Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1e X-Fi SoundCard test
Based on Creative's PCIe X-Fi chipset, the Prodigy 7.1e keeps sound quality high and prices low for a superior value. It may be a no-frills sound card, it has features that a gamer would want like OpenAL and a stable driver, but also for audiophiles in upgradable opamps and a dedicated headphone out. Solid value.
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We mentioned this card several tiems already, but for the uber gamer and more likely profession users in need of massive multi-monitor setups ATI is going to release the the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 edition, apparantly next month.
AMD will launch its new graphics adapters around the same time NVIDIA plans to release its GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. These two models will be NVIDIA's first adapters to support DirectX 11 and will be built on the next-generation CUDA architecture known as Fermi. It is not exactly surprising to see AMD trying to take away its rival's spotlight by releasing its first Eyefinity 6 card. ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 edition is concerned, this product will make its official debut on March 11, just after the end of the show in Hannover, Germany.
VIA announced it will show off the dual-GPU S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2 graphics card at next week\'s Digital Signage Expo 2010 in Las Vegas. This new graphics card is aimed at professional, multi-display digital signage applications as you guys know. This dual-GPU add-in-board can provide up to four independent HD video streams that can be spread over up to eight displays in total.
S3 Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced its participation at Digital Signage Expo 2010, Feb. 24 - 25, Las Vegas. Join VIA at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Hall C1-2, Booth 1240 and experience the latest technologies for next-generation signage systems, including a demonstration of the forthcoming S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2; a dual GPU add-in-board aimed at advanced, multi-display digital signage applications.
The S3 Graphics 5400E x2 is a highly integrated and flexible video card that features dual graphics and multimedia processors. Boasting extreme hardware acceleration of the latest HD video codecs, the S3 Graphics 5400E x2 uses S3 Graphics' PanoChrome technology to provide up to four independent HD video streams at resolutions of 1080p on up to eight displays, employing a variety of display modes and configurations.
"VIA is delighted to work with S3 Graphics to bring unique digital signage embedded products to market, highlighting our prowess in delivering the very best in power-efficient, Hi-Def digital display technologies," said Daniel Wu, Vice President, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc.
S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2 - Key Features:
* Support for up to 8 simultaneous displays
* Up to 4 independent video streams
* HD screen resolutions of up to 1080p
* H.264, VC-1 and WMV-HD hardware acceleration
* Support for Span, Extended and Clone view configurations
* Built-in Genlock support for synchronized source timing
Samples of the S3 Graphics Chrome 5400E x2 will initially be available to ODM customers in the US from Q2 2010.
OCZ introduced the Vertex LE, a new solid state disk that promises read speeds of up to 270MB/s and write speeds of up to 250MB/s. The new SSD will only be available for a limited time in 100GB and 200GB capacities.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (OTCBB:OCZT), a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and flash-based storage as an alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs), has unveiled the highly anticipated Vertex Limited Edition (LE). Based on a cutting-edge new architecture, OCZ
Sheesh, that's storage alright. Kingston announced the DataTraveler 310, a new USB stick with a storage capacity of 256GB. While the capacity of the disk is truly massive, the performance doesn't sound that impressive. According to the specifications, the DataTraveler 310 will have a read speed of 25MB/s and a write speed of only 12MB/s. The product is expected to be available for $1,108.
Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the release of DataTraveler
Corsair introduced the Flash Padlock 2, a new 8GB flash drive offers 256-bit AES encryption and a numeric keypad to keep your data safe. Files on the flash stick can be protected by a 4-10 digit PIN code, multiple failed entries lock the device for 2 minutes to prevent repeated attempts to access data. There's also a recovery mode that resets the Flash Padlock to its factory default state if you have lost your PIN, but doing so will securely erase all data from the drive.
The Padlock 2's built-in security doesn't require any additional software, it works on all Windows, Mac and Linux based computers.
The Corsair Flash Padlock 2 is perfect for transporting and protecting your sensitive business or personal information. With built-in 256-bit hardware data encryption, and access limited by a PIN, you can rest assured your information is safe from unintentional viewing. Built with the same ruggedized rubber housing found on the Corsair Flash Voyager family for durability, your data is protected from the elements as well.
Because the PIN keypad is integrated directly onto the flash drive, there is no software to install. Simply enter your own Personal Identification Number and your data is unlocked for use on virtually any PC operating system: Windows, OS X, or Linux
Wow -- does the gaming industry seriously not realize that they are killing off their own sales by implementing weird requirements ? We've had the DRM discussions, the copy protection discussions, the root kit discussions and now UBISOFT ups it another notch by making a requirement that is just ridiculous.
My former colleagues at PC Gamer found out that while testing review copies of the PC port of Assassin's Creed 2 they got kicked out of playing the game whenever they lost their internet connection. Which simply means your game quits and you lose any progress -- with single player missions.
We've just received Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII for review, and verified with Ubisoft that the DRM is the same as the boxed product. If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected.
The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers'. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen - all my progress since it last autosaved was lost.
Why do software houses consistently find methods to seriously agitate end-users ? I'm sure this again is a privacy breach on so many levels ... UbiSoft .. seriously, I do not want you guys hogging my Internet bandwith. or what if I want to play the game I bought on a laptop with no WiFi available ?
The keyboard uses 2.4GHz wireless tech with 12 channels that it can change automatically to prevent interference. Wireless range is 30 feet and the keyboard has a small USB receiver. The best feature of the keyboard for the HTPC user is that it has a two-button track pad on the right side rather than a number pad.
That means you can type and control the mouse from one device. Power comes from a pair of AAA batteries and the keyboard has a switch to turn it off when not in use. The WKB-4200UB is available now for a steep $119.99.
The big news with the 25mm thick sets is that they are plasma TVs. I am a fan of plasma tech and have been bummed that the tech is slowly disappearing. The line is called Skinny Frame and supports 1080p resolution. The TV boasts a 600Hz refresh rate for clear images.
Connectivity for the line includes three HDMI ports and a USB port. The screen sizes in the line are 60-inches and 50-inches. The bad news is that the sets aren
USB 3.0 standard allows a maximum bandwidth of 4.8Gbps, allowing roughly 600 MB/sec of data transfer.
However if it's up to NEC, this can be more than tripled to 16Gbps (~ 2000 MB/sec). The company send out a statement that it had successfully demonstrated a serial bus that it believes can hit that speed thanks to a new technology that significantly reduces interference.
At high throughput rates, signals become distorted, especially over long cable lengths. Bus interface chips use 'adaptive equalisation' to correct the distortion, and they do this by splitting the signal into two and feeding one back onto the input signal. The snag: the higher the frequency, the quicker the chip has to perform the feedback operation to successfully reduce the distortion.
NEC said it gets around this problem by adding a delay tied to the data rate to the feedback waveform.
"This procedure greatly reduces the nearest-neighbor inter-bit interference in the signal waveform and thus successfully alleviates the issue of feedback-time constraint inherent in conventional equalisers," said NEC's boffins.
Corsair will introduce the Obsidian 700D, a new full-tower ATX case that seems to have most of the interior features of the 800D, which was released last year. Check out our review here.
The case features six HDD/SSD drive bays, five 5.25" drive bays and one floppy bay. To keep your hardware cool the Obsidian 700D uses a three-zone cooling method, there are holes designed for cable management and vents have been pre-drilled to fit a triple 120mm fan radiator.
The case measures 24" (H) x 24" (L) x 9" (W) / 609 mm x 609 mm x 229 mm, weighs 34.8 lbs / 15.8 kg, and makes use of steel for the internal frame, and aluminum for its panels. There's room for three 140 mm and up to four 120 mm fans. There are eight expansion slots, so it makes room for a double-slot video card seated on the bottom-most slot of the motherboard.
There's room for ITX, m-ATX, ATX, and EATX motherboard types, the motherboard tray has a cutout at the CPU socket area for easy handling of certain types of coolers. The front-panel has four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, and the FP audio connectors.
Pricing is unknown, but we can safely assume that it will be cheaper than the Obsidian 800D, which sells for roughly $275,-
Good news for NVIDIA they report a fiscal fourth quarter of 2009 ending Jan 2010 revenue of $982.5 million, a 9 percent quarter-over-quarter growth, and net income of $131.1 million, or 23 cents per share. In the same period a year earlier, the graphics giant recorded a net loss of 147.7 million.
The results are better than expected, as analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had anticipated earnings of 20 cents per share on a revenue of $957.2 million. For the current quarter, NVIDIA expects revenue will be flat from the fourth quarter, gross margin is expected to be in the range of 44 to 45 percent (vs 44.7 percent this quarter), and operating expenses are expected to be flat, at approx. $305 million.
Sales of GPUs rose 22 percent quarter-over-quarter, notebooks GPUs were the biggest sales driver with a growth of 27 percent, revenue of the Quadro GPUs shot up 25 percent, and desktop GPU revenue soared 19 percent.
The company also reveals that about 50 notebooks with the NVIDIA Optimus technology should be available by the summer, and that Volkswagen and Audi will start using next-gen Tegra chips in their cars in 2012.
ATI just launched Catalyst driver revision 10.2, this releases comes with a number of changes. Here is an overview.
Key new features in ATI Catalyst 10.2:
Performance improvements
Apparently a company called Oakville Mehlville Computers in the USA is offering to sell 12-core (physical) AMD Opteron 6174-processors on eBay in tray's of four. These puppies are yet to be released by AMD and are clocked at 2.2 GHz.
These processors are tied to an unavailable (in retail) socket G34, which Oakville Mehlville Computers does not offer. The 12-core processors would have 12 physical CPU cores and a shared L3-cache of 12MB. Each core also would have 512KB L2 cache. The processors are capable of running DDR3 memory at 1333 MHz.
You guys have heard about these processors under codename Magny-cours. According to the eBay post, these are retails samples .. not engineering samples.
Well, if you have 7000 USD to spare, they are sold in a tray of four, yeah .. that would be 48-cores slapped on one motherboard. Here's a photo of the processors:
At this moment ATI is sampling a new driver to press. unfortunately I did not have the time just yet to go in-depth into them, so with this post I wanted to make you aware of some of the new and upcoming features.
Anyway the upcoming two releases are going to be huge, have a peek at some of the new features and improvements:
Two ATI Catalyst driver updates will unlock the many new features, the first coming on February 17th in ATI Catalyst 10.2, and the second update, Catalyst 10.3 (publicly available in March), which I am previewing to you today.
Key new features in ATI Catalyst 10.2:
Key new features in ATI Catalyst 10.3:
A plethora of options can be found really. Small side note, for good HD quality versus optimal streaming please select 720P.
We record our footage in 1920x1080. Especially showing a BIOS with a lot of letters and numbers that can help out a lot in readability and sharpness. We hope you like this new approach to showing you BIOS features; and as you can see, this motherboard has a fantastic BIOS feature set and firmware flash options.
In the video we are overclocking towards 4200 MHz (on air) with a Intel Core i7 870 as well. At the end of the video you can see Windows running at 4200 MHz, be sure to select full-screen mode to be able to read the text and values in the video.
More soon in the final review of course.
HighPoint Technologies is announcing the RocketRAID 640 series- the industry's fastest SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapters powered by PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus speeds. The industry's first 4 port native SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapters allow users to upgrade to the fastest SATA hard drives and scale to higher storage capacities.
The RocketRAID 640 series is the newest edition to the RocketRAID SATA 6Gb/s host adapter portfolio. This series offers 4 independent SATA 6Gb/s ports for internal or external storage connectivity. A PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus technology and is also backward compatible with PCI-Express 1.0 for legacy systems. HighPoint hardware assisted RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD offers a balance of storage performance or protection.
Turbo Charging Your System with SATA 6Gb/s
The RocketRAID 640 series delivers up to 600MB/s of throughput per SATA port boosting storage performance for legacy systems. Current systems can also maximize PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bandwidth to 2GB/s of throughput. Being backward compatible to all generations of SATA hard drives (3.0, 2.0 and 1.5) ensures that systems can smoothly transition to SATA 6Gb and fully utilize their existing cables and connectors.
Performance Companion for Speedy Devices
The highest performing SATA and SSD hard drives have performance bottlenecks due to older generation host adapters and bus technologies. The RocketRAID 640 series offers dedicated bandwidth and point-to-point connectivity making it the performance companion for speedy devices such as SATA 6Gb/s and SSD hard drives. A PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus also provides the bandwidth needed to break through the performance barrier.
Growing Your Storage As You Need !
Four SATA 6Gb/s ports and support for port multiplier devices allows user to grow their storage capacities as needed. PM devices provide the most economical way to scale storage capacities. With the HighPoint RAID management utility, users can scale their storage capacities with OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) without losing their existing data investment to 20 SATA devices or up to 40TB of disk space.
The RocketRAID 640 and RocketRAID 644 are priced at $196.90 and $240.90, respectively.
USB 3.0 support is popping up on many of the new mainboards, notebooks, and computers unveiled recently. With all the new boards and machines that support USB 3.0 there is also lots of new USB 3.0 hardware coming to take advantage of the speedier connectivity.
Active Media Products has unveiled the Aviator-2 external USB 3.0 chassis for SATA HDDs. The chassis measures 3 x 5 inches and can fit any 2.5-inch SATA drive. The enclosure is also available with a 64GB or 128GB predator X7 SSD inside from Active Media Products. When fitted with the Predator X7 SSDs the system supports read speeds of up to 200MB/sec.
The SSD version uses MLC NAND flash and has ECC for reliability. The system also includes wear-leveling algorithms for longer life. The drive ships with a USB 3.0 cable. The enclosure alone sells for $32.95 with the 64GB SSD version selling for $259 and the 128GB version going for $449.95.
NVIDIA marketing director Yushing Lui, 47, is facing a misdemeanor charge after he allegedly pulled a bomb prank on a flight attendant on a Cathay Pacific Airways plane before takeoff Thursday at San Francisco International Airport. Lui pleaded not guilty, claiming he only told the flight attendant "something to the effect that he did not have a million dollars inside" the jacket.
Lui had taken his seat in the business class section on board an aircraft headed to Hong Kong, where he lives with his family, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney's Office.
As a flight attendant was taking Lui's jacket, she asked whether it had anything important in the pockets, to which he replied: "I have a bomb in my jacket," prosecutors said.
The flight attendant backed away and the flight crew on board called San Francisco Airport Police, which immediately responded and did not find a bomb.
Perhaps it was a GeForce 470 or 480 ? Heard they are the bomb as well ;)
USB 3.0 SSD performance the MSI Star USB 3.0 controller
Typically with USB 2.0 you'd limit yourself to roughly 30MB/sec so it will be very interesting to see what MSI's latest USB 3.0 Star add-on controllers have in store and what kind of performance they bring to the table opposed to that old interface.
Therefore we test USB 3.0 with the USB 3.0 ready N002 SSD from ADATA, this device is able to deliver up to very fast 200 MB/s and 170 MB/s sequential read/write performance. But how will it perform on USB 3.0 ?
Check out this Guru3D review right here.
Toshiba has announced a new drive that it claims to be the industry
WiFi? In a SIM card? It