DFI shows off Tunnel Creek board

Intel’s upcoming Atom for embedded systems

IF YOU LOOK carefully enough you can find a wealth of interesting things at Computex and we spotted a tiny little board at DFI’s booth that turned out to be housing Intel’s Queens Bay platform. The Queens Bay platform is set to launch in the fourth quarter this year and is an Atom solution for embedded platforms.
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Cooler Master shows off new HAF case, gaming mouse and PSUs

As well as some other interesting accessories

COOLER MASTER IS a company that has been branching out over the past couple of years and is now doing a lot more than just cases. This doesn’t mean that it has lost focus on its case business and it was showing off a couple of new models at Computex, alongside a wide range of other new products like the Inferno gaming mouse, a range of new 80 Plus gold power supplies and some other interesting things.
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Sapphire first with passive Radeon HD 5670

Fully featured card without a fan

PASSIVELY COOLED GRAPHCIS cards are underrated in our opinion and we’d like to see more fanless graphics cards. Mostly low-end cards are passively cooled and others are down clocked and use slower, cheaper memory. Not so with Sapphire’s latest addition which is a passively cooled Radeon HD 5670.
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Gigabyte has Google TV ready motherboard

And a white box solution

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of buzz around Google TV since it was announced a couple of weeks ago and since we know the hardware is based on Intel’s Atom CE4100 SoC platform, we were quite surprised to see exactly that kind of solution hiding in plain sight among a range of server motherboards at Gigabyte.
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Gigabyte shows off VIA Nano mini ITX board

With the VX900M chipset

THE VIA NANO CPU has been out for quite some time now, but we haven’t seen a lot of products based on it so far. We spotted an interesting mini ITX board over at Gigabyte that will hopefully find its way into some interesting devices such as media players/HTPCs in the near future.
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Gigabyte adds Unlocked Power to its X58 boards

More models to come

IF YOU READ Charlie’s piece on Tuesday about the ability of Gigabyte’s new X58 UD9 board being able to deliver 1500W to the CPU socket and figured that’s something you need, then you’ll be glad to know that the same technology is being rolled out across its entire range. The feature is called Unlocked Power and allows for more power to be delivered to the CPU socket, although only the UD9 can do 1500W.
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Sapphire scores new motherboard team

Yes, it’s the EVGA team

THE EVGA MOTHERBOARD team story is starting to unfold as we’ve found out more details about what’s going on. It turns out that the team did indeed leave and they left because they had a better offer from none other than graphics card maker Sapphire.
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Asus reveals more details about the Immensity

Might not launch

WE DIDN’T QUITE get Asus’ Immensity R.O.G. board that we spotted on Tuesday at Computex, but Asus held a special event earlier today talking more about its new motherboards and the Immensity was one of the products that it covered. We had a chance to speak with the product manager and he told us that the board might not actually make it into a final retail product in its current form.
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Etron enters USB 3.0 host controller market

Own controller to enter mass production in August

YOU MIGHT VERY well own, or at least have owned, a graphics card with memory from Etron Technology, or even some low cost DDR2 memory modules. However, the company has now started to move away from making DRAM and decided to start making USB 3.0 host controllers. By now you might start to say “not another one” but bear with us and you’ll see that these guys mean serious business.
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EVGA’s motherboard team leaves unexpectedly

Will cause long term issues

WE HAVE IT on very good authority; in fact we heard it from the horse’s mouth so to say, that EVGA has run into a bit of a problem, as its motherboard team has decided to depart. This is not good news when you’re a company that design your own motherboards, especially when you consider how few motherboard design companies that are left standing today.
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