News

Though Intel has been delayed with the 45nm quadcores it's convinced to be able to release a new series of processors, Nehalem, by the end of this year. The desktop version of this, the Bloomfield, will feature four cores with a shared cache memory of 8 MB. Bloomfield will also have a triple-channel DDR3 memory controller, which should significantly increase the bandwidth between the memory and the processor.

The X58 chipset has 32 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes, which can be spread in two times 16x of four 8x lanes. It's almost certain that Crossfire support will remain existant. The X58 will be linked to the current ICH10/R southbridge, meaning there won't be any new features in this area. Earlier on, a motherboard picture leaked, of which Expreview thinks might be an X58.

A few months ago Iomega expanded their line of external hard disks with the eGo 2.5 inch Portable Hard Drives.  These drives have a capacity of 160 or 250 GB at 5400 RPM.  Iomega has now released a special 'camo' version of these disks. The model comes witrh a camouflaged pattern and features a black protective cover to enhance durability. The hard disk gets it's power through USB and does not require an external power supply. 

De 2,5 inch Camo drive heeft een opslagcapaciteit van 250 GB en wordt geleverd met EMC Retrospect HD software die zorgt voor eventuele backups. Iomega heeft ter bescherming van de drives een nieuwe Dropguard technologie ontwikkeld die in combinatie met de grip bescherming biedt tegen valschade tot op een hoogte van ongeveer anderhalve meter.

The 2.5 inch Camo drive has a capacity of 250 GB and comes with EMC Retrospect HD software to create backups. Iomega has developed a new technology called Dropguard to protect the drive. This technology combined with the protective cover should ensure that the hard disk survives a fall of about 1.5 meter.

Following HP, Dell has introduced two 'Special Art Edition Inspiron 1525' laptops. The notebook will be available in two types, the 'Sea Sky' and 'Bunch O Surfers'. Concerning hardware they will be equal to the 'normal' Inspirion 1525 and feature an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 160GB hard disk and a maximum of 3GB DDR2 memory. The screen is 15,4-inch in size.

It looks like the 'Special Art Edition' is going to cost the same as the regular model in the US (the regular one costs 699 dollar as well with a 160GB hard disk). Price and availability in Europe are still uknown.

Inspiron 1525 "Sea Sky"

Toshiba introduces the Gigaframe Q8 digital photoframe. The Gigaframe Q8 features an 8-inch screen and can play back photo's, videoclips and music. It is expected that the Q8 will be available in the second quarter of 2008. 

The Gigaframe Q8 has an aspect ratio of 4:3 with an 800 x 600 pixel resolution. Two stereo speakers (2 x 0,5 Watt) are integrated, allowing the frame to be used as an mp3 player as well. The blue glowing on-screen buttons are touch sensitive and give access to extra applications, like screen configurations, calendar and clock.

AMD will introduce it's new mobile platform Puma in June. Puma is built around the 65nm Turion Ultra processor  (codenamed Griffin) and is a combination of the K8 and K10 architecture.  The Turion Ultra has the K8 cores, with the powersaving options and Hypertransport 3.0 of the K10 (Barcelona/Agena) architecture.  

The used chipset (780M, with n RS780M Northbridge and SB700 Southbridge) features an integrated graphics card based on the HD2400 chip. It is expected that for an IGP chipset Puma will perform quite well.

It's likely that the Puma platform won't beat Centrino 2 (based on Intel's 45nm Penryn), neither in performance, nor in battery lifetime. According to Fudzilla the platform will be powerful enough for everyday tasks like email and listening music. The biggest advantage of Puma over Intel's platform would be the price. Notebooks based on Puma are expected by the end of June.

Pictures of ASUS' I220GC have appeared on the internet. The I220GC is a mATX motherboard with a Celeron 220 soldered onto the board. This single-core CPU has a TDP of 19W, 512kB L2 cache and a clockspeed of 1.2GHz with a 533MHz bus. According to Fudzilla the BIOS allows overclocking the bus to a speed of 800MHz.

Photo by Matbe.com

A remarkable thing is the usage of the 945GC chipset, which supports some of Intel's upcoming Atom processors. Fudzilla says that the Atom 200-serie pin-compatible is with this board and that in the future ASUS may introduce a motherboard with an onboard Atom processors.

As seen on the picture above there are four USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 Mbit Ethernet, HD audio and IDE/SATA connections. While the old Intel GMA950 takes care of onboard graphics, the mATX board has a PCIe x16 slot, allowing a seperate graphics card. This means that the motherboard can be used for an HTPC as well. Apart from the PCIe x16 slot, the I220GC also features one PCIe x1 slot and two PCI slots.

Since ASUS has yet to release any official information on the I220GC it is not clear when the motherboard will be released and at which cost.

After the release of 3DMark Vantage several problems with the benchmark application were reported. Some users had to enter their product key twice, while others got an error when starting the program. Jaakko Haapasalo, Vantage projectmanager, has now confirmed that they are working on a hotfix to resolve these problems. 

He also mentioned that there will be looked at the request to give the Advanced version of 3DMark Vantage the possibility to view results offline. Another point of criticism is the amount of adverts in the Advance version, which costs $20 online.  Haapasalo says to release more information on the hotfix soon. 

The Amilo Xi 2550, Fujitsu Siemens' latest notebook, features an ATI HD 2700 graphics card, Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN a 17" widescreen monitor and an optional Blu-Ray Disc drive.  The laptop is aimed at home entertainment solutions and the price starts at €1500. 

Thanks to the remote control, the HDMI-connection for an optional screen and the multimedia LightTouch control panel the Amile Xi 2550 can easily becontrolled from the couch, according to Fujitsu Siemens. The laptop has and integrated numeric pad, 640 GB hard disk, an eSATA-connector and a Raid 0/1 function to use two hard disks (optional). 

Today we have laid eyes upon the successor of the popular ASUS R.O.G. Maximus Formula, the on Intel's P45 chipset based Maximus II Formula, in ASUS' Republic of Gamers series.

As expected of a highend motherboard like this, ASUS has set the bar very high to create an even better board than the prior one. The board features a 16-phase power connection for the processor, three for the Northbridge, and two for the DDR2 memory. According to ASUS this ensures a very reliable solution that allows excellent performance under all circumstances.

We find another option at the two additional SATA-ports that are attached through a Silicon Image-controller. When you add two hard disks to these ports they are automatically configured in RAID 0 (striping), however this controller can easily be configured differently.

The X-Fi compatible soundcard of the new R.O.G. motherboard.

Other remarkable details are the red on/off switch (under the bottom PCI-slot) and the detailed heatpipe cooling. It is expected that ASUS' Maximus II Formula will hit shelves next month.

ASUS launches it's  GeForce 9 GSO editions with the EN9600GSO TOP/HTDP/384M and EN9600GSO/HTDP/384M.  The EN9600GSO TOP comes with a standard overclock, which according to ASUS should have a performance increase of about 11%. 

Both models feature the Gladiator Fansink, while the integrated SmartDoctor should allow you to enhance the Shader Clock.

A few weeks ago Western Digital (WD) introduced the successor of it's well-known Raptor hard disk, named the VelociRaptor. Anandtech already ran benchmarks of a preview model, though the drive was fast in the tests, there were still some minor problems due to the disk's firmware. WD has since improved this and even though not all problems are solved yet, the disk performs a lot better, reason enough for Anandtech to update their article.

To make things easy, we've created a table of some of the benchmarks. The New column is represented by the VelociRaptor with new firmware, the column Old by the older firmware and the WD6400AAKS by a reference disk, in this case a WD SE16 640GB model. As seen below, the results aren't always as different. However, in some cases, like the file copy test, a significant performance increase can be seen. Anandtech also reports that the new firmware version is not a retail version, so further performance advantages and bugfixes are a possibility.

Point of View expands it's GeForce 9 series with the 9600 GSO, the smaller brother of the GT. The GSO features 96 stream processors running at 1350 MHz.

The card uses DDR3 memory, which runs at 1600 MHz with a 192 bit bus. The GPU's core is clocked at 550 MHz. The GSO also features an HDMI connector, allowing full support of:

• Blu-ray and HD-DVD decoding with PureVideo HD (H.264 en VC-1)
• Microsoft DirectX 10 and 9 and Shader model 4.0

A-Data has announced to expand it's MyFlash series of USB flashdrives with a 32 GB model. The white PD2 and black PD9 drives are already available in sizes of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 GB.

The drives have a dimension of 69,6x17x10 mm (LxWxH), and according to A-Data, will be sold worldwide. The 32 GB model will cost around $149 (ex VAT).

Noctua introduces the NH-C12P CPU cooler, equipped with 6 heatpipes and Noctua's NF-P12 120mm fan. The downwards angled c-type design allows the cooler to be smaller in height (114mm), while two Airflow-Gaps are to offer additional cooling for several motherboard components.

The premium bundle comes with Noctua's NT-H1 high-end cooling paste, at a recommended price of €59,90.

Recently GPU-Z version 0.2 has been released by it's creator techPowerUp. The graphics card tool is officially still in beta but is already used a lot.

The program now offers better detection of ATI's RV770 chip and support for nVidia's GT200 chip and different S3 cards. There is also a possibility added to create a screenshot and upload it directly, clicking the icon on the right.

Shortly after the introduction of version 0.2.0 a newer version, 0.2.1 was released to fix a problem with Vista 32/64 bits detection. This version, released saturday the 3rd of May, is as of yet the latest version and can be downloaded here.

Recently Thermaltake introduced a new case, the Armor+ MX. The case, which was presented at the CES 2008, should be available this month for a recommended price of $139.

The Armor+ MV has a transparant side panel

According to Thermaltake the Armor+ MX is optimized for both air- as watercooling. It has three fans, as illustrated below:

Manufacturer RaidSonic has introduced two new cases in the Stardom series. The SF2010 and SF2020 are compatible with Compact Flash memory cards with a capacity of up to 1 TB.  Since the casings feature a SATA connection, they can easily be transformed into a 2.5" Solid State Drive.

The Stardom SF2010 offers room for a single Compact Flash card and is has a lid to protect the insides. Two LED's show the memory card's activity.  This also counts for the Stardom SF2020, which offers space for two Compact Flash cards.  The two placed cards can be configured in RAID 1 or as JBOD. 

The recommended price of these new SSD cases is still unknown. 

Airlive has introduced a new powerline networkadapter with claimed speeds of up to 200Mbit/s. The HP-300E adapter allows a  home network solution by simply connecting a UTP cable to the adapter, without requiring additional cables.