EVGA HAS MANAGED to gain a fair bit of fame for its unusual and often quite good motherboards, but its latest creation that was sneak previewed on Twitter a couple of days ago is a monster of a motherboard. Not only does it feature two LGA1366 CPU sockets, but it also has six memory slots and seven PCI Express x16 slots. However, there’s one slight problem with this board, it uses a proprietary form factor.
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TODAY INTEL’S NDA for its Clarkdale and Arrandale CPUs finally ended and the web got plastered in reviews. Most of the reviews take a closer look at the Clarkdale, although a handful of Arrendale reviews have also made it, all of them based on a single Asus notebook model. What is a bit irksome is the fact that Intel has pretty much only seeded the Core i5 661 processor to reviewers and this is of course the model with the much faster IGP than the other Core i5 and Core i3 processors that are being launched later this week.
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RAID IS ONE of those things that you either know what it is, or you don’t care what it is. However, it does offer benefits that make it worth looking into if you’re looking at either getting some extra performance out of your hard drives or want peace of mind that you’ll never lose your data.
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TOUCH SCREEN TECHNOLOGY has been one of the big things in the past year, especially the battle between resistive and capacitive technology with most people preferring the latter as it’s easier to use with your fingers. However, now there seem to be a new player entering the market as a New York University start up is getting ready to unleash its interpolating force-sensitive resistance touch sensor technology onto an unsuspecting world.
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PANASONIC MIGHT NOT be best known for its battery technology, but the company has been doing rechargeables that go into notebooks for many years, not to mention a wide range of other electronics. It now seems like Panasonic is getting ready to give us all a nice power boost for our notebooks as the company has come up with a new improved Li-Ion cell that can store more power. This means either smaller batteries or longer battery life, both of which are potentially good things.
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SOME EARLY BENCHMARKS of Intel’s next generation integrated graphics processor have allegedly been posted by a “local paper” somewhere in Asia. It didn’t take long for them to appear online, but what is important to keep in mind is that these should be the worst case figures. Why? Well, simply because the CPU used is the Pentium G6950 which has its GPU running at a mere 533MHz and will most likely lack Intel’s Turbo feature for the IGP.
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DISPLAYLINK, THE COMPANY behind the fairly successful USB display controllers, is working on delivering chips with support for USB 3.0 and will be demoing it all at CES. It’s unlikely that we’ll see any retail products before the end of next year, but the chips will of course be available much sooner for DisplayLink’s partners to allow them to design new products and solutions.
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JUST AHEAD of the holiday’s, Apple’s stock shot up like a rocket gaining nearly $11 in value over two days’ trading. The reason? Well, either the fact that Apple has had excellent sales in the run up to Christmas, or the fact that the much rumoured tablet product from Apple got one step closer to being announced in January.
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WE’RE ALL FOR tools that help people pick suitable parts for their next system build, especially these days as it can be hard to figure out what bits goes with what. Futuremark has just launched a new tool in partnership with Gigabyte called the Gigabyte System Builder. Okay, so you only have the choice of Gigabyte motherboards and graphics cards, but that’s fair enough, as this is a business partnership and monies have been exchanged at one time or another to get this up and running.
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CES IS THAT first chance in the new year for companies to reveal what they’re working on for the coming year and it looks like Shuttle is getting ready to change its focus, just as so many other companies are. The pre CES press releases on Shuttle’s website talk about a new XPC, a new all-in-one, but also a secret new strategy called SPA and this is the big news that might just make or break Shuttle.
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IF YOU KNOW where to ask, you can get your hands on motherboards with Intel’s upcoming H57 chipset. Well, at least you can if you happen to live in Taipei. We headed down to the Guanghua computer market earlier today after having been told that some of the shops were selling H57 motherboards from Asus ahead of the official launch on the 7th of January next year.
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ISN’T IT GREAT when a technology company relaunches technology that no one really cared about the first time around? Broadcom has reannounced its Crystal HD video decoder solution for entry level notebooks and netbooks that lacks the graphics oomph to play HD video content, despite the uninspiring uptake last time around. So far there are only two netbooks on the market that ever got fitted with a Crystal HD module and only one of those is entering retail.
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NEC MIGHT STILL be the only company making USB 3.0 host controllers for PC motherboards, but there are seemingly oodles of manufacturers of USB 3.0 chips that go into devices that hook up to your PC. A full on price war has already started between these companies and considering that the starting price for these chips was somewhere between $5 to $6 and we’re already down to half of that, we should start seeing some very affordable USB 3.0 devices fairly soon.
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KOREAN MEMORY MANUFACTURER Hynix has announced that it has started to produce 2Gb GDDR5 memory chips using a 40nm manufacturing process. The significance of this is that Hynix will be able to get more memory chips per wafer, but apparently this isn’t the only benefit from shrinking the fab process.
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INTEL’S NEW ATOM processors were expected to launch in early January, but it seems like Intel had a change of heart and decided to announce the new processor family today. The Atom N450, D410 and D510 are all now official alongside the NM10 chipset and Intel’s “new” GMA3150 IGP that’s now an integral part of the CPU packaging. However, what many are waiting to find out is if Intel’s new Atom platform will offer any advantages for the end user.
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