M' word? March!

January seemed a pretty set date from most partners when it came to the release of the new NVIDIA based graphics card, the problem is though that for the first time we've now heard a February / March timeline. You can't help be feel worried that the time is slipping further and further away.

Every week that NVIDIA go past without a new high-end DX11 video card, it has to become ever so slightly faster than the HD 5870. If Fermi launched in November / December, people would've simply been happy with the green teams product coming out 5 - 10% faster than ATIs, if it comes out four to five months later though people are going to expect more performance than that though.

We've just received word that ATI have just sent out the design kit to its ATI partners this week. So what does that mean? Well it means that come January we'll begin to see companies offer their own design of Radeon HD 5800 series video cards, this also means that ATI probably have confidence in their supply of chips come early next year as well.

This is good news for everyone, for starters the supply will mean that if you're looking for a HD 5800 series, you shouldn't run into any dramas. Secondly with the launch of the Fermi based boards from NVIDIA, ATI only partners like Sapphire and HIS can work at making a product that will compete with the green teams new model, which is no doubt going to beat a stock HD 5870 for the simple fact that it needs too.

While we can't confirm 100%, come January we should see models like the Atomic from Sapphire, TurboX from HIS and other pre overclocked models from partners producing ATI products.

NVIDIA has just quietly unveiled its first GeForce 300 series graphics chipset, dubbed the GeForce 310. But don't get too excited, it's said to be based on current architecture, not Fermi (which adds DirectX 11 support and inevitably far superior performance characteristics).

The GeForce 310 is positioned to directly replace the older 210 model as a replacement for systems limited to slow integrated graphics. As such, specifications aren't anything to wow yourself over with a 64-bit memory bus and 16 processing cores. Stock clockspeeds come in at 589MHz for the core and 500MHz on the 512MB of DDR2 memory.

Despite the lowly specs, the card is still said to be quite capable for most desktop tasks including the ability to fully accelerate 1080p video in hardware and make good use of NVIDIA's CUDA or PhysX technologies.

For a while now we've been hearing about the possibility of Intel bringing out an E8700 to market which would top the lineup of Wolfdale cored Core 2 Duo processors.

An E8700 had been listed on Intel's website quite a whiles back which stated it uses the Wolfdale core and runs at a stock clockspeed of 3.5GHz (using a 10.5x multi) and has a TDP rating of 65 watt. All other specifications match the rest of the Wolfdale family.

Since the listing we've heard nothing more as to its release date / availability. However, a user over at the XtremeSystems forums has just reported today that he received an E8700 directly from Intel's chip factory in Malaysia, despite actually arranging a QX9650 to be sent to him. You can see the CPU he received above which distinctly shows that is an E8700 processor and previous known specifications are now confirmed as per what's imprinted on the heatspreader.

A little birdy has kindly passed on some nice clean images of some various upcoming ASRock H55 Express based motherboards which are due for launch early next year when CES kicks off.

As you can see below, there's both mATX and full sized ATX motherboards being prepared by the company, and by the looks of it they're all in final form here.

The H55DE3 is a full-sized ATX variant with dual PCI-E x16 slots, a couple x1 slots and a couple legacy PCI slots.

Hi, I'm a Mac

And I am a PC.

Hey Mac, you look like you are hurt...(Concern in PC's Voice)

When you are traveling around Taiwan all of the time looking here and there, you see all sorts of different things.

Recently we ran into something out and about looking kind of strange. On closer inspection, we released just what we were looking at. If you've been following Intel's CPU plans, you'll know that early next year they intend on coming out with more Core i5 processors and also a line of entry-level Core i3 processors.

These processors will use the Intel Clarkdale processor core built on 32nm technology and what's different about them is it will be the first time we see Intel bolt on a graphics chip to the CPU itself. Users interested in running this type of CPU will either need to buy an upcoming Intel H55 or H57 chipset, which includes the required framework for the graphics to work.