MSI released the GeFroce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II, GeForce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II Golden Edition and GeForce GTX 470 Twin Frozr II graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 470 Twin Frozr II features a 607MHz core, 1215MHz shaders and 1280MB GDDR5 clocked at 3348MHz, while the GeForce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II model has a 607MHz core, 1215MHz shaders and 1GB GDDR5 clocked at 3206MHz. The Golden Edition features the same specifications but has a full-copper design.

We are putting the GTX 465 through testing paces as we speak, a full review with extensive overclocking will be posted next week. We can already tell ya .. it's pretty darn good.

MSI, the world's leading graphics card and mainboard manufacturer, today launches two of its latest graphics cards, N470GTX and N465GTX Twin Frozr II which are based on MSI's unique Twin Frozr II thermal design. MSI also revealed its limited N465GTX Twin Frozr II golden edition graphics card which adopts the full copper design. The cards are powered by NVIDIA's advanced GeForce GTX 400 GPU and support NVIDIA technologies such as 3D Vision Surround, PhysX and CUDA etc and boast MSI's Twin Frozr II thermal design. As compared to the reference graphics cards, MSI's latest offerings show a reduction in noise by 21.5dB and heat by 16?

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We test the MSI R5670 Cyclone 1G. a sub 100 USD graphics card that certainly is not a card with a lot of muscle, but for low-level and not too demanding gaming, it can suffice. MSI decided to redesign the board a little bit, slapped a Cyclone cooler on the GPU, ditched their high-end 'military class' components on it, equipped it with some faster memory and bam... you've got yourself a product that can be tweaked into the stratosphere. 1Ghz? Not an issue my kind Sir.

AMD is working on a new x86 chip architecture code-named Bulldozer. The architecture will be used in chips manufactured using the 32-nm process. The company scheduled a 16-core chip code-named Interlagos for release in 2011. Bulldozer is AMD's first properly new processor architecture since the Athlon 64 of 2003. Every AMD chip since then has been a variation on that theme. A tweak here, an added core or floating point unit there, perhaps. But basically the same design.

Not so for Bulldozer. It's a genuinely novel architecture. Novel enough, in fact, to make describing it something of a semantic assault course.

Instead of traditional execution cores, Bulldozer chips will be made up of one or more "modules". Each module packs a pair of integer units and a single shared floating-point resource. The latter is actually a pair of 128-bit FMACs, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

AMD will disclose more details about its forthcoming code-named Bulldozer micro-architecture at Hot Chips conference in late August. Potentially, micro-architectural details may reveal projected performance of the forthcoming multi-core central processing units.

In the program of the Hot Chips conference AMD itself describes Bulldozer core as

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ATI unleshes a couple of new FireStreamprofessional graphics cards. The FireStream 9370 and 9350, two new GPGPU computing beasts based on the Radeon HD 5870 architecture.

With up to 2.64 TFLOPS of compute power, the new AMD FireStream accelerators are ideal for HPC, cloud and enterprise-scale deployments that require advanced performance for handling today

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A university research group and Toshiba Corp jointly developed a power supply technology that can enhance the write speed of SSDs (solid state drives) by 60% to 4.2 Gbps compared with existing SSDs.

The research group is led by Ken Takeuchi, associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Graduate School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo.

The new technology dynamically and optimally controls power supply in accordance with the number of NAND flash memories operating in parallel. It is target at the "3D SSD," which three-dimensionally stacks the components of, for example, a NAND flash memory.

The research group and Toshiba announced the details of the technology at 2010 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, which took place from June 16 to 18, 2010, in Honolulu, Hawaii (thesis number: 22.4).

This time, the research group and Toshiba aimed to solve this problem by using a power supply system equipped with a boost converter that was developed by Takeuchi, etc in February 2009 (See related article). The power supply system consists of a coil, high-voltage switch and boost converter control circuit. Among them, the boost converter control circuit was greatly improved.

In an SSD, multiple NAND flash memories are operating in parallel. And the number of chips operating in parallel (the number of channels) changes according to the state of data writing, etc. The former power supply system developed by Takeuchi, etc supplies a certain amount of electricity, regardless of the number of channels.

With this method, when the number of channels exceeds a certain level, it becomes impossible to supply electricity needed for writing data (about 20V) to each chip. Therefore, it limits the number of channels to 15 or less, capping the write speed of SSDs at 2.6Gbps. 

According to the results of actual measurements and simulations, the new method enables to increase the number of channels to up to 24, which is 1.6 times more than before, in the high-speed mode, the research group and Toshiba said. As a result, the write speed can be improved by up to 60% to 4.2Gbps. When the low-speed mode is applied, the electricity supply required to boost the voltage of a chip can be reduced by 32%, they said.  More here

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught mode can be played with up to four players across four multiplayer maps -- Valparaiso, Atacama Desert, Isla Inocentes, and Nelson Bay -- redesigned with new lighting, time of day, added vehicles and other effects. Each map has a dedicated gameplay focus, requiring different levels of teamwork in order to complete the objectives against an onslaught of enemy AI. Vehicle warfare comes to the forefront in Atacama Desert while Nelson Bay focuses squarely on infantry assault. Players can compete in squads and check individual progress via the dedicated Onslaught leaderboards.


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In the wake of leading edge technology, there is always a turbulent sea of opportunity both for manufactures, partners and consumers.  That

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Shuttle is ready to release the new ION-2 based compact system, a new ultra thin nettop ready to support playback of HD 1080p video resolution. Although Shuttle XS35 is already launched in Europe, it will also become available for pre order in the US, later this week. Apparently, despite the mere fact of product

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Lexar Media, today introduced a value for money SSD drive from Crucial

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Palit GeForce GTX 470 Dual Fan Cooler review

We test and review the Palit GeForce GTX 470 Dual Fan. As such, many NVIDIA board partners went on a quest to find better 3rd party solutions. A handful of the AIB/AIC partners managed to put some interesting stuff on the table. Palit was amongst the first to say it out loud and proud; "we have a custom cooling solution for the GeForce GTX 470."

Will it be good? Will it be able to handle the heat levels and keep noise under control? I mean, Palit has put a heatpipe based cooling solution on top of the GTX 470 with two active fans.

Read the Guru3D article right here.

 

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EIZO announced the ColorEdge CG243W-B. The ColorEdge CG243W-B is EIZO's latest monitor, though it isn't exactly meant for just any end-users. In fact, it is intended for professionals and, thus it has a feature set that focuses on color abundance, image quality, comfort and ease of use instead of responsiveness or techniques to enhance visibility under sunlight.

The display has a diagonal of 24.1 inches and is an IPS liquid crystal display with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. This much may not seem particularly out of the ordinary, what with the current passion for Full HD videos, but the screen's ability to reproduce 98% of the Adobe RGB color space immediately light the professional signal.

Other specifications of the monitor include a brightness of 270 cd/m2, a contrast ratio of 850:1 and connectivity via a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a DisplayPort and dual-DVI.

The panel has a response time of 5ms GTG gray-to-gray and 13ms black-to-black and a power consumption of up to 95W. The viewing angles, both horizontal and vertical, are of 178 degrees. Finally, to ensure that any customer can make the best of its new product, EIZO gave the monitor a FlexStand, which can tilt, rotate and swivel, for maximum comfort and productivity while working. The ColorEdge CG243W-B is slated to cost roughly $1,850 and should start shipping, in Japan, on July 23.

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Intel reports its Atom D525 and D425 chips are now available in nettops.

Entry-level desktop PCs based on the Intel Atom processors D525 and D425 with support for DDR3 memory technology are now available. Announced at Computex, the D525 dual-core processor and D425 single-core processor run at 1.80Ghz and are paired with the Intel NM10 Express Chipset. The Intel Atom processor enables low-power, affordable entry-level desktop PCs, allowing system builders the flexibility to design a variety of form factors including all-in-ones, small form factor and standard desktop PCs.

Additionally, the chip giant also writes its Wireless Display technology is now available on more than 25 systems:
The award winning Intel Wireless Display is now available on more than 25 systems based on Intel Core i3 or Intel Core i5 processors from manufacturers like ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. It is now available at more than 10 retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, Dell.com, Fry's, Sony Style, OfficeMax, Tiger Direct, and more. Enhancements to Intel Wireless Display are available for download with the 1.2 software version. This enables people to access an extended display mode for watching a video on TV while surfing the Internet on the laptop. New remote only mode allows you to watch a video with a black screen on the laptop to lower glare and distractions. A new fast cursor improves navigation on the TV. Intel Wireless Display is available on select Intel Core i5 or i5 systems and requires a Push to TV adapter from Netgear.

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Arctic Cooling announced the K381 keyboard and the M551 and M571 mice. ARCTIC EQUIPMENT is entering into the market for input devices. The products are characterized by high quality at a reasonable price and leave behind a valuable and elegant impression. ARCTIC has launched a keyboard, K381, and two gaming mice known as M551 and M571. The ergonomic designs of these peripherals make surfing and gaming more comfortable and pleasant.

The Keyboard

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We've been planning this for months now ! That is to review the eVGA SR2 motherboard.

The SR2 is a dual-socket Intel 5520 chipset based server motherboard dressed up for hardware enthusiasts, it supports 4-way SLI, has 8-phase PWM, support for up to 48GB DDR3 memory, USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps. The motherboard uses the new, huge HPTX form factor that measures 15" x 13.6". EVGA warns the motherboard will only fit in wide ATX cases with 9 or more expansion slots, and that it is possible that mods may be required for a correct fit in the chassis. You can check out the full specifications over here. When combined with compatible Intel 6 Core CPU

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New Photo's surfaced of a new NVIDIA GF100 board, it looks similar to that of the GeForce GTX 480, but features a stronger VRM, better high-C surface-mount capacitors and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

 

It looks like a previous rumor is confirmed, all streaming multiprocessors (SMs) physically present on the GF100 will be enabled. meaning 512 shader processors, and ROP count to 64. The most likely name for this SKU is GeForce GTX 485. Apart from a higher CUDA core and ROP count than that of the GTX 480, slightly higher clock-speeds for the GPU are also on the cards. The memory subsystem remains untouched, at 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 924 MHz (effective 3.7 GHz), over a 384-bit wide memory interface.

Well memory wise that's what the rumor says, we thing another 256MB of memory will (must) be added for the extra SM cluster, which would mean 1792MB of memory.

We do not expect this SKU to launch this summer, yet likely late Q3 2010.

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We test and review the Palit GeForce GTX 470 Dual Fan. As such, many NVIDIA board partners went on a quest to find better 3rd party solutions. A handful of the AIB/AIC partners managed to put some interesting stuff on the table. Palit was amongst the first to say it out loud and proud; "we have a custom cooling solution for the GeForce GTX 470." Will it be good? Will it be able to handle the heat levels and keep noise under control? I mean, Palit has put a heatpipe based cooling solution on top of the GTX 470 with two active fans.

Deepcool presents Ice Warrior, a new cooler for Intel's LGA775/1156/1366 and AMD's Socket AM2/AM2+/AM3 processors. The heatsink features six heatpipes, a polished copper base and 48 aluminium fins to dissipate the heat. Airflow is provided by a 120mm PWM fan with a blue/black design, it delivers up to 66.3CFM at a noise level of up to 27.6dBA and one of the special things about the fan is that the shell features a rubber coating to minimize vibrational noise. The Ice Warrior measures 136mm x 84mm x 156mm and weighs 1172g.

Features:

• Equipped with multiple clips to support Intel LGA1366/1156/775 and AMD AM3/AM2+/AM2.
• 6 sintered powder heatpipes conduct heat from the processor quickly to protect it from overheating.
• Mirror polished copper base gives perfect contact with the CPU surface.
• 120x120x25mm PWM fan offers a perfect balance between airflow and noise.
• Uniquely designed fan made of special material, modding looking.
• 48 pieces of aluminum fins with big surface dissipate heat efficiently.
• De-vibration rubber fan cover absorb operating noise maximally.
• Intelligent side flow design further utilizes system airflow to improve computer case ventilation.
• Tool free installation.
• 150W solution, a perfect choice for overclockers.

 

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Google recently revealed the latest Chrome developer build for Windows and Linux features an integrated PDF viewer, which can be enabled by visiting chrome://plugins.
Today, we are making available an integrated PDF viewing experience in the Chrome developer channel for Windows and Mac, which can be enabled by visiting chrome://plugins. Linux support is on the way, and we will be enabling the integration by default in the developer channel in the coming weeks.

With this effort, we will accomplish the following:

• PDF files will render as seamlessly as HTML web pages, and basic interactions will be no different than the same interactions with web pages (for example, zooming and searching will work as users expect). PDF rendering quality is still a work in progress, and we will improve it substantially before releasing it to the beta and stable channels.
• To further protect users, PDF functionality will be contained within the security
  

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ViewSonic introduced the VG28 series, a new line of 20", 22", 24" and 27" LCD displays with Energy Star 5.0 and EPEAT certifications.

ViewSonic announced the launch of the VG28 series, its latest family of ergonomic widescreen LCD monitors with Energy Star 5.0 and EPEAT certifications. Offering innovative space-saving and ergonomic design features as well as an ECO mode, saving up to 30% of average power consumption, the VG28 series is making its debut with 20

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