Gigabyte is one of the more popular computer hardware makers in the industry with a variety of mainboards and video cards that range from entry level to high-end enthusiast offerings. Today Gigabyte has unveiled a pair of new entry-level video cards using the NVIDIA GT 440 GPU. The video cards include the GV-N440TC-1GI and GV-N440D3-1GI.

Both of the cards use the same GT 440 GPU that supports DirectX 11, 3D, CUDA and a lot more. Both of the cards have D-sub, DVI, and HDMI connectivity. The N440D3 has 1GB of DDR3 RAM inside that is clocked at 1800MHz. The core clock for the GPU is 830MHz and the shader clock is 1660MHz.

The N440TC has 512MB of TurboCache GDDR5 RAM onboard had a clock speed of 830MHz. The RAM is clocked at 3200MHz and the shaders are clocked at 1660MHz. Both of the video cards are RoHS compliant and the GPUs use 40nm technology. Pricing and availability on the cards is unknown at this time.

We talked a bit about the Toshiba NB550D netbook with the AMD Fusion APU yesterday when it got unboxed. The gang over at Netbooknews also posted up some benchmarks for the new Fusion processor inside the machine to give us an idea how well the netbook performs. The machine has the C-50 APU running at 1GHz and a HD 6250 GPU that supports DirectX 11.

The geeks playing with the system ran 3DMark06 on it and the total score was 1889 3Dmarks. They point out that the score is 120 points higher than the preproduction version of the same notebook they had benchmark before. They upgraded the RAM to 4GB and the score stayed the same. The 3DMark06 score puts the machine ahead of some netbooks, put well behind the score the Atom D525 packing rigs like the Revio 3700 from Acer that put down 2898.

The machine was also ran through 3DMark03 and scored 4854 3DMarks. That is quite a bit better than the Aspire One 532G at 3029 according to Netbooknews. Rounding out the benchmarks is CrystalMark with the score of 37,648. The geeks also used the netbook for some gaming at 1024 x 600 on Crysis and others and the games played without issues.

Last night you probably heard all the news about Intel only just discovering an issue with the Sandy Bridge chipset. We are using the GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard in the Aussie Flood Appeal Dream System and that is one of the many affected products on the market.

The issue of degrading performance and possibly even data corruption over time is seen when using the SATA II ports on motherboards that are powered by the Intel P67 chipset. The Intel SATA III ports are not affected, nor are the SATA ports powered by the two Marvell 88SE9128 chips that are featured on the GA-P67A-UD7.

The Dream System comes with a total of five drives: two Corsair Force F120 120GB SSDs and three Western Digital Black 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s HDDs. Our solution to dodge the problem altogether is running both Corsair SSDs on the SATA III ports (still in RAID 0) and two out of the three Western Digital hard drives on the Marvell controlled SATA ports. As for the third drive from WD, Thermaltake has stepped up to the plate once again and is throwing in one of their Max 5G USB 3.0 external hard drive enclosures. We did intend on adding in a high-end PCI-E RAID controller to take care of this issue, but all of the PCI Express x16 slots are accounted for by use of the three SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6970 2GB video cards in lovely Crossfire.

D'oh. It appears that the new Intel Sandy Bridge chipset has a flaw that can't be fixed with firmware or software. The issue has required a silicon redesign to fix and some systems shipped before the issue was discovered meaning that there are some Sandy Bridge machines in the wild already that will suffer from the issue.

As far as silicon issues go, it could be worse. The affected machines will continue to work, the issue is with the SATA controller and performance will degrade over time. That means that while your rig might be fast right now, a year or so down the road things could be totally different with IO performance.

Intel is seeing some significant recalls in its future. The chipmaker has reduced expected revenue by $300 million to fix the issue and make the new version of the chipset design. The issue is specifically with the Intel 6 Series chipset known as Cougar Point. The total cost to repair and replace materials and systems on the market already is expected to hit $700 million. Intel doesn't expect the chipset issue to significantly impact its full year revenue. Intel expects to resume P67 chipset shipments in late February and meet full demand by March or April.

Logitech Australia has just announced that consumers are able to get a 100% cash back offer on selected Logitech products. During the month of February, Australian consumers can get a full cash back on various Logitech products. Logitech has set a $300, 000 budget for returning the cost of the purchase back to the customer.

When customers purchase a participating product they will be directed to a website to lodge a claim and will be reimbursed for the full amount of the product. Five separate claims per household.

Below are the list of product Logitech have on offer:

After reporting a net income of $6.63 billion in their reports of the second fiscal quarter, not too many companies would be able to say that they had not hit their goals. But when you're Microsoft there's a different standard, even that amount of loot has a few things on the inside that could show downward trends.

The biggest winner for Microsoft was their Entertainment Division, which handles the Xbox 360 and the Kinect which helped that division grow its earning by 55%. The downward trend for Microsoft was actually their Windows OS, which missed their forecasts by nearly $300 million despite selling over 300 million licenses for Windows 7. The emergence of tablets and smartphones are cutting into the sales of products like netbooks and even PCs along with the Windows licenses that go with them.

While Windows grossed over $5 billion in revenue, there was a 30% drop in sales compared to a year ago. Then again, Windows 7 was a lot fresher product then. Microsoft is banking on Windows Phone 7, which is reporting high customer satisfaction rates, continuing to grow and products like Office which saw a 24% rise in revenue over last year, to pick up some of the slack that Windows is leaving.

NewerTechnology is one of the companies that seems to have an adapter to make just about anything fit into the USB port. The latest adapter from the company is one that will let you take your eSATA external HDD and adapt it to fit into a USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 port. The USB 3.0 use will make the data transfers much faster than eSATA is capable of. The adapter is called the eSATA to USB 3.0 Adapter.

This thing will be great if you have an external HDD that you use for backing up lots of data that has only eSATA connectivity. You can hook the HDD and adapter to your USB 3.0 port and get much faster transfer of data. You can also use the adapter to plug that eSATA only external HDD into a USB 2.0 drive in a pinch.

The adapter doesn't provide power for your eSATA HDD so you will need to plug it into the wall outlet. The adapter kit does ship with the USB 3.0 cable you need, but you will have to provide your own eSATA cable. You should have the cable for eSATA and power already. The adapter is shipping right now for $29.95.

It's hard to keep up with all the goings on in the tech world. The proposed purchase of security firm McAfee by Intel first surfaced back in the summer of 2010. The deal didn't get the nod in the US until December. While the US was eyeing the purchase, the EU was as well.

Intel has now received the approval it needs in the EU to complete the purchase. The deal will cost Intel $7.68 billion and will let the chipmaker integrate its processors much more tightly with security software. Before the EU would approve the deal, Intel had to put some commitments in writing.

The commitments included an agreement to allow other security software makers access to the same hardware McAfee has access to, and to allow other hardware makers to be supported by McAfee. Specifically AMD is to have access. The deal is expected to complete this quarter.

Earlier on today ASRock and Fatal1ty held a joint launch event in Taipei at the at Y17 Taipei Youth Center to officially launch their relationship as well as the P67 Professional gaming motherboard to local press.

We already went over in detail about Fatal1ty's P67 motherboard in an exclusive interview with the man himself back in early December last year. You can watch that here to refresh your memory if it needs, err refreshing.

After some presentations by ASRock, Intel and others as well as a highlight of some of the top features of Fatal1ty's P67 motherboard by Johnathan himself, we got down to the business end of the show. The business we are talking about here is of course gaming. ASRock gathered together four top Taiwanese gamers (I think they were from what I gathered) and put them up against Fatal1ty playing Counter-Strike 1.6.

Some think the nettop and netbook market are dead thanks to the tablets like the iPad. That isn't quite true just yet, there are still a lot of consumers that are shopping for these machines and there are a lot of computer makers still adding new machines to their lines. Giada has announced that it has launched four new nettops for 2011.

The new machines include the Giada A50 with AMD Fusion, the Giada i50 with a Core i3 or i5 CPU inside, and the N50 with Atom and ION 2 power. Another larger line of nettops called the D2301 was also announced using Core processors and ION 2 graphics.

The other machines all share the same chassis. The A50 is the rig in the pic here and it has a single DDR3 RAM slot, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, WiFi, and Bluetooth is optional. It also has HDMI output, VGA out, and a single USB 3.0 port along with four USB 2.0 ports. The machine measures in at 190 x 150 x 25mm. The i50 packs in a Core i3-330UM CPU or an upgrade Core i5-430UM CPU and HD graphics along with 320GB of storage, WiFi and a lot more. The only change for the D50 is the sub for the Atom D525 CPU and ION 2 graphics.