News

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Potential backlash from failed Sun-IBM negotiations could include a distraction by Sun's management and board in justifying their decision to reject an offer with a high premium, rather than focus on their struggling business, Sacconaghi noted.

The IBM-Sun buyout talks durig the last two week of March, the end of Sun's quarter, could make its fiscal third quarter challenging, given that up to 40 percent of Sun's revenue is generated in the last two weeks of a quarter, Sacconaghi stated in his report, noting customers are likely to have lingering concerns about Sun's future.

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LAKE FOREST, Calif., March 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART, SolidStor and SiSecure technologies.

WD’s storage industry leadership, worldwide infrastructure, and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

“We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD,” said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. “The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements.”

Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

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Comcast said Wednesday afternoon that it hasn't changed its policy. An executive who spoke at the same conference as Cicconi told the audience that the company has sent 2 million notices on behalf of content owners. A company representative said the company has no plans to test "a so-called 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' policy."

But music industry sources told CNET that Comcast has agreed to cooperate with the RIAA in other ways.

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In March 2009 SuperTalent introduced its UltraDrive series to market. This whitepaper outlines some of the performance testing done by SuperTalent showing the outstanding performance of the UltraDrive series. Both UltraDrive series achieved Sequential Read and Write speeds as high as 250MB/sec on the ATTO benchmark. With IOMETER the UltraDrive ME measured over 10,000 Sequential Read IOPS and nearly 16000 Sequential Write IOPS and 6500 Random Read IOPS and around 4000 Random Write IOPS. The UltraDrive LE series (SLC Flash) results were even better for Sequential Write, and Random Read and Write, yielding over 13,000 Sequential Read IOPS and nearly 7500 Random Read IOPS and 5000-6000 Random Write IOPS. Compared to a standard 7200RPM HDD from Seagate the 128GB UltraDrive ME lowered boot time by nearly 70 percent; booting the system in just over 9 seconds vs. nearly 30 seconds. Although the UltraDrives are available in densities ranging from 32GB to 256GB this whitepaper will focus on the performance of the 54-256GB Density Products.

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Based here in San Francisco, OnLive timed its formal unveiling to this week's Game Developers Conference, where it will be showcasing the technology and 16 initial games it will launch with. The service is currently in a closed beta, but is expected to go into a public beta this summer, and to launch this winter. According to Perlman, OnLive's technology will make it possible to stream the games in such a manner--high quality, no matter what kind of system the user has--by virtue of a series of patented and patent-pending compression technologies. And instead of requiring users to download the games, OnLive will host them all and stream them from a series of the highest-end servers. Users will have only to download a 1MB plug-in to get the service up and running.

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It finally looks like we have unofficial confirmation of the DSi's virtual console.

Check out Kombo for the whole story, but the highlight--as I'm sure we can all agree, is the revelation that the DSi will allow you to download Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games.

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For AMD, the 2001 Intel agreement allows it to manufacture chips using Intel's X86 design and rely on chip foundries for up to 20 percent of their total manufacturing capacity. Intel, meanwhile, receives royalties from AMD, under the deal. The companies, despite their heated legal battles over antitrust matters, have had a long-standing patent and licensing relationship, going back to 1976. But this latest turn of events could result in a change in that relationship. AMD, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, said Intel sent it a letter that alleges AMD: Committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the company's Global Foundries joint venture and purports to terminate the company's rights and licenses under the cross license in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

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There you go, folks. Reductio ad absurdum: a company is a machine, or at least analogous to one, kinda sorta like one. Therefore any process or method they come up with to do business would be patentable, presumably, in that universe. Well. Could someone please patent what Wall Street just did to the economy, and then refuse to license the "invention", so as to prevent those dudes from ever doing it again? Or just patent flaming greed, will you, somebody? Do the rest of us a favor and get it off the table or at least constrained.

The court rejected that claim about a company being analogous to a machine, but Justice Pauline Newman, while agreeing with the majority, nevertheless argued that it's good for the economy to have business methods patents, so we shouldn't go too far in limiting them. *Too far*?!

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The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster. In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and background settings to change reflections on the vehicle's surface.

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DDR3 has been out for a pretty long time already and even though a majority of enthusiasts currently run systems that utilize DDR3, the majority of systems are still running on DDR2. DDR2 is the mainstream technology and has a price point to match. The KHX8500D2T1K2/4G kit comes with brand new heat-spreaders and good performance for a 4GB DDR2 kit.

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The market for graphics cards centers around price to performance. While high-end cards capture the eye of the press, it is the job of the mainstream graphics card to capture the entire market. The 4600 series from ATI is targeted to the mainstream crowd and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 has just been refreshed with GDDR4 and a faster memory speed. The time to buy may be now.

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Antec is one of the most respected and well known case manufactures in the computer industry. They make a variety of cases that satisfy the OEM crowd as well as the enthusiast niche. The Skeleton is a completely unique design and the term case really doesn't describe the enclosure that well. This case is made to really show off your components.

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Kingston manufacturers a number of consumer electronic devices that have to do with memory. The main business of Kingston is memory and every enthusiast knows that Kingston makes enthusiast RAM for overclocking. That market segment is quite small compared to consumer electronics in general and the Kingston 19-in-1 USB card reader really shines with good features you don't see elsewhere.

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For those with a compatible computer, the Latosta portable laptop stand is an extremely lightweight and compact stand that can make it much more comfortable to use your laptop for extended periods of time. The typing angle created is more comfortable than a flat surface, and the elevated screen takes some of the strain off of your neck

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The Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD4670 is a passively cooled graphics card with plenty of features other than its silent operation that should appeal to HTPC owners. With an integrated HDMI port, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1 support, it offers some of the things you look for in a gaming graphics card, but with an obvious focus on home theater performance

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The Tuniq Potency 650W power supply is a no nonsense unit that will get the job done on a basic computer system without wasting your money on bells and whistles. It has decent features and specifications, was able to power the test configuration without issue, and it remains cool and quiet during operation

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*"One of Cooler Masters lastest offerings is the Hyper N520 CPU cooler. With the promise being able use the Hyper N520 on most recent motherboards, even the LGA1366 sockets, the Hyper N520 looks like it could be another high performance HSF from Cooler Master. However, we won't know until we toss it on our test bench and see how it compares to other coolers. Stick with us and check out the results."

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A sequel to the popular Zero case, the NZXT Zero 2 replaces it's predecessor at the top end of the pedestal. Equipped with a side panel capable of wielding no less than four 120mm fans, the NZXT Zero seemed perfect for the serious gamer or enthusiast running multi-GPU systems. Featuring a slew of changes from it's counterpart, NZXT hopes to wow the gamer and enthusiast community with a similar vivacity. Can the Zero 2 be just as strong the second time around or will it prove sequels can never compete with their predecessors? Let's jump in and find out!

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"We proceed with a series of practical articles, in which we analyze sufficiency of various CPU+GPU combinations for games, trying to keep our test conditions as close to popular realia as possible. We hope that such articles will come in handy to readers willing to reasonably distribute their budget between a graphics card and a processor."

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"AMD has updated its gaming platform codenamed Dragon with launching Phenom II processors. As all other parts we've reviewed have turned out to be more attractive than competitors in our tests and in terms of features, it's logical to assume that the new platform will merge all advantages of its constituent parts not just to make a poor part look better at the cost of other elements, but to raise platform attractiveness to a new level."

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"GeForce GTX 295 is based on two 55nm GT200b chips, which differ from their 65nm predecessors only in smaller die surface and lower power consumption. The transition to the 55nm process technology allows the card with two powerful GPUs to consume less than 300W and keep heat release at a level that its redesigned dual-slot cooling system can handle."

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Quote: "In the past, really small USB flash drives have had to make compromises on performance to fit everything in such a small form-factor. I'm pleased to say that the Super Talent Pico 16GB doesn't suffer from these drawbacks and offers great read and write performance. When you consider how small the drive is, this is even more impressive..."

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The television set has to be the most loved device in the house. After all, how many hours do you spend in front of the toaster each day? Despite all of that adoration, though, the boob tube no longer corners the market when it comes to audiovisual excitement. Thanks to advancements in online multimedia delivery, services such as YouTube, Picasa and iTunes also offer a lot of Web-based entertainment to get you through the wee hours of the morning. Still, no matter how much you can contort your body, sitting in an office chair is definitely not a

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The first of the new 2009 camcorders are finally hitting stores. Unlike the onslaught of low-priced (sub $200) video capture devices like the entry-level Flip Mino, models such as the GZ-MG670 have critical things like zoom lenses, better picture quality, bigger LCD screens and tons of others creature comforts that make them at least twice as expensive - but still much better deals in our view. Take the just released MG670 for example: It has a 35x optical zoom, a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD and 80GB storage (19 hours at best 720 x 480 pixel quality). Compare this to a Flip Mino with no zoom, a poor 1.5-inch screen and 640 x 480 clip quality. Basically, there is no comparison. However, the Flip and its brethren are extremely compact, and made for video sharing on YouTube. Both are features millions want and use every day. Until last year mainstream camcorder manufacturers didn't know sharing existed but that changed with the JVC GZ-MS100, a relatively affordable edition with YouTube uploading built into the software. Now JVC has introduced its newest models with YouTube and iTunes upload capability. As for size, it's definitely bigger than a Flip but hardly a TV station camera. Now is the MG670 worth it - and does it make sharing the breeze it's supposed to be? Let's start shootin.

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"Today we have PowerColors version of the card. To date we've only had one HD 4830 come through the door and that card managed to set the bar high for the model. You have to wonder, is PowerColor going to come within arm's reach of the bar, or hop straight over it? There's ultimately only one way to find out, so let's have a look at what the company has done with the package before we have a closer look at the card and then its performance. From there we will wrap it all up and hopefully the PowerColor card can offer us something that we didn't get from the MSI one which managed to impress."

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Trying to find a air cooling heatsink for our video cards that not only cools well but is small enough to fit into our cases and on our motherboard without taking up 3+ slots, has become a complete nightmare. As video cards get bigger and faster, most think that the cooler that cools these cards should also be massive in size. Either it adds a lot of extra unneeded weight to our video cards or these coolers take up extra valuable PCI slots that we may need.

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The rear of the box gives us a full compatibility list which takes in much of the GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series (apart from certain high-end GeForce 8800 parts), and a handful of ATI cards from the Radeon X1800 and X1900 series down to the later Radeon HD 3850 part. The cooler's specifications are all noted here, as we can see that the device is constructed from copper and aluminium (as you'd expect), while also featuring an 80mm fan, with the cooler as a whole weighing a little over 230 grams.

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* Today I will be looking at the P6T, Asus' basic mainstream X58 motherboard. As with other Asus Intel motherboard series, the P6T falls just under the Deluxe model, and is a full-featured but more affordable board. The P6T supports 3-way SLI and 3-way CrossFireX, triple-channel memory, and all of the other goodies provided by the X58 chipset. Read on to find out about the Asus P6T!"

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"Today Noctua has sent us the NH-U9B CPU cooler for testing along with a matching optional fan to allow for dual fan testing. The Noctua NH-U9B is a scaled down version of the NH-U12P that we reviewed some time ago. The major difference with these two coolers is that this is a 92mm fan cooled version for HTPC, or possibly even some SFF cases. This four heat-pipe cooler shows promise from what I have read in reviews of other products, as well as word of mouth from forum members and highly experienced people like Chris. I know, technically the NH-U9B shouldn't compete with its larger brother in temperatures, but Noctua pride themselves on quiet solutions to CPU cooling. With this in mind, I would hope this cooler is in fact quiet and can still hold its own footing battling temperatures. It is time we get to opening up Noctua's NH-U9B and see if everything I have been lead to believe is true."

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"Super Talent continues to upgraded their look, this reviewer believes the gold needs to go, I understand the reference of it, the aesthetics just aren't there. The heatspreaders are ribbed Aluminum with risers coming off the top. While we at VL have never been able to prove the addition of heatspreaders are of value, I suppose its better to have them then not, just in case you know . Super Talent, like most manufacturers today, are RoHS compliant with their chips, which basically means youcan eat them and not die from led poisoning etc... The packaging ofthe Super Talent Extreme Performance memory modules is that of simplicity with little fanfare other then a short paragraph on the back of what denotes Extreme Performance in Super Talents dictionary. "

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While pricey gaming rigs from the likes of Alienware and HP's Voodoo unit often grab headlines, these machines are well out of reach for most consumers. Thank goodness for systems like Dell's affordable and stylish XPS 625, which demonstrates that you can still get solid gaming performance for around a thousand dollars. This desktop strips away most frivolities-after all, liquid cooling systems and tool-less interiors are agreeable but expensive perks-and just sticks to the essential hardware necessary to run the latest games with aplomb. And, as an added bonus, it looks pretty slick to boot.

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You've no doubt heard the claims from electronics manufacturers stating the world's first this, the world's largest that, the world's smallest the other. Economic turmoil has only heated up this race to provide innovative products, and industry firsts. Here, we bring you 10 world's firsts that are bigger, thinner, smaller, lighter, and faster than the competition.

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QNAP is making its presence felt in the NAS industry with solutions for everyone. The QNAP TS-209 Pro II fits the bill for anyone looking for a small, flexible and powerful NAS. It provides 2 drives configurable as a bunch of disks, RAID 0 or 1 and offer a download management interface and doubles as a webserver, media & iTunes servers.

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"The past few weeks have been a pleasure to use the ASUS N10Jc-A1 Netbook as toting around a 17" screen laptop has really become a chore over the years. Never again will I need to walk out of the house with a clunky laptop when I can just grab a 3-4 pound netbook. The ability to take an inexpensive, fully functional PC on the road is only part of what is making the netbook market explode right now. The other part is the state of the economy. Given the current recession, consumers are looking for more affordable ways to get an upgrade or satisfy their electronics addiction. The performance of the ASUS N10Jc-A1 was actually a little more than I expected..."

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"As more and more people design wireless home networks, the question becomes one of what to do with your older wireless and wired systems. This has become even more prominent with the increase in the number of inexpensive 300Mbps N specification routers and access points available. Newer laptops and netbooks do come with N wireless cards, but many devices that are less than a year old do not. Well, TRENDnet has an answer for you in the form of its TEW-645UB High Power Wireless N USB adapter. The TEW-645UB boasts up to twice the range of traditional N USB adapters; with up to eight times the range of standard g adapters. Speed is also a feature of the TEW-645UB with maximum theoretical speeds of up to 300Mbps. Will the TEW-645UB be able to deliver on its promises? - It looks great on paper, but let's see if it can perform in the real world."

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Now a days video cards are pretty much follow a reference design, nothing that stands out from one to another manufacturer when it comes to actual card itself. But where manufacturers differ on their video cards is the type of cooling they use on their particular video cards. HIS has always been one of the fore runners on using an aftermarket type of GPU cooler's for their video cards. We at Bjorn3d going to look at such a video card that uses an aftermarket GPU cooler, and for its price range should provide the much needed horsepower we need to play today's most demanding games. We going to be looking at a HIS iSilence ICEQ 4+ 4670 1 gig video card.

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I hope you all had a good weekend. It's been quite a while since Auzentech's first design based around Creative's Xi-Fi chip, the X-Fi Prelude, hit the market, and today we take a look at the successor to this part, the X-Fi Forte. Boasting a low-profile, PCI Express design and a full set of driver functionality including support for Dolby Digital and DTS encoding, can it carve a niche for itself as the best discrete sound card on the market?

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Taking a look at the HD 4670, this is not the same HD 4670 we reviewed some months ago. This is a new and improved HD 4670 when has been packed with GDDR4, which is a technology jump from the GDDR3 on the older model. What we will be looking at besides the performance increase from the new memory is the new and quieter dual slot active cooler which sits atop the 750MHz GPU core. Sit back and read on as we take the new HD 4670 for a hefty round of tests.

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"Strangely, a few days later when I came back to get some screenshots of Voice Buddy, the problem seemed to have magically resolved! Voice Buddy understood every command I threw at it. I think that this could be down to a temporary system fault (or background noise, as it was much quieter in my house on the last time I tried), so I don't think it should be blamed on Voice Buddy."

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PC-based TV tuners are nothing new. For years, we've seen tuners of all kinds pass through the labs from a variety of manufacturers. ATSC tuners are a bit newer, but we've worked with those for a few years as well. An ATSC Tuner built on to a PCI Express video card, well, that is new for us. Today we'll be looking at the ATI All-In-Wonder HD. The card we'll be reviewing is an ATI/AMD reference card and when shopping around, you'll most likely find a version from one of AMD's board partners. As the name implies, the card is designed with HD in mind, and while Over-the-Air (OTA) ATSC tuners have been released by ATI before, the AIW HD is a step forward in integration.

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Quote: "In the $300 price segment, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850x2 can't be accused of bringing a knife to a gunfight; with 1600 Stream processors, 2GB of GDDR3 memory running at 993MHz, and two GPU's clocked at 625MHz all packed on the massive 11 1/4" single PCI-Express circuit board, the HD 4850 X2 is ready to go against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX280, as well as today's most popular games. Let's take a look and see what Sapphire brings to the table in their HD 4850 X2..."

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A storm is brewing over at Cooler Master. As the turbulence stirs up, the mixture of wind, dust, and water, it mixes and molds these elements to create something magical. No, we are not talking about the physical storm that causes havoc to people's lives, but rather, we are referring to Cooler Master's latest line of products that is going to stir up the computer world. The Storm is a line of products from Coller Master that is targeted at the computer enthusiasts. One product off the Storm line-up is the Sniper case, that is the magical thing which the engineering and designing team stirs up. As you can guess, this case is going to be the start of this review.

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, Xigmatek's name is soon to make the list. They have done really well for themselves and have kept introducing more products to the market as they go. Xigmatek is keeping me busy and sends over another addition to our lab for testing. This time we are taking a look at the Xigmatek Dark Knight S1283, a variation on an already good cooling solution that is based on the S1283 series coolers. The Dark Knight stands the same as the other S1283's, but this time it is dressed in all black. Xigmatek has plated the entire cooler in a black nickel coating. And I mean everything, except for the fan of course. Speaking of the fan, with the Dark Knight Xigmatek ships the highest CFM fan on their coolers to date.

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The company that pioneered the pocket-sized flash video camera has taken it a step further with the MinoHD, a pint-sized camcorder that shoots 720p high-def video, in a case that's no bigger than the original, super-slim Mino. But can a camera that's smaller than a pack of cigarettes really deliver on the promise of HD quality? Consider us quite surprised. But at $230, it's no bargain.

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"Thermaltake have taken the design of the V1 and tweaked and enlarged it into a monster that is the V14Pro. The added bulk is not in vain though and it works well and temperatures are improved because of it. The fan on full speed is loud, and I wouldn't want to run it like that all the time, but the manual fan speed controller allows you to dial in your own compromise between noise and performance."

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* Remember the day whenever 8GB Flash Drives were highest capacity drives on the market and cost a fortune? That time is no longer as we have a chance to look at the Super Talent Luxio 64GB Luxury Flash Drive. Available in three different colors: black, silver, or wood grain, the Luxio Series drives are also available in 16GB and 32GB sizes. This flash drive is so large that it could be used as another hard drive for your system. But how much will it cost you? Read on further to find out."

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With the Xporter Magnum, Patriot has once again shown their aim at performance. Even after doubling the storage capacity of their previous Xporter they have managed to keep close to the same performance numbers with the Magnum.

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Today we see the release of the GTS 250. Now, we're not going to sugarcoat it; this card is a 9800 GTX+ which we saw come out around August of last year. The thing about the 9800 GTX+, however, is that it's nothing more than an overclocked 9800 GTX, which was a card we saw released at the end of March last year. That's all the cynical comments, though; there are pros to a rehashed card. For starters, at launch there's no reason there should be any issues with the card, since it's been around so long. There's of course also the price which should be a lot more attractive than when it launched. And finally, if it ain't broke, why fix it?!

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Quote: "M-ROCK is primarily a maker of a line of camera bags. The line extends from very small bags for things like phones and music devices to their new combination laptop and full DSLR kit backpacks, with many intermediate sized bags between. There are several styles and many sizes of bags to fit the needs of almost any photographer. All of the M-ROCK bags (beyond the very smallest sacks) are made of durable padded nylon materials with soft non-scratch interiors, have combinations of hook and loop, zippers, and buckle closures and feature multiple carrying options such as hand-held, belt attached, and shoulder straps..."

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X58 based motherboards are popping up thick and fast. And why not? - Core i7 is Intel's new cash cow and its performance is beyond anything that Core 2 could ever hope for. Thanks to the on-chip memory controller, Intel has finally abandoned the old FSB interface for this high-end CPU and move to a more data friendly bus between the Northbridge and the CPU. No longer are memory transactions between CPU and DRAM required to go across a limited bus. So far we have tested most of the major companies X58 offerings. We have already seen GIGABYTE, MSI, ASUS and DFI strut their stuff and today we have another channel partner in the fray and that is Foxconn. Foxconn has really come a long way from just producing simple OEM boards; today they have their own enthusiast lines and we have their latest one in hand, the Quantum Force X58 BloodRage.

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Quote: "The folks at OCZ have come up with a creative solution to help improve performance with their new Apex line of MLC based SSD's. Available in 60, 120 and 250GB capacities with a 2.5" form factor, the Apex drives utilize a RAID-0 configuration with a JMicron JMB390 RAID controller and dual JMF602(B) JMicron SSD controllers all enclosed in the drive itself without the need for external software or hardware to assist. In addition, the JMF602 controllers each have a 16KB on-die cache to help performance. This allows users to utilize the advantages of RAID who may not want the hassle of a traditional RAID setup. We will be specifically looking at the 120GB OCZ Apex drive which currently retails for around $350..."

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Let's look at the new Mac Pro first: priced at $2,499 for the quad-core version and $3,299 for the eight-core version, those Intel "Nehalem" Xeon processors run at 2.93 GHz, and the interior of the machine has been cleaned up to make physical expansions easier. On the green front, it meets the new Energy Star 5.0 requirements that will go into effect later this year.

The new iMac desktop is a 24" machine that is priced at $1,499, the cost of Apple's previous 20" iMac. The 20-inch is now $1,199. The 20" is powered by a 2.66 GHz processor; the 24" has processor speed options of 2.66 GHz, 2.93 GHz (for $1,799), or 3.02 GHz (for $2,199). The 24" comes with a 640GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM expandable to 8GB; the 20" comes with a 320GB hard drive and 2GB of RAM expandable to 8GB.

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DDR3 has been out for a pretty long time already and even though a majority of enthusiasts currently run systems that utilize DDR3, the majority of systems are still running on DDR2. DDR2 is the mainstream technology and has a price point to match. The KHX8500D2T1K2/4G kit comes with brand new heat-spreaders and good performance for a 4GB DDR2 kit.

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The market for graphics cards centers around price to performance. While high-end cards capture the eye of the press, it is the job of the mainstream graphics card to capture the entire market. The 4600 series from ATI is targeted to the mainstream crowd and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 has just been refreshed with GDDR4 and a faster memory speed. The time to buy may be now.

Quote

Antec is one of the most respected and well known case manufactures in the computer industry. They make a variety of cases that satisfy the OEM crowd as well as the enthusiast niche. The Skeleton is a completely unique design and the term case really doesn't describe the enclosure that well. This case is made to really show off your components.

Quote

Kingston manufacturers a number of consumer electronic devices that have to do with memory. The main business of Kingston is memory and every enthusiast knows that Kingston makes enthusiast RAM for overclocking. That market segment is quite small compared to consumer electronics in general and the Kingston 19-in-1 USB card reader really shines with good features you don't see elsewhere.

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For those with a compatible computer, the Latosta portable laptop stand is an extremely lightweight and compact stand that can make it much more comfortable to use your laptop for extended periods of time. The typing angle created is more comfortable than a flat surface, and the elevated screen takes some of the strain off of your neck.

Quote

The Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD4670 is a passively cooled graphics card with plenty of features other than its silent operation that should appeal to HTPC owners. With an integrated HDMI port, DirectX 10.1, and Shader Model 4.1 support, it offers some of the things you look for in a gaming graphics card, but with an obvious focus on home theater performance.

Quote

The Tuniq Potency 650W power supply is a no nonsense unit that will get the job done on a basic computer system without wasting your money on bells and whistles. It has decent features and specifications, was able to power the test configuration without issue, and it remains cool and quiet during operation.

Quote

"We proceed with a series of practical articles, in which we analyze sufficiency of various CPU+GPU combinations for games, trying to keep our test conditions as close to popular realia as possible. We hope that such articles will come in handy to readers willing to reasonably distribute their budget between a graphics card and a processor."

Quote

In the past, really small USB flash drives have had to make compromises on performance to fit everything in such a small form-factor. I'm pleased to say that the Super Talent Pico 16GB doesn't suffer from these drawbacks and offers great read and write performance. When you consider how small the drive is, this is even more impressive...

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The television set has to be the most loved device in the house. After all, how many hours do you spend in front of the toaster each day? Despite all of that adoration, though, the boob tube no longer corners the market when it comes to audiovisual excitement. Thanks to advancements in online multimedia delivery, services such as YouTube, Picasa and iTunes also offer a lot of Web-based entertainment to get you through the wee hours of the morning. Still, no matter how much you can contort your body, sitting in an office chair is definitely not a

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The first of the new 2009 camcorders are finally hitting stores. Unlike the onslaught of low-priced (sub $200) video capture devices like the entry-level Flip Mino, models such as the GZ-MG670 have critical things like zoom lenses, better picture quality, bigger LCD screens and tons of others creature comforts that make them at least twice as expensive - but still much better deals in our view. Take the just released MG670 for example: It has a 35x optical zoom, a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD and 80GB storage (19 hours at best 720 x 480 pixel quality). Compare this to a Flip Mino with no zoom, a poor 1.5-inch screen and 640 x 480 clip quality. Basically, there is no comparison. However, the Flip and its brethren are extremely compact, and made for video sharing on YouTube. Both are features millions want and use every day. Until last year mainstream camcorder manufacturers didn't know sharing existed but that changed with the JVC GZ-MS100, a relatively affordable edition with YouTube uploading built into the software. Now JVC has introduced its newest models with YouTube and iTunes upload capability. As for size, it's definitely bigger than a Flip but hardly a TV station camera. Now is the MG670 worth it - and does it make sharing the breeze it's supposed to be? Let's start shootin.

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Today we have PowerColors version of the card. To date we've only had one HD 4830 come through the door and that card managed to set the bar high for the model. You have to wonder, is PowerColor going to come within arm's reach of the bar, or hop straight over it? There's ultimately only one way to find out, so let's have a look at what the company has done with the package before we have a closer look at the card and then its performance. From there we will wrap it all up and hopefully the PowerColor card can offer us something that we didn't get from the MSI one which managed to impress.

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Trying to find a air cooling heatsink for our video cards that not only cools well but is small enough to fit into our cases and on our motherboard without taking up 3+ slots, has become a complete nightmare. As video cards get bigger and faster, most think that the cooler that cools these cards should also be massive in size. Either it adds a lot of extra unneeded weight to our video cards or these coolers take up extra valuable PCI slots that we may need.

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The rear of the box gives us a full compatibility list which takes in much of the GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series (apart from certain high-end GeForce 8800 parts), and a handful of ATI cards from the Radeon X1800 and X1900 series down to the later Radeon HD 3850 part. The cooler's specifications are all noted here, as we can see that the device is constructed from copper and aluminium (as you'd expect), while also featuring an 80mm fan, with the cooler as a whole weighing a little over 230 grams.

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Today I will be looking at the P6T, Asus' basic mainstream X58 motherboard. As with other Asus Intel motherboard series, the P6T falls just under the Deluxe model, and is a full-featured but more affordable board. The P6T supports 3-way SLI and 3-way CrossFireX, triple-channel memory, and all of the other goodies provided by the X58 chipset.

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Today Noctua has sent us the NH-U9B CPU cooler for testing along with a matching optional fan to allow for dual fan testing. The Noctua NH-U9B is a scaled down version of the NH-U12P that we reviewed some time ago. The major difference with these two coolers is that this is a 92mm fan cooled version for HTPC, or possibly even some SFF cases. This four heat-pipe cooler shows promise from what I have read in reviews of other products, as well as word of mouth from forum members and highly experienced people like Chris. I know, technically the NH-U9B shouldn't compete with its larger brother in temperatures, but Noctua pride themselves on quiet solutions to CPU cooling. With this in mind, I would hope this cooler is in fact quiet and can still hold its own footing battling temperatures. It is time we get to opening up Noctua's NH-U9B and see if everything I have been lead to believe is true.

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Super Talent continues to upgraded their look, this reviewer believes the gold needs to go, I understand the reference of it, the aesthetics just aren't there. The heatspreaders are ribbed Aluminum with risers coming off the top. While we at VL have never been able to prove the addition of heatspreaders are of value, I suppose its better to have them then not, just in case you know . Super Talent, like most manufacturers today, are RoHS compliant with their chips, which basically means youcan eat them and not die from led poisoning etc... The packaging ofthe Super Talent Extreme Performance memory modules is that of simplicity with little fanfare other then a short paragraph on the back of what denotes Extreme Performance in Super Talents dictionary.

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ASRock has been known to us here at TweakTown as producing a more rounded board aimed at the mainstream and value end of the spectrum. Never would we consider putting this motherboard maker into the hardcore and overclocking segments that ASUS, MSI and GIGABYTE has managed to push into, yet ASRock for all their trying are aiming for the top. And why not! Today's motherboard market is cut throat. To survive you need to either have a unique product or to produce a mainstream product at the cheapest price. ASRock hasn't produced anything unique, but they are able to keep prices down. The ASRock X58 SuperComputer aimed towards the mainstream and extreme users comes to us at a price of $294.99 USD from Newegg and at this price it's one of the cheapest X58 boards out there. But how does it perform compared to the likes of ASUS and MSI? - Let's find out.

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In early January we had delivered Linux Solid-State Drive Benchmarks of an OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, which was a low-cost low-capacity single-cell drive. The increased performance and decreased power consumption compared to a 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive was nice for a netbook, but how are the higher-end solid-state drives performing? In this article, we have a high-performance Intel X25-E Extreme SSD on a System76 notebook running Ubuntu Linux.

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While pricey gaming rigs from the likes of Alienware and HP's Voodoo unit often grab headlines, these machines are well out of reach for most consumers. Thank goodness for systems like Dell's affordable and stylish XPS 625, which demonstrates that you can still get solid gaming performance for around a thousand dollars. This desktop strips away most frivolities-after all, liquid cooling systems and tool-less interiors are agreeable but expensive perks-and just sticks to the essential hardware necessary to run the latest games with aplomb. And, as an added bonus, it looks pretty slick to boot.

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QNAP is making its presence felt in the NAS industry with solutions for everyone. The QNAP TS-209 Pro II fits the bill for anyone looking for a small, flexible and powerful NAS. It provides 2 drives configurable as a bunch of disks, RAID 0 or 1 and offer a download management interface and doubles as a webserver, media & iTunes servers.

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What we are going to be looking at today is the new Delta V3 CPU water block from a fairly new company to the USA enthusiast community, XSPC. These guys have been around for several years over in Europe and have been doing fairly well and have been improving their products every year. I'm really excited to give their new block a try and see just how well it stands up to the performance of my current favorite water block from Swiftech.

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*One of Cooler Masters lastest offerings is the Hyper N520 CPU cooler. With the promise being able use the Hyper N520 on most recent motherboards, even the LGA1366 sockets, the Hyper N520 looks like it could be another high performance HSF from Cooler Master. However, we won't know until we toss it on our test bench and see how it compares to other coolers. Stick with us and check out the results.

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iPods are great music players, but there are also other options. The Sansa Fuze is an iPod nano competitor. The Fuze has an FM radio and a built-in voice recorder; two features that the nano lacks, so we decided to take a look and see how the Fuze stacks up against the iPod and other portable music players.

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The past few weeks have been a pleasure to use the ASUS N10Jc-A1 Netbook as toting around a 17 screen laptop has really become a chore over the years. Never again will I need to walk out of the house with a clunky laptop when I can just grab a 3-4 pound netbook. The ability to take an inexpensive, fully functional PC on the road is only part of what is making the netbook market explode right now. The other part is the state of the economy. Given the current recession, consumers are looking for more affordable ways to get an upgrade or satisfy their electronics addiction. The performance of the ASUS N10Jc-A1 was actually a little more than I expected...

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As more and more people design wireless home networks, the question becomes one of what to do with your older wireless and wired systems. This has become even more prominent with the increase in the number of inexpensive 300Mbps N specification routers and access points available. Newer laptops and netbooks do come with N wireless cards, but many devices that are less than a year old do not. Well, TRENDnet has an answer for you in the form of its TEW-645UB High Power Wireless N USB adapter. The TEW-645UB boasts up to twice the range of traditional N USB adapters; with up to eight times the range of standard g adapters. Speed is also a feature of the TEW-645UB with maximum theoretical speeds of up to 300Mbps. Will the TEW-645UB be able to deliver on its promises? - It looks great on paper, but let's see if it can perform in the real world.

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Now a days video cards are pretty much follow a reference design, nothing that stands out from one to another manufacturer when it comes to actual card itself. But where manufacturers differ on their video cards is the type of cooling they use on their particular video cards. HIS has always been one of the fore runners on using an aftermarket type of GPU cooler's for their video cards. We at Bjorn3d going to look at such a video card that uses an aftermarket GPU cooler, and for its price range should provide the much needed horsepower we need to play today's most demanding games. We going to be looking at a HIS iSilence ICEQ 4+ 4670 1 gig video card.

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I hope you all had a good weekend. It's been quite a while since Auzentech's first design based around Creative's Xi-Fi chip, the X-Fi Prelude, hit the market, and today we take a look at the successor to this part, the X-Fi Forte. Boasting a low-profile, PCI Express design and a full set of driver functionality including support for Dolby Digital and DTS encoding, can it carve a niche for itself as the best discrete sound card on the market?

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Consumers are looking for quality and performance at a price that won't break the bank, and today we have a power supply that promises just such an enticing combination. We're looking at the Tuniq Potency 750w, a unit that looks sharp and is priced very well in a competitive market segment.

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PC-based TV tuners are nothing new. For years, we've seen tuners of all kinds pass through the labs from a variety of manufacturers. ATSC tuners are a bit newer, but we've worked with those for a few years as well. An ATSC Tuner built on to a PCI Express video card, well, that is new for us. Today we'll be looking at the ATI All-In-Wonder HD. The card we'll be reviewing is an ATI/AMD reference card and when shopping around, you'll most likely find a version from one of AMD's board partners. As the name implies, the card is designed with HD in mind, and while Over-the-Air (OTA) ATSC tuners have been released by ATI before, the AIW HD is a step forward in integration.

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Arctic Silver 5 has long been hailed as the king of thermal compounds but it seems the king is finally dead. The GELID GC-1 trumps the AS5 in a couple of aspects. Letting the temperatures speak for themselves, the GC-1 does a much better job at conducting heat (or maybe, not impeding it as much). There is a caveat here, however, as the delta temperatures were somewhat close. With that said, the GC-1 did have a smaller delta between the idle and load temperatures in every test.

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Taiwanese manufacturer Silicon Power was kind to send to us three 1GB memory modules declared at DDR3-1333 with CL9 latencies. This type of memory can be considered as budget solution so we weren't surprised with declaration and absence of coolers. Silicon Power used blue coloured PCB and chips signed by ELIXIR. Full specification goes like this: 1333 (667MHz) CL 9-10-10-25, which is by our humble opinion very loosely set timings that leave space for tightening.

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Today we have a look at what is dubbed as a power saving motherboard that is also capable of above average performance. The Asus P5Q3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP @n (what a long model name) is an Intel P45 chipset based motherboard with DDR3 memory and ATi's CrossFireX technology support. This variant of the P5Q3 Deluxe motherboard comes bundled with WiFi hardware, hence the extra long model name.

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In the $300 price segment, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850x2 can't be accused of bringing a knife to a gunfight; with 1600 Stream processors, 2GB of GDDR3 memory running at 993MHz, and two GPU's clocked at 625MHz all packed on the massive 11 1/4 single PCI-Express circuit board, the HD 4850 X2 is ready to go against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX280, as well as today's most popular games. Let's take a look and see what Sapphire brings to the table in their HD 4850 X2...

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Hot on the trail of their very impressive new Xonar sound cards, ASUS have just sent me some wireless headphones. Up until this point I was not aware that ASUS were in the headphone business, but with so many users, particularly gamers, needing a personal audio solution and also taking into account the trend towards wireless devices, it makes sense to see an offering in this category by arguably one of the largest manufacturers in the game. Offering an easily accessible retail price and a simple software-free installation, it will be interesting to see what ASUS have come up with in what will be my first ever headphones review for TweakTown.

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Despite putting more cores in the processor, we managed to keep it in the same power and thermal ranges as our existing "Shanghai" processors. And since it fits into the same socket, our OEM customers should be able to bring products to the market quickly. End users will be able to quickly qualify and deploy these servers because the overall platform is the same as what they are using. In today's challenging economic times, that's music to the ears of IT departments both near, and as far away as Turkey. So what did we show? We showed a platform being easily upgraded from Shanghai to Istanbul, some amazing memory throughput courtesy of the new HT Assist feature, and a 4-socket server with all 24 cores being stressed by one of our development programs.

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The glitch occurred just minutes after the $273.4 million spacecraft blasted off at 4:55 a.m. EST (0955 GMT) atop a Taurus XL rocket that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. "Our whole team at a very personal level is disappointed in the events of this morning," said John Brunschwyler, the Taurus project manager for the Dulles, Va.-based rocket manufacturer Orbital Sciences, in a somber post-launch briefing. "It's very hard."