Palit goes HDMI on HD 2600 Pro

Palit has just announced its Radeon HD 2600Pro Sonic, which features a built in HDMI connector, making it easier to connect the card to HDMI enabled displays and HD TV's. The card retains one DVI and get a D-Sub connector as well, although it's missing a TV-out connector, but if your TV already has HDMI, why bother with analogue?

The card itself looks quite generic and it features a fairly standard cooler. The HD 2600Pro Sonic has 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.4GHz and the GPU is clocked at 650MHz. This is the first Radeon HD 2600 Pro card to feature GDDR3 memory and it should allow for a performance boost against the competition.

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Korean NAS/HD video player has it all

Lars Göran Nilsson | Internet & Websites | Jun 29, 2007 1:43 AM CDT

A Korean company called SavitMicro has launched an interesting device, it's a NAS and HD video player in one. It's called the cineDISK CD36HD and its one of the most feature packed devices of this type we've ever seen. Not only is it a NAS (it's actually a NDAS devices), although it only has 10/100Mbit Ethernet, it can also connect to your PC via USB 2.0 for some faster file transfers and it has two USB 2.0 host ports for external drives. There's also a version available with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.

So far it's not that remarkable, as there are plenty of devices like this on the market already. What sets the cineDISK CD36HD apart from every other such device is the fact that it connects up to your TV. Around the back you'll find DVI-D, Component video, S-Video and composite video outputs. It supports up to 1080p resolution, but there's no mention of HDCP support. It has a set of stereo RCA jacks, an optical and coaxial S/PDIF and finally even analogue 5.1-channel RCA jacks. Pretty impressive to say the least.

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Logitech launches two new webcams

Logitech has announced two new web cameras, the QuickCam Pro 9000 and QuickCam Pro for Notebooks, Both cameras can record video at 960x720 at 30fps, although these aren't the first cameras from Logitech to be able to do this. The big news here is that both these cameras use Carl Zeiss optics, which Logitech claims will improve the overall picture quality.

These are also the first web cameras from Logitech to feature auto focus and this should provide for superior quality to past cameras in itself. For still images these two new cameras features 2Mega pixel resolution and they will take still images at 1,600x1,200, although this can be software interpolated up to 8Mega pixels. Logitech's RightLight technology is also part of the package and it makes it easier for the camera to adjust to varying light situations automatically.

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AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT lands in Australia

Lars Göran Nilsson | Video Cards & GPUs | Jun 29, 2007 12:31 AM CDT

With the new AMD cards having launched yesterday, we tried to find out if you could find one in Australia and how much it would set you back. Well, the good news is that you can indeed get a Radeon HD 2600 XT if you'd want to pick one up today. The only problem is that it'll set you back AU$187 inc GST and that's for a GDDR3 card.

The card is from PowerColor and its entire range of cards are available right now. Starting from the bottom, a 256MB GDDR2 2400 Pro will cost you $110, the 2400 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 is retailing for $132. Considering that you can easily pick up an 8500GT, which is a faster card, for under $100, it seems like the 2400 series is priced out of its class.

A Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB of DDR2 memory will set you back $159.50 while the 512MB version is another $11 at $170.50. Both of these cards are more expensive than an 8600GT, which should be the faster card. Althoug the 2400 XT is faster than an 8600GT, with current pricing, there isn't enough of a performance difference to consider one of these cards.

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Conroe based Celerons On The Way?

Steve Dougherty | | Jun 28, 2007 10:06 PM CDT

The lads over at InsideHW have recently been handed a mysterious Intel based processor, which when firing up CPU-Z reported it to be a "Celeron" branded offering derived from the Conroe-L core. This simply indicates we will soon be seeing nice and cheap Conroe based Celeron processors enter the market.

The sample InsideHW were given was in fact an engineering sample, allowing the multiplier to go up to 14.

Some details about the processor. It's a single-core chip with 1MB of L2 cache, is based on a 65nm fab and runs a bus speed equal to that of the Pentium E2000 series, 200MHz (800Mhz Quad-pumped). InsideHw have a guess and say that it's likely this upcoming family of chips will be dubbed the "Celeron E1XXX" series or something like that.

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HDMI possible for older Xbox 360 models?

A to us unknown console accessory company called XCM is listing a new product that should appeal to owners of older Xbox 360 consoles, as they claim they're working on an HDMI cable that will work with them.

What exactly this cable does isn't clear at this time, as the only reference on the site is that it enables HMDI and 1080P output from the regular white Xbox 360. Our guess is that it combines the VGA or component video signal with the digital audio in the round little box on the middle of the cable and then outputs this as some kind of pseudo HDMI signal.

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Spotlight Back On PhysX

Steve Dougherty | | Jun 27, 2007 7:13 PM CDT

Since the official release of AGEIA's "PhysX" (dedicated physics) card for games, we haven't seen anything exciting happening with it at all. Following its release, of the VERY few games that were able to make use of it (namely Cellfactor, GRAW and a few others), these titles were discovered to work just fine without this card, not only that but the difference in physics effects with and without it were quite minimal, certainly not enough to warrant forking out for one.

To help draw a bit of attention to it again, a video posted up on YouTube shows off a new level in GRAW 2 called "AGEIA Island" with the PhysX in action, and after checking it out for myself it definitely wowed me more than anything i've seen from the card before.

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Seagate Announces Two 1TB Drives

Steve Dougherty | | Jun 26, 2007 5:18 PM CDT

Seagate have today announced not one, but two new hard drives with 1TB capacities. The new Barracuda 7200.11 is aimed at the consumer level whilst the Barracuda ES.2 model is an enterprise drive.

Both drives have 32MBs worth of L2 cache onboard, 3.0Gbps SATA and NCQ. The main difference between the 7200.11 and the ES.2 series drives is that the ES.2 uses a serial attached SCSI (or SAS) interface. the ES.2's MTBF rating has also been raised to 1.2 million hours, which is 200,000 hours more than the previous Barracuda ES series drives.

Both drives should become available anytime during this quarter with the Barracuda 7200.11 carrying an MSRP of $399. Both drives are also backed up by Seagate's 5 year warranty.

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Dell launches new XPS notebook

Lars Göran Nilsson | | Jun 26, 2007 3:57 AM CDT

Dell has just launched a new 13.3-inch XPS notebook, which will be available in one of three colours, red, black or white. Well, the lid will be at least, since the rest of the system is either grey, silver or black, depending on what part of it you're looking at.

It's rather nice looking for a Dell design tough and it packs quite a lot of features. It will come with a choice of Core 2 Duo processors up to 2.2GHz, all but one at 800MHz bus, up to 4GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, a choice of integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics or a GeForce Go 8400M with 128MB of GDDR3.

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