Computer Systems - Page 49

The last time we talked about Lenovo and a battery recall was back in 2009 when the notebook industry was in the midst of one of the biggest battery recalls ever. Lenovo has recently announced another battery recall that covers battery packs used in its notebook computers.

Lenovo says that the battery packs can overheat and pose a fire risk. Lenovo reports that it has received two notifications of battery packs overheating and resulting in damage to the battery pack, notebook, and nearby property. No injuries have been reported so far.

The recall covers 34,500 batteries in the US and an additional 2,900 batteries in Canada. Battery packs covered in the recall were sold separately and with the following notebooks: Edge 11, 13 and 14 series, the T410, T420, T510 and W510 series, and the X100e, X120e, X200, X201 and X201s.

GTC 2014 - One of the more impressive setups at this year's GPU Technology Conference was from Origin PC, where the custom PC maker had one of its Genesis PCs on display running 4-way GeForce GTX Titan Black GPUs in SLI.

What good are all four of those GPUs if there's not going to be an insane amount of pixels to be pushed, right? Well, are three 4K TVs enough? Yeah - I thought so. The Origin PC Genesis system was pushing out an insane 1.5 billion pixels per second, running Slightly Mad Studios' Project CARS. I didn't get any hands-on time with it unfortunately, but we'll let some of the photos of the setup do some justice.

CeBIT 2014 - We have had some hands-on time with MSI's unique Nightblade gaming barebones PC at CeBIT 2014 in Germany. Take a look at our hands-on video below.

Inside of the Nightblade we have a unique OC Genie button, which is capable of overclocking the Nightblade with just a press of a button. Better yet, the overclock is represented by a red light emitting from the Nightblade. Inside of the MSI Nightblade is a case fan that was custom-made for the chassis. The fan speed is dynamically adjusted depending on what you're doing at the time, with the fan capable of driving up to 3600RPM.

As for GPU support, the Nightblade is capable of housing a full-size GPU, with a maximum length of 290mm and 35mm thick. Even something as powerful as AMD's Radeon R9 290X can be installed into the Nightblade. MSI has installed its own MSI GAMING motherboard inside of the Nightblade, as well as a 600W PSU that should be capable of driving any combination of hardware you desire.

Zotac is well known for its video cards and its series of Zbox mini PCs for a very long time. The company worked with both AMD and Intel based mini PCs in the past, providing very small systems and barebones for its buyers. The company recently introduced some of its upcoming Zbox mini-PC systems during the CeBIT trade show. The Zotac Zbox 'E' series will be using Haswell and Iris Pro integrated graphics and the smaller Zbox unit AQ02 series will be using AMD Richland APU.

Zotac's senior direct Carsten Berger said that Zbox E series can deliver a good gaming experience and maintain balance between size, performance, heat dissipation and energy consumption. Intel's Haswell architecture and Irs Pro 5200 enabled them to do just that within the Zbox form factor. Zotac is confident that the E-Series can deliver smooth medium quality gaming experience and the perfect option for those LAN party gamers who want a compact PC gaming system.

The E series comes in a black enclosure, with the choices of i5 4570R and i7- 4770R. Its 'Plus' series variant offers 8GB DDR3 memory and 1TB 5400 RPM mechanical drive. It features dual DisplayPorts, dual Gigabit Ethernet, 6Gbps SATA and mSATA ports.

Before confirming the order, a buyer found out that Dell was charging an amount to install a free and open source web browser 'Firefox'. It was found that the PC builder has an option to install Mozilla Firefox on behalf of the buyer for a new PC if the buyer agrees to pay £16.25. Dell even put this as an option to select in its 'additional software' pre-purchase custom options selection list.

The Mozilla Foundation has started investigating once they've received this report. The company behind Firefox said that they are consulting with legal teams, though the process is in a very early stage.

As of now, Dell did not make any comment.

A researcher was caught using Harvard's Odyssey cluster of 14,000 cores that's usually meant for researching new clean energy methods for mining dogecoins.

The assistant dean for Research Computing at Harvard University, James Cuff, sent an email to the rest of the researchers with a message that "Odyssey and Research Computing resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non research related activity. Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied."

As one would expect, the researcher no longer has any access to its facilities on a permanent basis. The email also added that though the researcher was caught 'eventually', its most likely that he or she already made a significant profit at the University's expense. Since the mining operation lasted many days using the Odyssey cluster, the profit could have been in thousands of dollars as the value of a single dogecoin was roughly $0.0012.

Following this mornings announcement from NVIDIA, boutique PC builder, Digital Storm, has announced that it now offers all three of NVIDIA's new discrete graphics solutions in its line of custom gaming PCs. Digital Storm is offering both the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti, as a low-cost HD gaming solution to lineup. If Ultra-HD 4k gaming is more your style, Digital Storm is also offering NVIDIA's new flagship, the GeForce GTX Titan Black, the world's fastest GPU.

"HD gaming is the new standard and Ultra HD is not far behind with 4K displays already available for $800," said Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development. "This is an exciting time for gamers and we're thrilled to incorporate NVIDIA's new cards into our systems to deliver the stunning graphics and advanced gaming experience our customers demand." Digital Storm went on to highlight a few of its PCs that pair up great with these new offerings.

ASUS has just announced the Chromebox, a small NUC-like compact PC that features Chrome OS. ASUS' Chromebox features deeply integrated Google services thanks to Google's OS, as well as access the popular services such as YouTube, Netflix and Hulu.

The company has used Intel's fourth-generation Core or "Haswell" processors, the latest 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi tech, four USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth 4.0 and SD card reader. As for display outputs, we have HDMI and DisplayPort, which will drive 4K or Ultra HD displays. A nice touch for something that starts off at just $179.

There will be three CPUs on offer depending on the market you're based in, the Celeron 2955U, Core i3-4010U, or Core i7-4600U. It'll come with 2GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM, but can be optioned with 4GB of RAM. For storage, we have 16GB of built-in M.2 NGFF storage, backed up by 100GB of free Google Drive storage (which is for a limited time).

Today ZOTAC announced the launch of its ZBOX Nano series of mini-PCs featuring Intel "Haswell" 4th Generation Core processors. The new ZBOX ID68 and ZBOX ID69 series mini-PCs feature Intel Core i5 and i7 processors with Intel Turbo Boost Technology and take palm-sized computing to new levels.

"Users that want a taste of Intel Turbo Boost technology can opt for the ZOTAC ZBOX nano ID68 series with a high-performance Intel Core i5 4200U that can turbo boost up to 2.6 GHz," Zotac said in a release. "Demanding users that require the best performance available from the compact form factor can step up to the ZOTAC ZBOX nano ID69 series with an Intel Core i7 4500U processor that turbo boosts up to 3.0 GHz."

ZOTAC ZBOX ID68 series

During a recent Reddit AMA, Valve god Gabe Newell had something interesting to say about Steam Machines, and EA's Origin service. "We're trying to make it as open as possible," said Newell, continuing: "If EA wants to put Origin on it, that would be fine, etc... (trying to pick an example of something that people think we would prohibit)."

One of the big hurdles of Steam Machines in the market, would be to cut themselves off from the world, and not accept competitors' digital distribution or gaming services on its devices. But as we can see here, Newell is all for it - a totally open platform.

I think we're seeing the beginning of something very special here, a true living room PC. All we need are some awesome games like Half-Life 3, Team Fortress 3, Left 4 Dead 3 and more, and we'll be in gaming heaven.