This game is looks like its going to be a truly immersive piece of work. These new trailers are like a short 'the making of' scenario. This is part 2. Pretty good...

XFX GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition

Last week when AMD unleashed a some nice fury (you might even say a can of whoopass)  in the graphics card market NVIDIA just had to respond .. before we knew it a GeForce 9800 GTX+ SKU was born.

What people seem to forget though is that there are even faster than GTX+ products on the market, now priced very competitive as well. The card we review is the XFX GeForce 9800GTX Black Edition. The fun thing is, it has even faster than GTX+ clocks and will be priced at an amazing 239-249 USD. What we'll do today is have a look at that Radeon HD 4850 performance and compare it with the default GeForce 9800 GTX and then the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/xfx-geforce-9800-gtx-black-edition-review-test/

Well in my defense - it is called the Black Edition ...

The world's first stored-program electronic digital computer successfully executed its first program on 21st June 1948. That program was written by Tom Kilburn who, along with the late F.C. (Freddie) Williams designed and built the machine. It was called the "Small Scale Experimental Machine", but was soon nicknamed the "Baby". It is also sometimes known as the Mark 1 prototype. In modern terms the prototype Baby had a RAM (random access memory) of just 32 locations or

Pricing the PlayStation 3 below its production cost caused Sony to lose $2.16 billion in 2007 and $1.16 billion in 2008, the company revealed today.

Sony's fiscal 2008 annual report delineated potential risk factors to its investors, outlining that "the large-scale investment required during the development and introductory period of a new gaming platform may not be fully recovered." The loss figures were provided as an example of the "significant negative impact" introducing a new platform can cause at first.

"In the past, large-scale investment relating to capital expenditures and research and development for the manufacture of key components, including semiconductors supplied for [PlayStation 3] was also recorded within the Electronics segment," the company said.

In order to stay competitive, said Sony, it had to invest large amounts of money in research and development to introduce the PlayStation 3 into the market, and these sorts of expenditures don't always get recouped, especially if a platform "fail[s] to achieve such favorable market penetration... resulting in a significant negative impact on Sony's profitability."

Even if it can recoup its investment, Sony said, it's still possible to have lost large amounts of money on the platform's introductory period, and even a successful PS3 might take a while to replace what it cost to produce. These possible outcomes are currently a risk for the company, S

NVIDIA just released a new WHQL (microsoft certified) driver for their GeForce series graphics cards. Any GeForce card to date starting from series 6 and upwards seems to be supported.

• WHQL-certified driver for GeForce 6, 7, 8, and 9 series GPUs.
• Improved 3D performance and load times for GeForce 8 and 9 series GPUs in some DirectX 9 and OpenGL applications as a result an improved shader optimizer.
• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI
  

Cooler Master announced its new Aquagate Max liquid cooling system. It's intended for various processors - from mainstream to Extreme and is ESA-certified.

The kit features a polished spider-like copper water block with universal latches for different processors. It's comprised by a stylish pump unit, green coolant (ethylene glycol) and a massive heatsink with two fans.

In Japan Aquagate Max is priced at 300 USD.

Specs:

• P/N: PL-HUB-KBU1-GP
• Supports Intel Socket LGA 775
  

Recently, NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 200 series of products. We already published three separate articles on the GeForce GTX 280, but I figured it's time to have a look at the little brother of the 280, the GeForce GTX 260. A product that is priced much more aggressively than it's bigger brother at 399 USD.

There are always some dodgy webshops trying to get some additional attention by secretly inserting NDA products in their product list.  Ah well, we'll bite .. A Radeon 4870 is listed to sell for

Arctic Cooling launched its RC Turbo Module (a memory cooler) and we'll finally be seeing it in stores next month.

The dual-fan cooler, pictured below, attaches to Arctic RC-cooled memory and promises to lower temperatures.

Artic claims a 74 per cent drop in temperature, when compared to RAM without a cooler, is achieved via two 1500rpm 60mm fans that are said to be "extremely quiet", ideal for the discerning overclocker.

Arctic Cooling states that the RC Turbo Module is suitable for one to four RAM modules, and comes complete with a six year limited warranty. If it's the RAM-cooler you've been waiting for, it'll be available in July at a MSRP of

• Radeon
  

It seems everyone has tried their hand at designing the best all-in-one universal remote control. So many buttons so little time to actually learn what they all do. Well the

WD announced it is now shipping the new bration environments.

In line with the WD RE drive heritage, WD RE3 drives feature 1.2 million hours MTBF, native command queuing (NCQ), time limited error recovery (TLER), and an extensive and enhanced testing process.

Features:

• Dual processor - Twice the processing power that results in a 20 percent performance improvement over the previous generation.
• RAFF technology - Resulting in up to 60 percent performance improvement over previous generation drives, WD's fourth-generation RAFF technology includes sophisticated electronics to monitor the drive and correct both linear and rotational vibration simultaneously, in real time for maximum performance in high vibration environments.
• IntelliSeek technology - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration in active seek modes without degrading performance.
• Multi-axis shock sensor - An additional third sensor has been added to RE3 models to automatically detect the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data.
• RAID-specific, Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) - Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.
• Third-generation dynamic fly height - With this next generation dynamic fly height technology, each read-write head's fly height is adjusted in real time for optimum reliability.
• Thermal extended burn-in test - Extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling added to ensure only the most robust drives are produced as RAID Edition.
• NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

WD RE3 500GB (WD5002ABYS), 320GB (WD3202ABYS) and 250GB (WD2502ABYS) hard drives are available now. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD RE3 500GB is $119, the 320GB is $89 and the 250GB is $79 USD. WD RE3 drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty.

Hmm, hopefully a new trend that'll spread ? So far only the Chinese market is known to offer reduced prices. But, perhaps, Pioneer will do the same in other regions as well.

According to the source, a couple of days ago, Pioneer reduced the retail price of the BDC-S02BKZ down to $145, thus cutting its price by 41.2%. According to industry sources, the reduction will affect other suppliers of BD Combo and BD-ROM drives.

BDC-S02BKZ was introduced to the Chinese market in Q4'2007 for about $390 and underwent the first price cut this March. Market observers believe this new price correction has been made to whip up the demand that is to start growing as Beijing 2008 Olympic Games approach.

Besides, in July Pioneer plans to cut the retail price of BDC-S02 drive from $312 to $230 in Taiwan.

As BD Combo retail prices are higher than those of BD-ROM drive by about 30%, the price reduction will narrow this gap.

After spending the last six months front-running internet domains, Network Solutions has announced that ICANN should prevent people from front-running internet domains.

In early January, the well-known domain registrar began self-registering domains that web users show interest in. If you searched the NetSol website for a given domain without immediately buying, the company would hold the domain hostage for the next four days. You could still buy the address from Network Solutions, but you couldn't buy it from anyone else.

NetSol claims this was an effort to prevent domain front-running, but the Virginia-based company is guilty of extreme hypocrisy.

According to the company, certain people have found a way of monitoring searches on its site. If you show interest in a domain, these mystery front runners are waiting to snap it up, NetSol says, and that self-registering trick prevents them from doing so.

You see, in NetSol's world, front-runners are synonymous with domain tasters - those net miscreants that register hundreds upon hundreds of domains just to test their "marketability". And NetSol insists it would never sell to tasters.

Of course, self-registering domains is also a very good way for NetSol to boost its profits.

Network Solutions can pull this trick because under current ICANN rules, anyone can return a domain within five days without paying a penny. But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is now considering a non-refundable 20 cent fee for every registration.

This would kill NetSol's front-running scheme. But it would also kill domain tasting. And if others are front-running - which we highly doubt - it would kill that too.

Naturally, NetSol continues to say it's merely interested in preventing anyone else from gaming the system. Yesterday, the company issued a press release announcing that it fully supports ICANN's 20 cent proposal. And the release specifically badmouthed front-running.

The release also said that Network Solutions continues to practice its own front running scheme - but it didn't use those words. It called the scheme "an opt-in domain protection measure that reserves available domains for four day." Fair enough - except the opt-in bit is new. When the company began front-running domains, there's was no opt-in, no opt-out, and no press release telling the world what was going on.

Network Solutions can say whatever it likes. It wanted the extra revenue.

System tuning and monitoring support:

• nForce 4, 5, 6 and 7 series motherboards

Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) support:

• nForce 790i Ultra SLI 
• nForce 790i SLI 
• nForce 780a SLI 
• nForce 780i SLI 
• nForce 680i SLI 
• nForce 680i LT SLI

GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring support:

• GeForce 5 (FX), 6, 7, 8, 9, and 200 series GPUs
• Windows XP users must install Service Pack 1, at a minimum, prior to attempting to install this package. Failure to do so will result in the inability to support USB 2.0. 
• Installation of DirectX 9.0 or higher is required in order to use NVIDIA System Monitor.

Download - click here.

After we posted our 3DMark Vantage results in combination with 3-way SLI GeForce GTX 280 / PhysX drivers / and 4200 Mhz CPU overclock I received quite a lot of emails. A couple among them entailed the question if we could post the Extereme performance setting in 3DMark Vantage as well.

Therefore I just ran a couple of additional results for all modes in 3DMark Vantage.

Entry Performance Score

Performance Score (Default test)

High Performance Score

Extreme Performance Score

Dell today issued a last-minute stay on its XP cut-off date and has posted notice that it will continue selling some of its systems with the older Windows operating system until June 26th at 7AM Eastern, or four days before Microsoft's mandatory date for switching most computers to Vista. The extension applies to three variants of the Inspiron 530 desktop that start from $549; a special version of the XPS 630 gaming system also comes with Vista Ultimate but makes XP Professional the default installation.
As promised, Dell will also continue to make the XPS 630's downgrade option available after June 26th along with similar options on the XPS 720 H2C and the XPS M1730 notebook.

All of Dell's business lines already require the downgrade choice for users who would prefer not to use Vista.

The unusually short extension isn't explained by Dell beyond the popularity level but points to continuing resistance to Vista among home users, who are less likely than corporate buyers to be affected by backwards compatibility issues but have in the past raised concerns over software driver support as well as relative performance for both budget and gaming systems.

That's a first I think, a 21.5

Nearly half of Americans (49%) believe that the federal government should regulate the Internet the same way it does radio and television, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national survey.

Thirty-five percent (35%) disagree, and 16% are undecided.

Americans also believe overwhelmingly -- 73% yes to 13% no -- that it should be a crime to harass someone on the Internet.

The findings come as a Missouri woman faces an unprecedented federal prosecution for allegedly setting up an account for a fictitious 16-year-old on an online social networking site to harass the 13-year-old daughter of a neighbor. The girl, Megan Meier, ultimately committed suicide after being viciously rejected by the made-up boy.

Lori Drew, the woman in question, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges of conspiracy and accessing a protected computer to obtain information. She allegedly created the MySpace account after her daughter had a falling out with Meier.

Seventy-one percent (71%) have some awareness of the Drew case, with only 25% saying they know nothing about it at all. Women (79%) more than men

(67%) think Internet harassment should be a crime. Age is also a factor, with support for criminalizing such behavior higher the older the respondent.

Women also feel much more strongly about federal regulation of the Internet, with 55% in favor, 25% opposed and 20% undecided. Men reject federal regulation by a small margin