Intel SLI vs. Nvidia SLI

By Paul Taylor

HOW MUCH is the NF200 chip worth to your PC? Future Looks is comparing SLI with and without the Nvidia SLI chip. The whole experience shows little gain in standard SLI, in favour of Nvidia's solution. There's little to get excited unless you go for Tri-SLI. Kingston's HyperX T1 tri-channel 3GB and 6GB kits are on review at Legit Reviews. This is rated DDR3-2000 for Core i7 operation and uses some fancy new aluminium heatsinks to keep things cool.

OCaholic is reviewing a Zalman CPU cooler, the CNPS9900 LED. You'll be shocked at how much heat this shaves off the CPU. Mouse pads won't keep you awake at night, but some gamers need the extra slide for their sniping. Enter the Slidamat Platinum R, on review at XS Reviews.Legion Hardware is a bit disappointed with the Asus Extreme HD 4870 X2 TOP. For all Asus' reputation, it fails to deliver on something novel.

XBit Labs gathered some 320GB 2.5-inch HDDs. Hitachi, Fujitsu and Seagate have their pros and cons, and none get to trump the others in benchmarks.Techware Labs is going over an Asus S101 netbook. This one comes with a 64GB SSD which gives it a little boost in boot times and... price.Bit Tech has written up a guide to TIM - or thermal interface material for you there in the back. Personally we prefer the credit card approach over the "finger in a plastic film".

Metku Mods is reviewing Swiftech's H20-220 Apex Ultima Plus. This is the company's top-range kit in the liquid cooling business, and it performs that way...

If you're in the business of merchandising/customisation, you might like the DV Hardware article about PromoLocker and their Custom USB drives. Tom's Hardware Store is testing a bunch of SDHC cards and proving that the Speed Class convention is moot. Some interesting things you can do with these, like installing an OS, or running portable apps...

OCIA is testing the Cooler Master Storm Sniper PC case. Lots of airflow and an affordable price gave it OCIA's top award. Ninjalane is reviewing the Sapphire HD 4670 with GDDR4 memory. Great value and low power in this card, says William. If not for geekish curiousity, IT Reviews has a 2-pager on Dell's PowerEdge R900, 24-core Xeon server. A mere £17454...

Hot Hardware is playing around with a Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q725 gaming notebook. Chunky plastic look aside, it harbours some impressive hardware. OCZ's Vertex SSD is under scrutiny at PC Perps. These SSDs break in a custom ARM-based controller and RAM for caching, to good effect, says Ryan.

source : www.theinquirer.net

WD 2TB hard drive gets shiny new coat

Now comes in external NAS flavour

By Stewart Meagher

HOT ON THE HEELS OF THE WORLD'S FIRST 2TB internal drive, Western Digital has followed suit with a network-capable external version.

The My Book World Edition features gigabit ethernet connectivity and can act as a media server for DLNA-compliant devices. A USB port allows the addition of further storage.

A 1TB version is available right now for around £170 and the 2TB big brother is expected to turn up later this month sporting a £370 price tag.

The drives are capable of automatic incremental backups and work out of the box with Macs and PCs. µ

source : www.theinquirer.net

T-Mobile offers special $50 unlimited wireless plan

by Marguerite Reardon

T-Mobile USA, the fourth largest cell phone operator in the U.S., is launching new service promotions in an effort to keep long-term customers and attract new ones.

The company plans to offer a special $50 per month unlimited voice service plan to its long-time customers in San Francisco. And it will also offer new customers who switch from a competitor a $135 rebate, Reuters news service reported Thursday.

T-Mobile's new plan will only be available to customers who have used its service for 22 months or more, according to a T-Mobile representative who talked to Reuters.

The new promotions come as T-Mobile faces stiff competition from the three other major cell phone operators in the U.S. During the fourth quarter, AT&T and Verizon each added customers. AT&T added 2.1 million customers, including 1.9 million iPhone users. And Verizon added about 1.4 million new subscribers in the fourth quarter.

T-Mobile USA added customers too during the fourth quarter, but at a much slower rate. The company only added 621,000 new customers. This was down from the previous quarter when the company added 670,000 new subscribers. And it was down considerably from a year earlier when it added 951,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The bulk of T-Mobile's new subscribers came from pre-paid accounts, as the total number of customers signing up for contracts slowed compared to previous quarters.

Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel, which reported fourth quarter earnings on Thursday, continued to lose customers, shedding a total of 1.3 million customers during the quarter.

The results from the four major carriers suggests that higher value customers, who enter contracts and generally generate more revenue per month, are gravitating toward the two biggest carriers rather than T-Mobile or Sprint.

T-Mobile and Sprint seem to be duking it out for value customers, which is where these new promotions from T-Mobile are targeted. In fact, it looks as if T-Mobile's new promotions may be in response to a new plan that Sprint's prepaid brand Boost Mobile launched in January. Boost is offering an unlimited mobile plan for $50 a month. During Sprint's quarterly conference call on Thursday, executives for Sprint said the service is off to a good start.

source : news.cnet.com

The Reason HTPC Makes Sense (Now)

by Chris Angelini

The Reason HTPC Makes Sense (Now)

As mentioned, our previous objection to a PC in the living room was its redundancy, especially in the face of modern networked gaming consoles designed to be there. Why bother booting a PC to watch a DVD when the PS3 has Blu-ray functionality built-in? Why bother booting a PC to record a TV show when so many services include their own DVR as part of your monthly package anyway? Why bother booting a PC to listen to .mp3s when your console is already wirelessly connected to the whole collection?

But as soon as we got Maui into a living room, it became clear that this can not only be a play on enhancing the functionality of your entertainment center, but also on saving money. There’s no longer a need for redundancy, if you don’t want it. The HTPC we’re building here can take the place of your CD/DVD player with a built-in Blu-ray drive. It can displace your console with the help of an add-in graphics card. It can almost nudge your DVR out of the way, thanks to AMD’s TV Wonder card with dual tuners. And—most important—it’s able to displace your amplifier with its own 5 x 100 W PCI Express card. Or install the optional seven-channel pre-amp and use an existing amp to drive your non-powered surround sound speaker system.

Our Maui box, turned sideways so its cables would reach far enough...

Hardware is only one half of the picture. We’ve also seen software take a huge stride forward.

It’s true that there’s plenty to like about a Playstation linked up to a home’s media server with access to music, movies, and pictures—in addition to its core competencies as a gaming platform and Blu-ray player. But the console isn’t perfect. If you’re not meticulous about keeping your media organized, trying to find your favorite tunes on the PS3 can quickly become frustrating.

In contrast, the Media Center software built into Microsoft’s Windows 7 beta does a beautiful job of tracking down album covers, movie information, and scheduled programming all on its own. Just point the software to your audio repository and video library. It does the rest.

Microsoft has put a lot of thought into the 10-foot interface, too. Once you fire up Media Center, you can almost forget about the underlying platform running in the background (even though you’ll undoubtedly find yourself tabbing out to check email or search Wikipedia—I wanted to know more about the F-35 during Live Free or Die Hard). Flipping between music, movies, live television, Internet television, and photo albums with an IR remote is incredibly convenient and much more tailored to the content on your home network.

Let’s move on to the hardware inside this improved HTPC.

source : www.tomshardware.com

How To: Build An HTPC (With Windows 7) : One Small Hawaiian Island At A Time...

by Chris Angelini

One Small Hawaiian Island At A Time...

I’ve been trying to build great HTPCs for several years, and several generations of PR folks at AMD (formerly ATI) have tried helping me piece together the right components to make my theater room shine. Incidentally, this is one niche where Nvidia has historically had little impact. Of course, those efforts have forever centered on All-in-Wonder graphics cards, which integrated 3D, OTA television reception, time-shifting, and video playback.

Not that anything was wrong with the AiW lineup—the cards demonstrated tremendous engineering prowess, as ATI managed to fit all of its multi-media strengths onto boards that didn’t compromise 3D viability. The AiW boards simply didn’t break down all of the barriers to getting PC technology into the living room, as attractive as they were.

Pardon the cabling mess; this project required a little re-wiring.

Ironically, now that the All-in-Wonder family is all but deceased (with one lonely model representing), the age of the HTPC is arguably upon us.

You see, previously, incorporating an HTPC into a home entertainment rack almost felt like showing off, since much of its functionality would be redundant. Yeah, you could get a PC wedged in between the stereo receiver and the standalone DVD player. But so much of the concept’s functionality still depended on other components in the rack.

You’d run video from the graphics card out to a DVI input, ideally, or a component input if your TV didn’t have the digital connection. You’d run optical or coaxial audio to a stereo receiver, which would be responsible for taking that sound signal, decoding it, and outputting to the non-powered speakers typical in a theater.

Adding an HTPC just seemed superfluous. And with a Playstation 3 in the loop, sporting its almost instant-on and rich audio/video playback (plus wireless network connectivity), there’s almost no reason to power-on a PC and wait for it to boot up into a Media Center environment—until now.

Maui Makes Nice With The Living Room

AMD recently (actually, not so recently—it was late last year) sent us an example of its Maui platform, a collection of hardware that, put together, achieves a remarkable degree of living room functionality despite its desktop PC pedigree. We’ve had the hardware in an HTPC role for a few months now and recently shifted the system’s software environment from the Vista Ultimate/Media Center/TotalMedia Theatre configuration that AMD shipped to a more streamlined (at least we think so) Windows 7/PowerDVD build.

Zoom

In this How To guide, we’ll explain why the HTPC now makes so much sense, we’ll show you the hardware that goes into our test platform (and how it all fits together), and we’ll walk you through using it with Microsoft’s Windows 7 beta, which should be shipping by the end of the year. Truly, this is the hardware/software configuration for which we've been waiting.

source : www.tomshardware.com

DRAM Prices Soar Despite Large Oversupply

by Steve Seguin

The price of DRAM continues to soar for the second week in a row after a major DRAM manufacture files for bankruptcy.

Zoom

DRAM prices continue to surge upwards after Qimonda, a major DRAM manufacture, filed for bankruptcy an hour before the Asian market closed on January 23, 2008. The price of 1Gb DDR2 667 MHz DRAM chips already increased 16-percent last week, with average prices for all DRAM capacities rising by as much as 8.7-percent during that time. The worst may yet still come however as prices are further increasing this week as brokers and traders in Taiwan and China return from a week long Lunar New Year holiday. China has the largest spot market for DRAM as it is where many of the world's PCs get assembled.

Despite the recent hike in DRAM prices though, market researcher IDC is expecting prices to begin trending downwards in the long-term as there is a large oversupply of DRAM in the market. Qimonda is still manufacturing DRAM, despite the bankruptcy, but even if it were to stop all production, there would still be more than enough DRAM in the market to meet all demand. The current global economic crisis has resulted in a decrease in the demand of consumer electronics, which puts pressure on DRAM makers.

As of Tuesday this week, DRAM prices were still trending upwards, but the market demands had stabilized. Even though this recent shock to the highly-sensitive DRAM market may soon pass, there may be more shocks soon to come. ProMOS Technologies is one such company that may soon be forced to follow the lead of Qimonda, as it is currently facing a $330M debt that it needs to payoff by the middle of February. The Taiwan-based company is appealing to the Taiwan government for funds as it cannot pay off the debt itself.

source : www.tomshardware.com

Tom's and AMD Overclocking Contest Opens!

by Marcus Yam

Zoom

Listen up, AMD overclocking enthusiasts, Tom’s Hardware’s next big competition is for you!

Starting Today, those of you with AMD Phenom 9950 Black Edition processors will have the opportunity to push your CPU to the limit for a shot of being crowned the winner of the AMD CPU Virtual Overclocking Contest.

For this month’s contest, we’ll be sticking with the Phenom 9950 Black Edition, but those of you with the Phenom II 940 will get your chance in March.

As long as you have an AMD Phenom 9950 Black Edition and are a U.S. Resident (sorry international folks, but those are the rules we’ve been given), then you’re qualified to compete! Here's the kicker though: you can enter even if you're not going to overclock! Non-competing entries will be placed in a weekly random drawing for prizes, but if you don't compete, you can't get dibs on the grand prizes.

To get started, you will need to prepare and then send us some information. When you enter, you'll automatically be emailed a copy of the requirements and rules.

For starters, we’ll have to know about the rest of your system besides just the requisite CPU. Tell us your motherboard model, memory configuration, graphics card, and any hardware and software modifications. We’ll also need to know your cooling method (e.g. air, water, liquid nitrogen, or, for the brave, liquid helium; where appropriate list any non-stock heatsink and cooling fan manufacturers and models).

We want to see what your bad ass rig looks like too. The winners of the Phenom 9950 Black Edition and Phenom II 940 will be flown out to our offices here in Los Angeles, all expenses paid for, to receive the prizes and have an opportunity to replicate or even exceed the winning overclock! Best of all, you'll get to hang out with us and AMD.

source : www.tomshardware.com

Hynix Produces 40nm 1 GB DDR3 for Q3'09

by Kevin Parrish

Sunday South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor said that it has developed the world's highest-density memory chip built on 40nm process technology.

As technology progresses, sometimes bigger isn't always better. Case in point: Hynix Semiconductor has figured out how to develop 1 GB DDR3 DRAM (dynamic random access memory) built on 40nm process technology... in other words, the circuits within this new memory chip are just 40 nanometers apart. To put its size in perspective, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. As a result, the new chip is no larger than an adult fingernail.

Hynix's new DRAM will deliver a maximum speed of 2133Mbps and show a 50 percent productivity increase over the previous 50mn process technology, requiring less energy than its predecessor. The company also said that the new product will be cheaper to make, and by applying three-dimensional architecture, will see minimal leakage current.

"Hynix has become the world's first to apply the 40-nanometre-class technology to the DDR3 DRAM chip successfully," said Hynix spokesman Park Hyun. "The new chip development will help the company continue to lead the fast-changing memory chip market."

However, due to the plunging global economy, the memory chip industry has taken a huge hit below the belt. Still, the company hopes to expand its DDR3 specification and 40nm technology to other products including mobile DRAM, graphics DRAM, and even mass storage memory modules. That's bold news considering Toshiba slashed flash memory production at the beginning of the year, reducing output by 30 percent.

Hynix said that the new 40nm 1 Gb DDR3 is slated to enter mass production in Q3 2009.

source : www.tomshardware.com

Shuttle's New Flagship SX58H7 HTPC

by Aaron Heibert

Zoom

Looking to downsize your rather large and mundane tower case that currently hosts your Home Theater PC or semi-extreme gaming rig? Shuttle delivers with its latest Prima flagship model--the SX58H7.

The new Shuttle SX58H7 features Intel's X58 chipset and is capable of running both ATI CrossFire or Nvidia SLI. Some other interesting features of this new mini-beast is that the power supply unit (PSU) has an 80PLUS Bronze certification with high efficiency and 500 watt max output. The included CPU cooler has a vapor chamber base with heat-pipes and allows efficient thermal movement while lowering CPU temperatures by up to 7 degrees Celsius over standard coolers and heat-pipe implementations.

Judging by what the Prima SX58H7 has to offer, you could pack a lot of punch inside of its small walls, effectively making it a prime choice for enthusiast gamers on the go or those that wish have a home theater PC that is also capable of playing all of today’s latest games. Don't get too excited about going too extreme with your CrossFire or SLI setup though--only single-slot cards will fit in this case.

Technical specifications for the SX58H7:

source : www.tomshardware.com

Sparkle Says DLC Heatsinks Help Overclocking

by Aaron Heibert, Tuan Nguyen

Sparkle Computer Co. this week announced a technology for cooling its video cards called Diamond-like-Carbon (DLC) coating. Stated as a new process to help dissipate heat from heatsinks, Sparkle sets sights on overclockers.

Zoom

The new coating uses what Sparkle refers to as diamonds sputtering technology, and Sparkle claims that the DLC coating increases the rate at which heat is transferred from the source and dissipated away through the heatsink fins. Sparkle is claiming that its DLC coating can lower temperatures by up to 5 degrees Celsius.

Giving a nod to the molecular structure of carbon, Sparkle says that heatsinks coated with DLC will be able to draw away heat from GPU cores significantly faster than direct copper contacts. A DLC coated heatsink also allows fins to transfer heat from metal to air--essentially, the entire heatsink is coated with DLC.

Sparkle also mentions that its DLC coating is able to achieve high thermal transfer rates by acting as a barrier between metal to air contact. Because it's chemically inert, DLC helps prevent corrosion due to oxidation, which reduces thermal conductance. While we think that a DLC coating can help to protect copper-based heatsinks, aluminum heatsinks aren't susceptible to rust and most heatsinks are machined from aluminum.

Typically, DLC has several properties, including:

• Low friction
• Hard but flexible/Wear resistant
• Chemically inert
• Atomically dense
• Bio-compatible and anti-thrombogenic

DLC is often used to coat bearings and engine parts to prevent heat build-up. However, heat build-up is avoided by reducing the friction between the bearing and the housing, and preventing heat from transferring into the bearing. Judging from Sparkle's measurements, it's unclear whether temperature readings were performed on the heatsink or on the GPU die. The supplied chart is also visually skewed, as the graph supplied by Sparkle shows a 50-percent reduction but really only measuring a decrease of roughly 5-percent in temperature from 88C to 83C.

Since DLC prevents heat from entering an object, we're curious to find out from Sparkle if its prototype DLC heatsink actually prevented heat from transferring from the GPU to the heatsink, therefore producing a cooler heatsink. We contacted Sparkle to inquire but have yet to receive a response.

Sparkle has yet to mention which products will use DLC coatings and when consumers can expect to see them on store shelves. We'll follow up with Sparkle on this one.

Quoting from the Sparkle press release:

Now with more and more advanced relative technologies, the performance of video cards is getting stronger and stronger, there will be more heat generated by video cards, which significantly impairs the life expectancy of GPU and video memory chips on video cards. Video card companies have a lot of programs come and go to solve the problem of heat dissipation. The most commonly seen in general is the use of fans with cooling fins to do additional cooling. in the early days, the cooling job can be done simply with a fan or cooling fins, but in today's graphics cards with more intense heat than before, the cooling job must be done on the technologies not the same as before, not just rely on the fan and cooling fins. Video card companies must go to find some relatively new method to solve the problem of heat dissipation.

With a strong R&D team, SPARKLE introduced Diamonds Sputtering technology, which plate a Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) membrane on the surface of video cards cooling fins to realize the cooling effects of DLC. Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) membrane can help to quickly transfer the heat from GPU and video memory chips to the cooling fins. SPARKLE R&D team found in the study that Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) which gradually been found in the past few years has many high-natures, such as high optical penetrating, high-chemical corrosion-resistant, excellent friction properties and good compatibility. In addition, Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) also has a high heat conduction. General heatsink is relies on the electronics movement within the metal (such as copper) to do heat conduction. The diamonds do heat dissipation four times faster than copper, it relies on the phonons which is produced by the crystal lattice vibration, to bring heat to lower temperature places. Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) can achieve both functions at the same time, that is, transferring heat to lower temperature places with both graphite metal bond and diamond insulation bond (the covalent bond) . Apart from this, Diamond-like Carbon (DLC) can transfer carbon surface heat (atomic vibrations) into the infrared radiation of electromagnetic waves in bold (Black Body Radiation) , directly to the air molecules.

source : www.tomshardware.com

Top 10 All-Purpose Laptops

These laptops can do it all and are a great choice for most notebook users. Ratings and rankings can change due to pricing and technology changes, so check back frequently for the latest info.

by Darren Gladstone

1. Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 (2743-25U)

2. Micro Express JFL9226

3. Lenovo IdeaPad Y510

4. Samsung X460

5. HP Compaq 6530b

6. Sony VGN-NR485

7. Toshiba Satellite A305-S6864

8. Gateway MC7803u

9. Gammatech Durabook D15TS

10. Fujitsu LifeBook E8410

source : PCWorld.com

PIXELVIEW GEFORCE 9600 GSO 384 MB DDR3

For a manufacturer that has long been playing in the world of graphics card, Prolink still orient ¬ products to its entry-level class. With Pixelview GeForce 9600 GSO 384 MB DDR3, Prolink try to further explore the world of gaming. However, a somewhat pitied Prolink is cooperating with the graphics card is effectively the equipment available.
In the test conducted on the graphics card, the results are still quite low if compared with other products that classmates.
Although the test results are not so impressive, this graphics card shows the level of stability during the process of testing progress. Performance of the ordinary course, Prolink balanced with the compensation price.
It is interesting from the graphics card is on the testing done overclocking. The increase GPU core is 600 Mhz of 550 MHz and memory speed of 850 Mhz from 800 MHz to provide increased performance significantly.

Unfortunately, the opportunities for higher overclocking, it seems to me this card can not meet these demands. One that needs to be longer for the MOSFET is that there is no use HSF, although the heat generated can still be tolerated.

Conclusion: Judging from the test results, seems oriented towards this graphics card for users who have a relatively tight budget, but want a graphics card with a taste GeForce 9600 GSO. A graphics card that has a relatively good performance for entry-level class, especially with the price valued the relative economic power into pull apart.

Source: CHIP 07/2008
Author: Sony Hanifudin

Huawei U121

Huawei has a new entry-level handset called the U121. The phone comes with pretty simple features, but it looks good and qualitative, especially since it's made of stainless steel. It is currently only available in Russia.

Features of the Huawei U121 include:

* 1.3Mpix camera;
* Support for video calls;
* Integrated FM radio;
* microSD memory card slot;
* 3.5mm headphone jack;
* Audio and video playback;
* miniUSB port;
* 3G connectivity

ASUS Mb P5GC-MX/1333 Intel?

Product Description

Description	Best Performance of All-in-one Solution MB - Intel LGA775 Pentium CPU - Intel? Core 2 Duo Ready - Dual-Core CPU Support - Intel? 945GC/ICH7 - Dual channel DDR2 - 6-channel High Definition Audio - EZ Flash
CPU	LGA775 socket for Intel? Core 2 Duo / Pentium? D / Pentium? 4 / Celeron? D Processors Compatible with Intel? 05B/05A/06 processors Intel? Hyper-Threading Technology ready
Chipset	Intel? 945GC / ICH7
Front Side Bus	800 / 533 MHz
Memory	2 x DIMM max. 2GB DDR2 533/400 MHz non-ECC un-buffered memory Dual channel memory architecture
Expansion Slots	1 x PCI-E x16 @16 1 x PCI-E x1 2 x PCI 2.2
VGA	Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 Max. resolution	2048x1536@75Hz Max. Vertical Refresh Rate	85Hz@ up to 1920x1440
Storage	Southbridge	- 1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33 - 4 x Serial ATA 3Gb/s
LAN	PCIe 10/100M LAN controller
Audio	Realtek ALC883 6-CH High-Definition Audio CODEC
USB	8 x USB2.0 ports 4 ports at mid-board 4 ports at back panel
Special Features	ASUS CrashFree BIOS 2 ASUS Q-Fan ASUS EZ Flash ASUS MyLogo
Back Panel I/O Ports	1 x PS/2 Keyboard 1 x PS/2 Mouse 1 x VGA 1 x Serial port 1 x Parallel port 1 x LAN (RJ45) port 4 x USB 2.0 6 Channel Audio I/O
Internal I/O Connectors	2 x USB connectors support additional 4 USB ports 1 x Floppy disk drive connector 1 x IDE connector 4 x SATA connectors 1 x CPU/ Chassis Fan connector Front panel High Definition audio connector 1 x S/PDIF Out connector Chassis Intrusion connector CD audio in 24-pin ATX Power connector 4-pin ATX 12V Power connector System Panel
BIOS	4 Mb Flash ROM AMI BIOS PnP DMI2.0 WfM2.0 SM BIOS 2.3
Manageability	WfM 2.0 DMI 2.0 WOL by PME WOR by PME
O/S Compatibility	Windows Vista/XP/2000
Accessories	1 x UltraDMA 100/66 cable 1 x Floppy disk drive cable 1 x SATA cable I/O Shield User's manual
Form Factor	uATX Form Factor 9.6x 7.2 (24.5cm x 18.3cm) Source : http://www.chevrontechnologies.net.au/P5GC-MX-1333.html?affiliate=myshopping