A little later than some would have expected, but as the saying goes, better late than never. Corsair has just updated its good ole' Voyager GT, Voyager and Survivor families of Flash Drives to USB 3.0, giving a significant boost in transfer rates across the board.

While the Voyager GT and Flash Survivor series stick to their traditional designs externally, the Voyager (non GT) in USB 3.0 form is more compact in stature. The Voyager GT USB 3.0 gives read and write rates of up to 135MB/sec and 83MB/sec, respectively, featuring a rubber housing to make it water resistant and coming in two capacity sizes of 32 and 64GB at respective pricing of $59 and $129.

As for the Flash Voyager (non GT), this one also uses rubber housing, measuring 73 x 22 mm and coming in 8 and 16GB capacity sizes costing $17 and $24, respectively. The Flash Survivor on the other hand features a unique anodized 'aircraft-grade' aluminum housing giving it shock, vibration and water proof attributes. It comes in 8 and 16GB capacities, costing $28 and $35, respectively.

Following leaked details on AMD's Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards earlier in the week, some new slides (said to be straight from AMD) have since popped up which add some more meat to the equation.

We are assured that the HD 7000 family will use the first VLIW4 circuits at 28nm. In usual fashion the series will be rolled out in steps, with each sub-series based off different base architectures. Looking at the latest leaked roadmap, we can ascertain that AMD is initially planning the launch of four different GPUs making up three series, said to be scheduled for a Q4 2011 launch.

There will be the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850, HD 7670 and HD 7570. They will be equipped with GDDR5 memory across the board and sport 768 to 1536 Radeon cores (stream processors).

Enjoy your 1080p screen? Well, maybe it's time for an upgrade. Sony have released their VPL-VW1000ES projector that has a 4k resolution - that's 4096x2160 pixels folks! More than four times the resolution of a 1080p picture. What would you do with it? Well, Sony Pictures has more than 60 theatrical releases shot in native 4K resolution, but there is no way of getting that onto a disc and into customers hands right now with current technology.

Sony reps do claim however, that they're in talks with the Blu-ray Disc Association to iron out a standard compression method to squeeze 4K movies onto discs and they have already promised that the upcoming Spider-Man movie will be the first one. But, Spider-Man has a release of July 2012 which should tell you that Sony don't want to talk specific dates and their calendar definitely doesn't have any definitive strikes on it.

The VW1000ES does sport a 4K upscaler, meaning that it will boost your current 1080p content to new heights. It also features 2,000 ANSI lumens, which Sony claims is enough to throw up a screen of 200-inches, and also offers 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio thanks to Sony's Iris3 technology and latest SXRD panel. Control over IP is included as is the ability of 3D. Sony are set to launch this puppy in December and hopes the price will be "under $30,000".

While many have anticipated its presence in Windows 8 through several reports for a while now, Microsoft has just confirmed that the virtualization technology popular on Windows Server, "Hyper-V" will in fact be a part of its next-gen consumer level OS. This is not a feature the majority of folks using Windows 8 will be singing sweet melodies about, but for some it will no doubt be a true god send. If you're not even sure what it means or does, but are quick to sit forward in your seat and learn more, you can head over to this link for a detailed rundown.

Another interesting addition to Windows 8 talked about via the source is that of MinWin, which is essentially just the core kernel and operating system components of Windows, making it the most stripped down version of Windows possible. While it has showed up in Windows 7 and started when Vista came out, apparently for Windows 8 its role will be much more significant and purposeful, especially when combined with the powerful virtualization features of Hyper-V.

When the Xbox 360 and PS3 games launched, we were told it would usher in a new era of "1080p gaming", that has really never taken off. Apart from a few games, most AAA titles run at sub-HD or HD (720p) resolutions. Battlefield 3 will be no exception. DICE's rendering architect has tweeted that the game will run at 1280x704 as it saves good performance and memory for the game. While this is not surprising, I don't see how console owners can get angry at this. The consoles are 5 - 6 years old now, hardware of that day could never run games at 1920x1080 at 30fps consistently with constantly upgrading game engines and graphical details.

The tweet says "BF3 is 1280×704 on both PS3 and 360. Removing a few lines from 720p saves good performance and memory for us." It can also be seen in the picture below:

This is why it pays to have a PC that can be upgraded over time. New consoles have never needed a better excuse to be launched - come on Microsoft and Sony, do it now.

Apple's next-gen iPad 3 is set to have a "massively upgraded" battery, but will cost Apple anywhere between 20 and 30% more per unit according to Cens.com. The new battery is reported to go into production early next year and has been designed to be both thinner and lighter with a longer service life than the current iPad 2. With the iPad 3 rumored to have a higher resolution screen, this would impact battery life. Apple would be smart to combat this with an upgraded battery.

The news site says:

Originating from its own media database to confirm the source, MSI is taking a pretty vicious swipe at GIGABYTE for apparently giving somewhat misleading information to its buyers in the way of native PCI-E Gen 3 support on its motherboards.

Using a batch of freshly produced, detailed slides that are now being distributed about the web, MSI makes an effort to educate people on what a true PCI-E 3.0 board is all about and how to tell if a motherboard carries proper PCI-E 3.0, with its primary intent at this stage of the game to point out that GIGABYTE's boards are lacking in this respect and will not deliver quality PCI-E 3.0 connectivty.

MSI goes on to say in its slides that apart from GIGABYTE's G1.Sniper2, GIGABYTE's 40 odd motherboards with "Ready for Native PCIe Gen. 3" association are anything but and that GB is misleading its buyers to think otherwise.

A little birdy has leaked out some specs on AMD's next generation Radeon HD 7000 series of graphics cards, though the information is most certainly still questionable at this stage with the lack of confirmation on any of it.

Codenamed Southern Islands, these next-gen chips will be 28nm (TSMC) based and as the chart above denotes, sitting at the top of the hill is the dual GPU wielding HD 7990. As per tid bits of info on the two Tahiti XT/Pro Cores the card will use, the max stream processor count is estimated to be around 4000 ALU, with the card featuring a TDP of >300W.

Head on over to the source link for a better idea of how the complete lineup is likely to shape up, with details on 8 known SKUs in the 7000 series shared. But remember, it's all potentially very loose information just at this point, so do remember to take it with a pinch of salt.

We knew they were coming soon, just not sure exactly when. Today marks the day the world's first 4TB capacity HDD hits the scene with Seagate beating its competitors out to the milestone. However, the it isn't in naked form at this time and comes as part of their GoFlex Desk external HDD family.

The official announcement from Seagate on the new unit doesn't go into specifics about the 4TB 3.5-inch drive itself, but we are presuming it uses a 4x1TB platter arrangement. As for specific features on the 4TB GoFlex Desk, it uses USB 3.0 for its connectivity and comes pre-loaded with software to assist in automatic, continuous data backup (with encryption) and the included adapter has an illuminited gauge that makes it quick and easy to look at the available space remaining on the drive.

Seagate is now shipping the USB 3.0 4TB GoFlex Desk with a price tag of $249 US. There's word of a Mac version on the way too, shipping later this month with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connectivity.

This news certainly won't gel well for many of you at a time when we thought launch was imminent - AMD is once again choosing to delay the launch of its FX-Series desktop processors, now planned for release in October.

AMD's rescheduling for October is supposedly due to AMD wanting to make sure they hit all the right performance price-points with the first wave of models; thus they are said to be introducing seven models straight out the gate comprising four 8-core FX-8000 series chips, one 6-core FX-6000 series chip and two 4-core FX-4000 series chips.

Looking at a chart compiled by the folks at Xbit labs after gathering data from unknown sources, the initial line-up of models will include the FX-8150 (a 3.6GHz part), FX-8120 (3.1GHz - avail. in both 95 and 125W variants) and FX-8100 (2.8GHz) as far as octo-core models go. The six-core model to accompany them is the FX-6100 running at 3.3GHz, while the two quad-core models are the FX-4170 and FX-4100, running at 4.2GHz and 3.6GHz respectively.