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Memory manufacturer Hynix is ready for the production of a new generation 40nm DDR3 memory chips. The chips contain 2Gbit of storage capacity, allowing 4 GB modules to become affordable, and existing 2GB modules to drop in price as well. Intel has validated two of Hynix's new 40nm DDR3 chips. The modules are a 2GB DDR3 DIMM and a 4GB SO-DIMM, both clocked at 1333 MHz.

At this clock frequency, the chips only require 1,5V, living up to the JEDEC specifications for DDR3 memory. According to Hynix, the new generation 40nm DDR3 memory chips are up to 40% more efficient than their 50nm predecessors, while the production costs for each chip will be lower as well. It's still unclear when the first modules based on the chips are to be released.

Hynix 40nm DDR3 chips ready for production

DFI has officially launched its Hybrid P45 ION-T2A2 motherboard, first shown about two months ago. The board houses both an energy efficient platform as one that is more aimed towards performance by incorporating both an nVidia Ion chipset, and an Intel P45 chipset on a single PCB. According to DFI, the hybrid solution not only requires less space, but the combination also fuses efficiency with performance at a reasonable price level.

Thanks to a number of internal switchchips, both platforms can be controlled using a single keyboard, mouse and monitor. It is also possible to use both systems completely independent from one another by connecting additional peripherals. Files can easily be shared using an internal network connection. The P45 ION-T2A2 is constructed in a such a way that nVidia's Ion components are on one side of the motherboard, while those of Intel's P45 chipset are on the other side. Shared connectors include four USB 2.0 ports, onboard Gigabit networkcontroller and some audioconnectors.

The Ion-side features a 1,6 GHz Intel Atom 230 processor and two DDR2 SO-DIMM slots, capable of holding up to 4 GB of memory. Also present is a PCI-Express x1 slot and a regular PCI slot. Three SATA 3.0 Gbit/s connectors are present for storage, supporting both RAID0 and RAID1 configurations. The GeForce 9400 IGP sports both a DVI and an HDMI output.

By means of an LGA775 socket, the P45-side of the board allows processors of the Core architecture to be used. The ICH10R southbridge provides the board with its connectivity options. Four DDR2-memory slots are present, allowing up to 16 GB of memory to be placed. A single PCI-Express x16, as well as one PCI-Express x1 and one PCI slot have been used on this side of the board. The P45 side also features six SATA 3.0 Gbit/s ports, again with RAID-functionality. A switchbox which allows for switching between both platforms is bundled as an accessory.

DFI claims that its Hybrid P45 ION-T2A2 will be a cheaper solution than purchasing two seperate systems, though a recommended price has not yet been mentioned. The estimated price is specified at $399.

While AMD's partners are displaying the new Radeon HD5970 topmodel, competitor nVidia has launched a new 40nm DirectX 10.1 graphics card, branded GeForce GT 240. In terms of features, the new card is equal to the earlier launched G210/GT220 models, while the increased shader amount makes this card more potent in 3D games. Though its 96 active shader units still don't make the card extremely fast, the decreased power consumption and added DirectX 10.1 support is to make the GT240 a worthy successor to the older GeForce 9600GT and 9600GSO graphics cards.

The GT240 is based on the GT215 GPU, which incorporates a 128-bits memorycontroller for both GDDR3 and GDDR5. This makes the GT240 the first nVidia card to feature the faster GDDR5 memory. Initially, the GT240 will be launched in four versions: equipped with either 512 or 1024 MB of memory, of either the GDDR3 or GDDR5 kind. nVidia has already allowed users to modify the card, since all manufacturers have equipped their models with alternative cooling solutions. Zotac has also announced a passively-cooled version.

At the launch, overclocked versions of the card will also be available. The GeForce GT240 card features a DVI, VGA and HDMI output. Because the card requires less than 75 Watt, no additional powerconnector is required.

Biostar GT240

GeForce GT240 by Club3D

GT240 by EliteGroup with Arctic Cooling heatsink

EVGA GT240 SC with increased clock frequencies

Galaxy GT240 graphics card

Gigabyte launches two versions: GV-N240D5-512I with 512 MB and the GV-N240D3-1GI with 1 GB.

GT240 by Inno3D

MSI GT240 models

Palit GT240 with short PCB and dualslot cooler

Point of View GT240 with Arctic Cooling cooler

XFX GT240 with shorter PCB

Zotac AMP! edition is overclocked out of the box

Passively cooled GT240 by Zotac

As result of a production error, several Hewlett Packard ink cartridges, produced in a period between May 1st 2009 and August 31st 2009 are incorrectly filled. In Europe, the problem affects two Tri-colour inkjet cartridges, leading to the entire cartridge being filled improperly, some too empty, others too filled. Though the production issue has been resolved and the wrong filling does not affect print quality, HP offers its customers the possibility to replace the  cartridges.

The two cartridges are HP's 342 Tri-colour Inkjet with product code C9361EE, as well as HP's 351 Tri-colour Inkjet, which sports product code CB337EE. The latter is also used in HP's 350/351 Inkjet double pack, coded SD421EE. It's also possible that a number of incorrectly filled cartridges was bundled with the HP Deskjet D4360 (CB700B), HP Photosmart C4580 All-in-One (Q8401B), HP Photosmart C4480 All-in-One (Q8403B), HP Photosmart C4472 All-in-One (Q8394B) and HP Photosmart C4485 All-in-One (Q8395B). The cartridges that are eligible for replacement feature a warranty end date of between May 1st 2011 and August 31st 2011.

The improperly filled cartridges can be returned to where they have been purchased from.

Shortly after the introduction of the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro graphics card cooler, Arctic Cooling has announced yet another GPU-cooler, branded Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro. Like all existing models in the Xtreme series, the new version features three 92 mm PWM-fans to cool the components beneath the heatsink. As the name suggests, this model has been specially designed for use with nVidia's high-end graphics cards.

Arctic Cooling claims that the three fans, in addition to the five heatpipes, copper base and MX-2 thermal paste are capable of cooling up to 250 watt. Also bundled are some smaller heatsinks, to be placfed on memorychips and voltage regulators. The cooler is sized 290 x 104 x 56 mm and weighs 632 grams. The temperature-controlled fans feature a speed ranging from 900 to 2000 RPM, displacing up to 81 CFM of air. Combined with a GeForce GTX 285 card, the difference in temperature between the Xtreme GTX Pro and the reference cooler, both with a 2000 rpm fanspeed, is claimed to be 20 °C.

Arctic Cooling's Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro graphics card cooler is compatible with graphics cards based on nVIdia's GeForce GTX 285, 280, 275, 260+ and 260 GPU's and will be released next month, bearing a pricetag of almost €71.

Patriot has launched four new SATA 3Gbps SSD's, branded PS-100. The drives come in a 2,5" form and feature capacities of 32, 64, 128 and 256 GB. Patriot's SSD's feature 64MB of cache memory. Reading- and writing speeds are specified at respectively 210 MB/s and 150 MB/s.

Patriot claims that its new PS-100 solid state drives feature an exceptionally long lifetime of 2,5 million hours MTBF, while competitors usually specify either 1 or 1,5 million hours. Under full load, Patriot's new SSD's feature a 5,3 Watt power consumption, while idle requires 0,5 Watt. The drives are to be launched shortly, bearing pricetags of 105, 240, 364 and 749 euro for respectively the 32, 64, 128 and 256 GB editions.

Patriot launches PS-100 series of SSD's

A while back, LG announced the LG W2220P monitor. The monitor was to feature a 22" e-IPS panel with a 1920x1200 pixel resolution. Though the panel remained unreleased in Europe for reasons unknown, Computerbase now reports that the monitor will be launched in Europe too.

Contrary to the earlier model, this screen is likely to feature a 1680x1050 pixel resolution. The e-IPS does sport the same 1000:1 static contrast, as well as the 300 cd/m² brightness. The horizontal and vertical viewing angles also remain at 178°. LG's W2220P has a claimed gray-to-gray response time of 5 ms.

The screen can be adjusted in height, as well as tilted to the back or front. It can also be rotated to both left and right in an angle of up to 150°. Connectivity includes a DVI and VGA (D-sub) connector. It's still unclear whether the earlier-announced HDMI connector is still present in this revised model. In use, the screen consumes 40 Watt, while in idle less than 1 Watt is required.

LG's W2220P will be released shortly, featuring a recommended price of €250.

The final resolution and presence of an HDMI connector remain unclear for now.

To organize television and computer cables, Eminent has introduced the so-called twistabled cables. Though they can be warped, these cables retain their shape when bent around other cables to keep them bundled. This makes tie-wraps unrequired for cable management and also prevents tangled wires.

The cable is enclosed ina so-called Memory Technology Material (MTM), which does not affect the electrical properties and conductivity of the inner cabling. This allows the cable to be bent in a certain shape after which it will remain in that form.

The Twistable cables will be released soon in various lengths. Initially, USB, HDMI, video- and audio cables are to be introduced.

The warpable Eminent cables retain their bent shape

Yesterday AMD launched its new topmodel Direct X 11 graphics card, the Radeon HD5970. This new card is best compared with a Crossfire setup of two HD5850 cards, only then on a single PCB. THe HD5970 will initially suffer from feebled availability, partially due to the 40nm production issues at TSMC.

Despite the fact that only few AMD partners are capable of selling the card in decent quantities, they have already shown their versions. Brands such as ASUS, MSI, Sapphire, HIS, PowerColor, Club3D, XFX and Gigabyte have all introduced an HD5970 card. Each of the cards is based on AMD's reference design, though Sapphire and XFX will also launch overclocked models. Sapphire's overclocked version adds 10 MHz to the GPU and memor yfrequency, while XFX has not yet released any information regarding the clock frequencies of its 'Black Edition' HD5970. The biggest differences however will remain the stickers, packaging and bundled accessories for a while.

Like all HD5000 series cards, the Radeon HD5970 supports DirectX 11, UVD videodecoder, Eyefinity and ATI Stream. The two GPU's on the card feature a total of 3200 shader units and each core has 1 GB of GDDR5 memory linked to a 256-bits memory interface.

HD5970 by MSI

HD5970 by PowerColer

HD5970 by Sapphire

XFX's HD5970

HD5970 by HIS

HD5970 by Gigabyte

HD5970 by ASUS

Affter not having heard from OCZ's Colossus SSD since August, the manufacturer has now officially launched the drive and added several models to its line-up. The Colossus SSD has a 3,5" form factor, and is to be used in desktop PC's. The drive consists of two OCZ Vertex SSD's that have been configured in an internal RAID-0. The SSD's use MLC flashmemory chips, combined with two Indilinx Barefoot controllers and 128 MB of cache memory.

OCZ's Colossus will be released in capacities of 120 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB. OCZ claims maximum reading- and writing speeds of 260 MB/s. The average writing speed is dependant on the chosen model. An MTBF of 1,5 million hours is specified ant the SSD's come with three years of warranty. OCZ will also sell the Colossus SSD with modified firmware for the business market.

Thanks to their large capacities, the solid state drives are capable of entirely replacing conventional hard disks. This solution however remains rather expensive for now, with prices of up to €3200 for the 1 TB topmodel.

 OCZ's Colossus SSD, featuring capacities of up to 1 TB.

Simultaneous with the introduction of the Radeon HD5970, AMD has launched its monthly driver update. The Catalyst 9.11 driver is compatible with all graphics cards from the Radeon HD2000 series up to the most recent Radeon HD5000 series, also supported are IGP-chipsets from the HD4200 and HD3000 series.

This version has also added some new features, such as GPU acceleration of H.264 video files used in combination with Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (beta), of which the prerelease version has recently been distributed. Only cards from the Radeon HD5000 and HD4000 series are capable of using the new feature to accelerate the HD video. The ATI Video Converter has also been improved, allowing Full-HD video to be downscaled whilst maintaining most of the quality of the original source.

Apart from these additions, several Catalyst Control Center bugs have also been fixed, such as issues during Blu-ray playback and in games:

• World in Conflict (DX10) no longer causes problems when a multiplayer game is ended.
• Audio output available again in Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
• Anno 1404 no longer has black texture issues in Windows Vista.
• Crysis Warhead no longer crashes when run in Crossfire at high settings.

Support for RHEL 5.4 and openSUSE 11.1 Linux operating systems has also been incorporated.

The release notes contain a more detailed list of improvements and bugfixes. ATI's Catalyst 9.11 drivers can be downloaded here by choosing your operating system and product.

ATI launches 9.11 drivers.

Zalman has introduced an improved version of its MFC1 Plus fan controller. The MFC1 Combo features four voltage-controlled channels, as well as one PWM-controlled fanconnector. LED-lighting has been incorporated into the black front panel to display the individual fanspeeds.

Properties:

• Five-channel Fan Controller (PWM x 1, voltage x 4)
• User Defined PWM Fan Control (3 x Auto Mode and a Manual mode)
• Mode Select button and voltage-controlled button
• Coloured LEDs.
• Aluminum Front Panel
• Price: € 37,50

Sharkoon has introduced two new USB 3.0 products, a PCIe x1 expansion card and a QuickPort harddisk dock. The expansion card is to cost about 40 euro and features an NEC controller, used to power the two USB 3.0 ports that are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 as well.

The dock is USB 3.0-compatible and works with 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA hard disks. This SATA QuickPort USB 3.0 will be released next month at a recommended price of 50 euro.

nVidia has released an image of an operational Fermi graphics card on its Facebook page. In terms of appearance, the card bears a striking resemblance to the current GeForce GTX models.

After the Fermi architecture was announced in late September, Jen-Hsun Huang reported that a working model was to be showed 'soon'. It's no coincedence that nVidia has chosen exactly this date to reveal the card, given the launch of competitor AMD's new topmodel Radeon HD 5970 card. The card looks a lot more realistic than the mock-up nVidia showed earlier. The manufacturer speaks of the GF100 and contrary to the Tesla series, this card is meant for the consumer market.

The GF100 graphics card ran the Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark, designed by the Russian company Unigine. As of yet, no information is known regarding performance and clock frequencies. The first Fermi-based graphics cards are to be released in the first quarter of next year.

Thermaltake has launched the Level 10 Gaming Station VL30001N1Z. The chassis is created in cooperating with the BMW Group Designworks USA. The Open Compartment Architecture (O.C.A.) is to result in both a fancy look as well as excellent cooling capacity.

Thermaltake's new Level 10 features three external 5,25" and six internal 3,5" bays, while the hard disk tray is created in such a way that 2,5" SSD's can be mounted without requiring additional brackets. The "chassis" is cooled by four fans, while the eight expansion slots allow for a Quad CrossFire or SLI configuration to be used.

The Level 10 Gaming Station VL30001N1Z is to cost about €500.

Click to enlarge

With the 200 Pass Thru Duo and Solo, Herculas has introduced two new powerline adaptors to its ePlug PLC-line of products. These new ePlug 200 Pass Thru with filter-adaptors are equipped with an additional socket on the front, to allow another device to be connected. The filters are to prevent interference between the ethernet signal and the connected devices.

Herculus' new plugs with filter-adaptors are available in kits of two (Duo-version) or seperately (Solo-version) and are theoretically capable of reaching speeds of up to 200 Mbps, the current maximum using PLC-technology.

The ePlug 200 Duo and Solo Pass Thru are to be released by the end of November 2009, sporting a recommended price of respectively € 129,99 and € 79,99.

Provider of warranty extensions SquareTrade, has extensively analysed the three-year service history of over 30.000 notebooks and summarized the results in comparing diagrams, as can be seen below.

The first thing noticable is that netbooks are about 20% less reliable than entry-level laptops. Those laptops are 10% more unreliable than more expensive models.

The diagram compares several manufacturers to one another. At a 25,6% failure rate, the test does not favor HP notebooks, whereas ASUS and Toshiba appear to produce the most reliable laptops.

A detailed report can be read here.

Since the launch of Intel's high-end Core i7 9xx line of processors, not much has changed to the LGA 1366 platform. The 940 and 965XE models were succeeded by slightly faster models, and samples of the first 32nm hexacore Gulftown chips are also surfacing. To keep the platform interesting in comparison to the fastest LGA1156 Lynnfield processors, Intel introduced the Core i7 960 last summer, which was to become the replacement of the current 950.

As of yet, this new Core i7 model, running at a 3,2 GHz clock frequency, has started surfacing in various webshops, featuring a pricetag of about 500 euro. Though no exact information is known in regards to stock, some shops have already mentioned that the chip will become available within 2 to 5 days.

The Core i7 960 sports a 24x multiplier at a 133 MHz Bclk. Like all other LGA1366 processors, the chip has a 130 watt TDP and an 8MB shared L3-cache. In performance, the new CPU leans towards the old 965XE, though that processor has an unlocked multiplier. The new Core i7 960 is likely to be released in a D0 revision, which in comparison to the older C0/C1 revision, requires less voltage during overclocks.

Intel Core i7 960 processor to become available soon

nVidia has announced its new series of Fermi-based Tesla graphics cards. These Tesla products are designed for use in professional applications and are capable of rapidly processing certain tasks. The Fermi's 512 stream processors are capable of executing calculations much faster and more efficiently than a cluster of conventional processors.

To live up to the demand in this market, nVidia had its Fermi cards certified for the IEEE 754-2008 double precision standard and incorporated ECC support into the chip's memorycontroller. Because the Tesla cards are compatible with the C++ programming language, software developers can easily make their code work on a card like the Fermi.

The line of Fermi-based products will initially consist of two graphics card models (the C2050 and C2070) and two complete systems with four Fermi cards onboard (the S2050 and S2070). The products ending in 50 will be equipped with 3GB of GDDR5 memory for each card, while the C2070 and S2070 are also capable of processing larger datasets, featuring 6 GB of videomemory. The Tesla cards reach up to 630 GFlops of double-precision computing power, allowing the quad-Fermi systems to sport over 2 TFlops worth of double-precision power.

The Tesla C2050 and C2070 cards feature respective pricetags of $2.499 and $3.999, while the complete 1U Tesla systems with four GPU's will cost respectively $12.995 and $18.995. nVidia will be shipping the first orders of the card in the second quarter of 2010. The desktop version of Fermi is to come slightly earlier; the manufacturer has it planned for release in Q1 of 2010.

Tesla C20xx graphics card with Fermi GPU

Four Fermi chips in a 1U systeem feature at least 2,1 TFlop worth of double precision computing power

The Greek overclocker, known as 'hipro5' on the XtremeSystems forum, has recently broken new records in both 3DMark 2003 and 3DMark Vantage. The configuration consisted of an Intel Core i7 Extreme 975 processor, an EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI motherboard with 4 GB of DDR3-memory, and four MSI Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards. To significantly overclock both the processor and GPU, the components were cooled by means of liquid nitrogen. The result: 191.062 3DMarks in 2003 and a performance score of 44.323 in Vantage.

Both benchmarks had the processor overclocked to 5,33 GHz, while the memory consisted of 'only 4 GB in dual channel modes (during one of the first runs, the third module broke down). The memory featured a clock frequency of almost 1 GHz, running in a 2:10 ratio. The four DirectX 11 graphics cards were also significantly altered, having their core clocks increased from 850 to 1242 MHz and the memory from 1200 to 1300 MHz. During the 3DMark Vantage benchmarking, the core clock of the graphics cards was decreased to 1200 MHz due to a shortage of LN2.

Though Intel's Core i7 Extreme 975 is currently the fastest processor by far, the chip is incapable of keeping up to the combined force of the four Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards.

Click image to enlarge

Meteen na de laatste run