Intel got a serious slap in the face from the EU as they levied a $1.45 Billion (yes with a "B") US Dollar fine on them for violating Anti-Trust Laws.

The 9-year investigation was kicked off when underdog AMD complained to them that Intel was unfairly forcing them out of the market. Now I will say that Intel has some...interesting marketing practices but are they really any different from any other manufacturer?

I mean NewEgg offers rebates, CDW offers customer loyalty benefits as does Dell. I can actually remember being offered a 48-Inch LCD TV from Dell if I bought a large server purchase before the end of the month.

We've just been sent a rather interesting picture from a Taiwanese motherboard maker.

After MSI announced its first motherboards with Power Over eSATA recently, we just had to get a look at one of the compatible cables to get a full grasp of the technology. And as it turns out, it seems like MSI isn't the only one to take on the new eSATA concept released by SATA-IO earlier this year.

The shot below is of a Power Over eSATA cable that bridges from a single eSATA port to a connector that includes the normal SATA power and data connectors. You'll end up seeing cables like this at the start and later "normal" single eSATA cables that transmit both data and power.

There is an interesting article over at Fudzilla that should be of importance to gamers. It seems that Intel's Turbo Mode (which dynamically overclocks a single core in the event of a non SMP/SMT aware application) can push the new i7 975 up to 3.6GHz.

For some reason Fudzilla seems to think this has something to do with the overclockability of the CPU. This is simply not the case. It is just an advanced more to recover performance for single core only applications and games.

Read more here

Sapphire has announced the HD 4890 ATOMIC Edition graphics card, the fastest single GPU ATI-based card available.

(Click the above image for the large version)

Corsair has announced its latest addition to the SSD market, the Storage Solutions P256 high-performance 256GB solid-state drive.

The new drive utilizes speciall selected Samsung MLC flash memory and is backed by a Samsung controller as well. Topping it all off is 128MB of super-fast cache and NCQ for sppedy, stutter-free performance.

Acer is the latest in a group to join an Open Patent Alliance with Intel to work on 4G WiMax.

The group is working to make WiMax the next standard in wireless communications. Acer is the first global OEM to join. Current members include Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Cisco, Clearwire, Huawei Technologies, Intel Corporation, and Samsung Electronics.

The purpose is to create and maintain an ecosystem to give 4G WiMax a more competitive stance in the market which is currently dominated by 3G.

MSI is getting into the X-Fi sound card market. They have announced the release of a PCI-e 1x card complete with the Creative Labs X-Fi sound chip.

The card which will sell under the name SyrenSound X-Fi will be part of MSI's new Syren series and will include a USB headphone (Syren Phone Gaming) and a set of Mini-Q USB speakers that should fit in with Netbook users.

The new series is in direct competition with Asus' Xonar series but will be using the X-Fi sound chip as the name indicates. The question now will be if MSI will be like Azuntec and make the X-Fi work properly in Vista.

The Internet is buzzing with rumors that the EU is about to slap Intel with a heavy fine for violating Anti-Trust laws.

Although I am not sure about the Anti-Trust thing, I can say that if want has been reported is true it does border on anti-competitive. But then again lately the EU has been very free with its rules governing Anti-Trust (just read their witch hunt on Internet Explorer).

While if Intel is truly guilty of these actions (and it seems they are) then they should pay the fine and be done with it. However I can't help but wonder if this will open up a whole new business.

Microsoft has announced that they will be doing another test to see how well they can update Windows 7.

The new updates are scheduled to hit Tuesday, and there will be as many as 10 fake updates in the next week. Microsoft stated that there will be no new features or fixes and that all of the updates will be fake. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that they want to "verify our ability to deliver and manage updating of Windows 7 in certain real-life scenarios."

Andy Paul, CEO and president of Corsair Memory, says that by the end of the year he expects most dual-channel memory kits will be 8GB.

Paul backs his statement by talking about the price of memory continuing to decrease, Windows 7 launching before the end of the year is up, and the push towards 64-bit computing which allows the additional address space for applications to take advantage of. This shouldn't be a surprise to most though. Windows XP popularized the 2GB kits, Vista the 4GB kits, and the next step up becomes the 8GB kits.