Quote
Just because it's a budget board doesn't mean you have to settle for poor performance and a complete lack of features. The DFI NF4 SLI Infinity will prove that! Sure the bundle is a little light, and there aren't the typical extras like dual Gigabit LAN. What you'll get instead is a solid performer with a reduced price tag that doesn't come with a slew of features that will go unnoticed, or a big bundle that will get put in the closet and forgot about. No, the DFI NF4 SLI Infinity has only the bare essentials to get your system up and running. Taking advantage of the dual video card SLI configuration was true Plug and Play! Matched with the gaming prowess of an AMD Athlon64 "San Diego" 3700+ - I built, I overclocked, and I benched. Why not go see the results...
Quote
Tell me, isn't that one of the purdiest boards you've seen seen since the Soyo Dragon KT400 Platinum? I "borrowed" the full board pics from Sapphire since the top is pretty reflective and honestly, their shot looks better than any that I took of the full top. I think I would have to cut a window in the motherboard tray and right side of the case just to show off the nice Sapphire logo on the bottom of the board.
Quote
OCZ has managed to provide perfectly for both platforms with high speed DDR-2 for the Pentium 4 market, and low latency, high speed DDR for the AMD64. The modules work well, no stability issues were noticed, the extra voltage is handy for overclocking and as always the OCZ modules are stylish and attractive in appearance.
Quote
Lots of memory manufacturers have tried their hand at custom heat spreaders, but most don't usually make much of a noticeable difference. Being the innovators that OCZ are, they have delivered a very unique new spreader, that incorporates a honeycomb design to aide with better heat transfer. We are taking a look at their Gold GX PC3200 1GB kit.
Quote
If you're running air cooling on a 915P/925X based motherboard with a Pentium 4 5xx series processor, this kit may not make a whole lot of sense. Otherwise, owners of 955X or nForce 4 SLI boards with a Pentium Extreme Edition will want to give this kit a close look.
Quote
My game play is all about Battlefield 2 right now. The OCZ EL-DDR PC4000 Gold Edition kit has proved without a doubt to me that two gigs are a very worthwhile investment for gamers. You could get a rough feel for this in our graph but within a game, you get the emotionally positive feedback that does not translate well into rote figures and results. If you are not a gamer, I think you may be better off saving your upgrade dollar right now as the benefit isn't earth shattering elsewhere.
Quote
With the latest stepping of the dual core processor series, AMD dishes up the Manchester core to set new standards in energy efficiency and price/performance ratio. Taking advantage of the proverbial excellent gaming and floating point performance and stripping the dual cores of 50% of their hard-earned cache in combination with a frequency sweet spot of 2.0 GHz results in a killer CPU at a reasonable price tag. Arguably, there are cheaper processors on the market, there are faster cores out there (as measured in clock frequency) and there are "the others" but after wrapping up this review, there is nothing out there that combines that many positive features as the Manchester running at 2.0 GHz, using the moniker Athlon X2 3800+
Quote
As a reviewer it is easy to always use the high-end stuff you get to review and forget about the mid-end and even low-end cards. Today though, I will test the Albatron 6600GT, a mid-level performance card that promises a nice performance/price ratio. I'm also testing it in SLI-configuration to see if it is worth getting a second GeForce6600GT instead of buying a completely new card.
Quote
There is no way I am going to put this card down. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this card if you consider its' targeted consumer genre. This card is meant to be a value based premium graphics card with exceptional cooling and overclocking potential. What more could you ask for when you are laying down US$139. Sure there might be cheaper, but I bet it isn't as loaded as this model. If you are in the market for a cheap, yet superb value videocard, give this one a try. The overclocking and cooling alone are worth it in my mind..
Quote
Feature-wise, nothing really comes close to the AIW X800XL as an all around product. If your space is limited in your PCI Express based setup and you're in need of a TV tuner and decent gaming card, the AIW X800XL is tough to beat. The multiple inputs, covering the different cable budgets, an easy to use software package and FM tuner makes it relatively easy to setup a multimedia (or at least a multipupose) box.
Quote
Another day sees another graphics card and this one comes in the shape of the newly released Radeon X1800XL from Gigabyte. This is our first sample to be tested with the new official ATI Catalyst drivers with the previous X1800XL we looked at was still running pre-released non-WHQL drivers.
Quote
The ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL isn't all about games of course, and the main selling point really is the X1800 XL combined with the myriad of multimedia features put into the product. Simply put, nobody from NVIDIA, Hauppage, Matrox, S3 or anywhere offers anything close to what the AIW family, let alone the AIW X1800 XL can offer.
Quote
With the All-In-Wonder X1800XL ATI has created a card that sits just as confortable in a MediaPC as a gaming-PC. Support for both analogue and DVB-T channels as well as true RGBScart, DVI, VGA and Component output makes it an ideal card for anyone who wants to get the best possible image to their TV.
Quote
One example of what the GeForce 7800GT is capable of is Asus' EN7800GT 2DHTV/256M/OSP/A PCI Express x16 videocard. Built with the massive 320 million transistor GeForce 7800GT 'G70' core, the Asus EN7800GT packs in 256MB of GDDR3 memory. The card supports nVidia's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) for dual videocard gaming like all current generation nVIDIA parts. The bright blue videocard incorporates twin DVI connectors so users can attach digital LCD displays. Component output (HDTV, Y, Pb, Pr) and S-Video output comes standard via a breakout-box. The software package includes a couple of games and some multimedia applications.
Quote
Jsgongwon, one of our forum members, reported that his newly bought Xbox 360 keeps crashing while playing Project Gotham Racing 3 in single player mode. He's playing with the default settings, and apparently his Xbox crashes even before the end of the first lap. Crashes on Xbox Live and on startup occur too. He included screenshots of the crashed Xbox 360 (see below - more pictures on flickr.com) and a video of the crash here(9MB) (mirror: here(2MB XviD))
A quick look on our forums (more and more) seems to indicate he's not the only one. Several of our members seems to get crashing 360s. It doesn't seem to be related to a specific game, as we get reports of the Xbox 360 crashing with several games. And it's not all the same Error-number either (E79, E74, E64, real crashes, ...).
Quote
A Japanese probe on a mission to bring back the first rock samples from an asteroid landed briefly on its target on Sunday but did not drop the equipment for collecting surface material, Kyodo news reported on Wednesday. Scientists from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had said earlier the unmanned probe failed to touch down on Itokawa, nearly 300 million km (186 million miles) from earth.
Quote
The nation's fair trade commission began its investigation in 2001 when Daum Communications, South Korea's top Internet portal, complained that Microsoft had breached antitrust rules by incorporating its Internet Messenger and Media Player services into the Windows operating system. Despite Microsoft reaching a $30 million settlement with Daum over the antitrust allegations in early November, the commission has said it will rule on the case.
Quote
"I feel amazing," said Peter Gonzalez, 19, from Manhattan. Gonzalez, shivering after waiting nearly 30 hours in front of Best Buy Co. Inc.'s midtown Manhattan store to buy the new Xbox. The college student said he would stay up all night playing games before heading to classes in the morning.
Quote
The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so. The move is separate to Microsoft’s ongoing antitrust case with the European Commission, but comes in response to another concern raised by the European Union executive body.
Quote
Many publishers had become concerned about the potential of Google Base, which could allow the company to dominate the classified advertising business. Now, publishers of services like the Yellow Pages are facing a competitive threat from Google. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., said that beginning this morning it would make available a feature that provides a local version of its Froogle shopping service. The service uses a third-party database of national product inventory organized by locality.
Quote
Dell Inc has informed its Taiwan contract makers of plans to develop devices based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc's microprocessors, and these suppliers are awaiting orders for global shipment, the Economic Daily News reported, citing industry sources.
Quote
After approaching to within metres of the 500-metre-wide asteroid, the spacecraft suffered a malfunction and temporarily lost contact with Earth. When the communication link was re-established, several hours later, the probe had drifted 100 kilometres away from its target.
Quote
Samsung, which competes with Hynix Semiconductor, Micron Technology and Infineon Technologies in the chip market, aims to boost its chip sales by more than three-fold to $61 billion by 2012 from $17 billion last year. In the flash chip market, Samsung competes with Toshiba. In a separate statement, Samsung said it planned to triple its chip sales in China to $5.5 billion by 2010 to meet demand from China's IT sector, which it said was expected to grow at an annual rate of 11 percent for the next five years.
Quote
Maureen Weber, general manager of personal storage in HP's personal systems group, said Wednesday that if Blu-ray remains committed to this stance, the computer maker will indeed adopt a more neutral position versus being an exclusive Blu-ray supporter. "If they are unable to incorporate technologies we think are critical for the PC architecture, we'll be more neutral. We'll think of cost and implementation across the board. Potentially, we could support both HD DVD and Blu-ray," she said.
Quote
No one is envisaging injecting supplements into people's brains, but Szyf says his study shows how important subtle nutrients and supplements can be. "Food has a dramatic effect," he says. "But it can go both ways," he cautions. Methionine, for instance, the supplement he used to make healthy rats stressed, is widely available in capsule form online or in health-food stores - and the molecules are small enough to get into the brain via the bloodstream.
Quote
On average, homes with a DVR watched 5.7 hours of television daily compared with 5.1 hours for homes without the device, the networks said. DVR households still watch about 90 percent of their television at original broadcast time, while the remaining 10 percent that is recorded favor the most popular broadcast programs during a given season.
Quote
The world's largest software maker plans to launch Xbox 360 on Dec. 2 in Europe and Dec. 10 in Japan. Microsoft convinced some of Japan's hottest creators, animators and musicians to create games for the new Xbox, including "Final Fantasy"'s original producer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and publisher Square Enix.
Quote
The last-minute deal, reached just hours before the World Summit on the Information Society, or WSIS, began Wednesday, effectively postpones a long-simmering dispute over the future of Internet management. China, Cuba, South Africa and other nations have argued that the U.S. and other wealthier nations must share power--complaints that now will be taken to the new U.N. forum.
Quote
Ventura is the new spokesman for BetUS.com, a Web site operated from Costa Rica that lets people wager on sports contests from their home computers. "This is a step toward bringing something above-board that clearly many people want to partake in," Ventura said.
Quote
"We share the concerns of consumers regarding discs with XCP content-protected software, and, for this reason, we are instituting a consumer exchange programme and removing all unsold CDs with this software from retail outlets," Sony BMG said in an statement.
Quote
"Although the growth of the online rental sector will inevitably cannibalize the offline business, its overall effect will be to maintain levels of consumer spending on video rental at above $8 billion and 2 billion euros in the U.S. and Europe respectively, throughout the forecast period," the report said.
Quote
The group then manipulated one of the glass beads until the RNAP latched on to a rung on the DNA molecule. As the enzyme moved along the bases, it tugged the glass bead it was bonded too, moving the two beads toward each together. The RNAP jerked along the DNA, pausing between jerks to churn out RNA transcribed bases. It was by precisely measuring the lengths of the jerks that Block determined how many bases it transcribed each time.
Quote
Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.
Quote
Hot off the heels of the last Corsair review, we have another Corsair review for you. Corsair has done it again, they are leading the pack in memory technology advancements, by releasing yet another quality high performance memory product. The Twinx2048-4000PT line of memory is engineered for speed and performance, using Samsung UCCC chips to power the sticks, these sticks just rock. Guaranteed 250Mhz at 1T with timings of 3-4-4-8, using high density, high capacity modules, being able to run high capacity sticks of ram at 1T is crucial to having a great performing system. Today’s high end systems take a performance hit if they run at 2T, so being able to run 2 gigs at 1T is a great triumph indeed, and at a speed of 250/500mhz is just amazing! Let's get into this review and see just how well these do perform..
Quote
More recently, the RAM sweet spot using Windows XP has been 1GB using a pair of 512MB DDR RAM sticks. Since the release of Doom 3 and Battlefield 2 though, many users are finding that using 2GB of RAM enhances game play and computer performance. There have been a few problems with going to 2GB though; first off was the availability and price of 1GB DDR sticks, since so many users opted to go with 4 512MB sticks of RAM. Unfortunately, some motherboards do not support DDR with 4 sticks, and others will kick the FSB speed down to 333 to reduce errors. Also, many people have limited success when trying to overclock a motherboard with 4 sticks of RAM in it even if they are matching sticks. Plus, there is the increased voltage requirement. OCZ recognized the issues and released a 2GB DDR memory kit that is rated up to PC-4000, so now you can have your cake and eat it too.
Quote
The next major push was at 3-3-3-8, where these modules scaled all the way to 287FSB (DDR574) at 2.93V, which is well past their rated speed of 250FSB. I was pleasantly surprised here, and considering the very modest voltage increase and the fact I still hadn't loosened the timings to their rated specs of 3-4-4-8, I thought this kit would fly past 300FSB (DDR600). Alas, loosening the timings to their rated speed only garnered me a slight increase to 292 FSB (DDR584)...
Quote
Foxconn has doven headfirst into the shark infested waters of the mainstream market and proven they can swim with the big boys. Pleasing the hardware enthusiast crowd is no easy task, but Foxconn has put their years of manufacturing experience to good use and put together a winner with this board. Even a hardcore enthusiast will have a hard time finding fault with this board.
Quote
Overclocking with the ECS board and our Athlon64 3200+ (Venice core) yielded a result of an impressive 2.65GHz. We got here by dropping the HT to 4x, moving the DRAM timings to 3-4-4-8. We left the CPU at 10x and increased it's Vcore by 125mv (resulting in a Vcore of 1.52). This is an impressive overclock to say the least. I was thinking that without the ability to apply more voltage to the chipset or FSB (HT) ECS would be hard pressed to catch up with the DFI's overclock. It turns out, we passed it nicely.
Quote
Sometimes us reviewer tend to forget that not everyone have the money to buy one of the latest and fastest cards available. Instead of a GeForce 7800GT or GeForce 7800GTX many instead have opted for cheaper, but yet capable, GeForce 6600GT. But what if you have one of those and want to in a cheap way increase the graphics performance? NVIDIA has the solution with SLI. Pop in a second card and in theory get double the performance. Today I am looking at one of the cheaper SLI-capable motherboards on the market, the K8SLI from Albatron.
Quote
The X800GTO from HIS in my point of view would be a perfect performance mainstream oriented gaming card that will handle any current game on the market and will easily toy with most games when overclocked. The overclocking potential in this card is fantastic and seeing that HIS has strapped on such a great cooling solution, you can squeeze out every last Mhz without turning your card into a peripheral cinder...
Quote
The Golden Sample is clocked with a 450 MHz core which is 4 MHz faster than one of the overclocking sweet spots (18 x 27 - 40 = 446). Now, as our last 7800 GT review showed, the good thing about the 7800 series is that we see good performance boosts when they are overclocked. There were some instances of a 10 fps increase in some benchmarks with reasonable overclocks. What this suggests is that the Golden Sample at its stock clocks and under warranty will perform much better than the reference 7800 GT and just might be up the rear of the 7800 GTX.
Quote
The Sapphire X800 GTO2 was modestly launched recently and not much hooplah had surrounded the card until it's secret was discovered. The X800 GTO2 is a 12 pipeline 256MB video card much like the vanilla X800. What is very much un-like the vanilla X800 is that the X800 GTO2 doesn't run on the same ATI430 GPU. Instead, it runs on the ATI480 GPU. For the GPU model informed you will notice that is the same GPU core model used on the Sapphire X850 video cards which pack 16 pixel pipelines.
Quote
ATI's new All-In-Wonder (AIW) X800 XL picks up where the company's X600 AIW card left off, which means a faster core processor, more multimedia capabilities and a heftier price. Surprisingly, the AIW X800 XL isn't the company's most expensive All-In-Wonder product though. Nestled in between the AIW X800 XT and the X600 PRO on the ATI product line, the AIW X800 XL offers impressive performance while still maintaining a somewhat modest price. But what is the main difference between the AIW X800 XL and the AIW 800 XT, and have multimedia capabilities really been improved over the previous year's offerings?
Quote
Once again, Sapphire is releasing a hidden jewel into the market, this time it is the X800 GTO2, a card based on the R480 GPU and boasting 1.6 ns GDDR3 --- and the entire thing sells for about US$ 200.-. From a marketing, logistics and legal standpoint, this is is only possible because officially the card is specked to run on 12 pipelines only at a core and memory speed of 400 and 490 MHz, respectively. In contrast to the X800 Pro series in which some cards could be modded to full 16 pipeline functionality by means of a BIOS flash along with the necessary bridging of blown substrate fuses, the current version only requires a BIOS update to live up to its fullest potential. In the best case, we were able to achieve approximately 70 % overall performance increase over the original configuration of the same, physically identical card. So what did we have to do for this other than selling our souls to the Sapphire aliens?
Quote
For the cost involved the X700 from HIS turned out to be quite a performer. When compared to a similar classed card from NVIDIA it outperformed at almost every task put before it. AGP is still a VERY viable option, and HIS has proven with the X700 that they haven't forgotten about those of us that can't shell out a couple weeks pay every time a new card is released.
Quote
The X800GT performs very well for a $160 card. It delivers solid performance when using 4x Aniso and 4x Anti at 1280x1024 and below, but anything over that will get you choppier video. Once you get to higher resolutions the card really shows it's lack of pipeline power by showing an even larger % dropoff than the GTO cards. Doom3 really shows some of this weakness as does Futuremark and FarCry, but UT2004 and HL2 are a bit more forgiving.
Quote
Several review sites have really popped the 7800 GTX from a price point of being around $500. For the past few years, be it ATi or NVidia, the pinnacle of VGA performance has always hit the market around $500. The increase in performance with the 7800 GTX is much more than just the next logical step as we have seen before. With this said, your dollar is actually much more future proof here than it has ever been before.
Quote
When video card shopping, many people look at a card's core and memory clock speeds, the included bundle of software and accessories, and the warranty among other things. More than ever before, NVIDIA's board partners are offering out-of-the-box, warrantied overclocks, so checking out clock speeds is worthwhile. More important to many consumers, though, is the warranty. XFX not only offers factory overclocked cards, but it also offers an exclusive Double Lifetime Warranty on 6 and 7 Series cards. The company also packs in some nice bundles with its cards.
Quote
Those of you on a budget, but are still pretty serious about gaming should really look no further than the XFX 6600. I'll have to admit that our expectations were pretty low when I was told that this was a mere 6600 but the card exceeded my expectations in almost every way. Performance was excellent, and despite not having any fancy copper/heatpipe cooling solution, the card overclocked very well as well.
Quote
The rampant office practice of "cc-ing" colleagues and bosses (carbon copying, to use the term of the ancients) has also heightened anxieties by forcing an ever-widening circle of people to respond immediately. Even vacation is no longer an automatic escape valve, not with the lure of laptops and Internet cafes. The popularity of wireless connections and hand-held devices like BlackBerries has only deepened the e-mail deluge. And then there is the scourge of spam, which still manages to stay one step ahead of the most aggressive filters.
Quote
The claim states that Sony BMG's failed to disclose the true nature of the digital rights management system it uses on its CDs and thousands of computer users have unknowingly infected their computers, according to court documents.
Quote
When recipients click on an attachment, they install malware, which may tear down the firewall and gives hackers access to a PC. The malware hides by using Sony software that is also hidden -- the software would have been installed on a computer when consumers played Sony's copy-protected music CDs.
Quote
"(Michigan) has been unable to demonstrate the perceived harm it seeks to protect against," Judge George Caram Steeh wrote in a ruling obtained by Reuters. He added that the state had failed to show what harm could result from selling games to minors. The judge also said "obvious harm" could arise from "stifling free speech" if the law goes into effect as planned on December 1.
Quote
The sharp drop in the seabird numbers coincided with a climate shift that resulted in a reduced abundance of lipid-rich fish in the area, though other fish species remained available as food. The researchers theorised that chicks born at or after this time lacked the lipid-rich foods they needed for proper cognitive development, leaving them less likely to have the skills needed to survive as independent adults.
Quote
The $260 million (220 million Euro) Venus Express probe is the ESA’s fastest spacecraft to develop to date, taking less than four years to move from the concept phase to launch, and its first aimed at Venus. While several probes have swung past the planet on their way to other bodies in the Solar System, the ESA’s Venus Express is the first dedicated probe to investigate the cloudy world since NASA’s Magellan orbiter burned up in the planet’s atmosphere in 1994.
Quote
The board of Dover Area School District in south-central Pennsylvania lost eight of its nine incumbents in an upset election that surprised even the challengers, who had been hoping for a bare majority to take control of the board. The new board, which includes teachers, opposed the incumbents' policy of including intelligent design in science classes.
Quote
"I think we are in trouble," said Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles and creator of the basic principle of packet switching. "Years ago, people took a long-range view to research. There was high-risk research with the potential for big payoffs. That's no longer the case."
Quote
Part of our pitch to enterprises is that we will help them save money. In terms of the trustworthiness of the platform, we have plenty of references and we have plenty of scale that should put to bed a lot of the legacy issues related to this stuff being enterprise-ready. We've had those issues for years. At some point, clearly those are legacy issues.
Quote
Women and men are often perceived as having differences in their senses of humour but, until now, there had been no neurological evidence for such suspicions. The new brain scanning study showed that although men and women tended to agree on which of the single-panel cartoons they were shown were funny, they processed the humour differently in their brains. In particular, women appear to have a lower expectation that the cartoon will be funny than men. “Women appear to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it,” says Allan Reiss, one of the study’s authors, at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US.
Quote
Both men are taking long-awaited steps to build new revenue streams amid increasing production costs and declining ratings. While new platforms could further drain the broadcast ratings that determine advertising rates, there is the hope that broadcast TV actually could be strengthened, with video-on-demand providing a safety net for viewers who might miss an episode.
Quote
Sony has backpedaled a little, saying that the hidden files can be uncloaked. But customers still have to beg for help if they want to uninstall the software. Still, it may be too late for the entertainment giant to fend off the plaintiff's bar. One recent court case in Illinois, Soleto v. DirectRevenue, sets a nonbinding precedent that lawyers expect to be invoked against Sony.
Quote
Venture capital firms are pouring more money into start-ups that adhere to open-source practices, such as giving away technology for free. That rush could result in an investment bubble, similar to that seen in the early days of the Web, several industry executives cautioned at the Open Source Business Conference last week.
Quote
The health ministry admitted in a statement that it did not know what killed the girl and afflicted her nine-year-old brother and a 36-year-old schoolteacher in the same province. While bird flu has killed more than 60 people in south-east Asia, China has insisted that it has had no human infections even though there have been numerous outbreaks in birds.
Quote
Observations made in 2004 by a team at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004 focused on a region twice as large as the new study, though at a lower resolution. The difference between the two observations comes down to the radio wavelength used: the Berkeley team took their measurements at a wavelength of 7 millimetres, while the Shanghai group was able to get down to a wavelength of 3.5 mm. A shorter wavelength means less distortion of the radio waves from interstellar plasma, enabling astronomers to see in greater detail.
Quote
Engineers have known for decades that it is more efficient to communicate with photons than electrons. Photons do not interact easily with stray electronic and magnetic fields nor with each other and so are better for long-distance communications. Today most of the world's communications networks rely on light and the optical fibres that carry it.
Quote
Researchers discovered this neutron star, a dense neutron ball about 12 miles in diameter, in the midst of an extremely young cluster of stars. By estimating the age and mass of the other stars in the cluster, the scientists were able to determine that this neutron star’s parent was at least 40 times the mass of the Sun.
Quote
It is likely that those women with higher hormone levels also had increased levels of oestrogen during puberty – the time when the hormone has a crucial role in determining facial appearance,” she suggests. The amount of oestrogen produced by a person’s body during the average seven-year-long puberty is largely determined by heredity. The hormone has lasting effects on bone growth and tissue formation as well as the skin’s appearance, Law Smith explains.
Quote
Gates said that Windows Live is a set of Internet-based personal services, such as e-mail, blogging and instant messaging. It will be primarily supported by advertising and be separate from the operating system itself. Office Live will come in both ad-based and subscription versions that augment the popular desktop productivity suite.
Quote
The plant, known as Fab 12, is Intel's second that has begun volume production combining wafers that are 300 millimeters in diameter, about the size of a dinner plate, with a 65 nanometer etching process. Intel, the world's top chipmaker, is moving to 65 nanometer technology from 90 nanometer.
Quote
NIST is weighing two broad options: selecting a newer variant of SHA-1 believed to be more secure, or undertaking the much longer process of soliciting public suggestions for an entirely new algorithm that can be used for digital signatures. (The agency followed the second path before deciding on the Rijndael algorithm, used for data encryption rather than signatures.)
Quote
But NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope used its Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) to peer through the haze. It has captured wispy streams of dust, flowing like spider's legs from the centre of the nebula, where massive young stars are forming.
Quote
The result was that the side of the body with the painful arm was hidden from their view and it appeared to the patients as if they had two healthy arms. They were told to concentrate hard on the image and try to believe that what they saw was a true depiction of themselves.
Quote
When a tag detects a radar pulse, it adds data to it and then sends it back, he explains. "That added data is what allows the radar to identify the tag as a friend." When the aircraft radar receives the signal, it adds an icon to the pilot's display which identifies the object as a friendly vehicle.
Quote
When Corsair collaborated with Asus to supply memory for their A8N32-SLI Deluxe/WIFI and A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboards any of use that have or had plans on purchasing a NF4 motherboard, were given some new memory to play with as well. Now thanks to the availability of this memory we expect to extremely fast benchmarks thanks to the ultra-low latency timing of 2-3-2-6. So come on as we test the 3500LL Pro and see just how fast it we can get it to clock.
Quote
The OCZ EB PC-4000 is another great product worthy of the Editor’s Choice Award. If you haven’t yet moved up to 2GBs of memory, consider this product for any system - its fast, stable and pushes the boundaries of what is possible with two 1GB sticks of memory.
Quote
Does anyone really need 2GB though? Our answer is yes. Even if your system is fine at 1GB, I can tell you that Microsoft will probably say something like "1GB is the recommended amount of ram a user needs for Vista". Using our rule, 1GB will probably be the minimum for Vista, and truth be told, we feel 1GB is the minimum anybody should have in their system now.
Quote
There are but a few names that come to mind when you mention quality memory, even fewer when you mention high performance memory. There are many companies out there now that are making it or trying to get into the high performance memory market. One name that stands out when you think of high quality, high performance memory is Corsair. Corsair is one of the top makers of reliable, high performance ram. Today for review I have an entry by Corsair that promises to deliver something we haven't seen yet, a CAS latency of 2 at speeds of PC3500.
Quote
Corsair, in a partnership with Asus, recently released a 2GB low-latency PC3500 kit. The company doesn't plan to stop there though, as it is also releasing a 2GB PC4400 kit, which happens to be the focus of this article. The kit won't be on shelves for at least a couple more weeks, so consider this article a preview of what you can expect from the TWINX2048-4400PRO.
Quote
Lastly is the price of the RAM, a rather large question especially since there isn't a lot of difference, performance wise to PC5300 RAM. As of this moment its around the $200 (US) mark, which puts it around the other PC6400 RAM around. The upside is that it has tighter timings than the competition, at least at the moment, at 4-4-4-15 rather than 5-5-5-15.
Quote
What can I say, this is some serious RAM, you can find it online for less than $100 for a 1GB kit. With some mild tweaking you got from some decent priced PC 4200 value RAM to some REALLY decent priced PC5400. Every once in a while a product comes along that gives you WAY more bang for the buck than you expect, like the ti series NVIDIA cards, the JIUHB XP 1700 and the ABIT NF7-s motherboard. You mention any of those products to an enthusiast and it brings a smile to their faces.
Quote
But they assured us, times were changing. Starting with some flashy purple boards that were a nice start, but failed to impress. Now they have the PF88, featuring their very own bus type and a highly portable SiS chipset allowing the board to support both Intel and AMD processors (and potentially more!).
Quote
Foxconn is one of the first manufacturers to release an GeForce 6100-series motherboard, and the 6150K8MA-8EKRS specifically uses the best of class nVidia GeForce 6150 iteration and nVidia nForce 430 Southbridge. The Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS mini-ATX motherboard which supports all Socket 939 AMD Athlon64 X2/FX processors on the market, as well as up to 4GB of PC3200 DDR RAM. In terms of goodies, the motherboard incorporates onboard analog video, a 7.1-channel Azalia audio codec, a single Gigabit LAN port and IEEE 1394a.
Quote
Today we've got a brand new motherboard on the chopping block from ASRock, a sub division of ASUS who produce value orientated motherboards. The ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard is based on ULi's new M1695 chipset and offers many innovative features. It has many features such as PCI Express and AGP support and upgradeability to upcoming AMD processors - it's an upgrader’s dream
Quote
Foxconn is one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers of computer parts and only recently has started to enter the enthusiast market. Overall, the brand appears to be well-received, even though the naming conventions are somewhat counterintuitive. Enthusiast boards on one side, OEM boards on the other side, there is still ground to play and it appears as if the red tape was lifted at least for once to let the engineers and designers play their hearts out. The result is a true oddity in the conformistic world of motherboards - a dual chipset motherboard for a single - server class - CPU with two 16-lanes PCIe SLI slots that promise to deliver uncompromised bandwidth to the graphics adapters while in the background some super RAID configuration is on a rampage and the entire system talks to the intranet via dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Needless to say that the latter are protected by nVidia's own Firewall.
Quote
When DFI launched the LanParty line of motherboards they targeted at a very narrow though highly vocal sector of the hardware market with one purpose in mind, to get DFI known in the enthusiast community. The marketing and products were solid and as a result DFI and the LanParty series are household names.
Quote
We've looked at a couple of PowerColor X800 GT cards and have come away with the feeling that whilst both offer something new in the marketplace, the respective asking prices takes away much of their shine. Novel, exciting products? Yes. Value-for-money? Not quite.
Quote
By now, there is no need to question the power of the 7800 GTX, whether it comes with a factory set overclock or not. Everyone knows that it is the card to get if you want the best gaming performance available. When you care about raw power though, a factory and warrantied overclock is a big plus. In fact, XFX only offers overclocked versions of the 7800 GTX. If that's not catering to enthusiasts, then I don't know what is!
Quote
Lastly, the performance of the card in games puts it at the top of the X8xx line, right behind the 850 and 850PE. While it isn't the speediest card it is also much cheaper than it's bigger brothers and you can overclock it quite easily to those speeds. Given that the X800XT AIW offers many features for a great price and still gets it's game on at a great FPS, it is a great deal for the money if you are looking for everything it offers.
Quote
With all the hype surrounding the new generation ATI graphics cards, there are people who don’t have that kind of money to spend. Sapphire is one of ATI’s partners doing the X800GTO chip and they’ve recently released two new graphics cards based on it - the Fireblade Edition and the other being the GTO² Limited Edition. One of these suckers might be just what the doctor ordered if you’re budget doesn’t extend to around $500 USD for a graphics card.
Quote
The GT model is quite similar to the 7 series flagship model, known as the 7800GTX, having 1 less vertex shader and 4 less pixel pipelines. The GT also has slower stock clock speeds of 400MHz core and 500MHz memory as compared to the GTX's 430MHz core and 600MHz memory. Seemingly minor differences but we shall see what the benchmarks have to say as we pit the Gigabyte 7800GT against the BFG 7800GTX which comes pre-overclocked out of the factory.
Quote
While ATI is busy showing off their new products it is easy to forget that they still have a pretty nice line-up already out. The X800-series has grown a lot and today I am testing the X800GT and X800GTO cards from HIS.
Quote
The stock versions of the HIS and Sapphire cards perform well, of course being of the same core, clock, and memory speed they perform almost identically. The true value of the cards comes out with the overclocking, the HIS card automatically improves 8% with some headroom to go a bit further. HIS states that it can go up to 540 and probably further. The Sapphire card performs great once you unlock it's full potential with the extra four pipelines, as shown there is a massive increase in many cases, up to 50% in a few. Sapphire definitely has an edge with the unlocking ability.
Quote
Power for the X800 GT Xtreme is provided by ATI's R480 chipset running at 500MHz. This is 25MHz faster than the standard X800 GT. The Xtreme achieves this higher core speed with a better cooling solution. The normal X800 GT use 256 Meg of 2ns GDDR3 memory running at 980MHz. The Xtreme version use 1.6ns memory running at 1050MHz. All together, it adds up to a faster video card for just a few dollars more.
Quote
In a posting on the Microsoft Internet Explorer blog, IE program manager Eric Lawrence said that IE7 would support the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS) by default. Existing versions of IE automatically use the SSL 2.0 protocol, which is weaker than TLS, to encrypt user data, although it is possible to manually switch to TLS.
Quote
Amanda Crispel, assistant program director for electronic game and interactive development at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt., said that only 18 of the program's 100 students are women. Of course, there has been no shortage of conversations about finding ways to get more women into the game industry. But it can be hard for such discussions to get attention, said Christopher Sherman, executive director of The Game Initiative, which organized the women's conference.
Quote
Dubai, one of seven semi-autonomous states of the United Arab Emirates, is the leading commercial center in the Gulf region and has ambitious plans to boost its thriving tourism industry to prepare for when its low oil reserves run out. But environmentalists say the futuristic island developments have taken a heavy toll on the present ecosystem.
Quote
While acknowledging that "services" is a pretty broad term, Ozzie pointed to a wide range of opportunities for the company, from hosting software for small businesses that don't want the complexity of managing a server, to adding specialized products for large businesses that already have scores of servers.
Quote
"Phased array" transmitters use interference effects among the multiple antennas to reinforce the electromagnetic waves going in some directions and to cancel them out in others. This allows the direction of the beam of radiation to be changed almost instantaneously. A phased array can even send beams in several directions at once. The military uses phased arrays for missile-tracking radar.
Quote
NaturalNano says that by filling Halloysite tubes with copper and then mixing the tubes into a polymer, a manufacturer could make an electrically conductive plastic. If filled with fungicides, the Halloysite particles--which consist of aluminum, oxygen, silicon and hydrogen--could be swirled into paint to make it more resistant to mildew and mold. Time-released coatings could also be added to make all-day deodorant.
Quote
Even larger screen sizes are in the pipeline. Samsung has already shown its upcoming 19-inch laptop to CNET Reviews. The product is expected to ship later this year. Dell, a major partner of Samsung, could easily adopt the large screen format for its high-end XPS laptops. And, LG Philips is also touting its 20-inch LCD displays for laptops, Shim said.
Quote
Disney said Monday that it will release DVD "screeners"--copies of movies sent to groups that vote on awards--only for DVD players made exclusively by a Dolby Laboratories unit, Cinea, and engineered to thwart illegal copying. "We feel like this is a really strong first step in addition to all the other things we do to combat piracy," said Dennis Rice, who heads Disney's Oscar publicity campaign, which will include films such as "Shopgirl" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
Quote
The chip features 165 million transistors and is fabricated using IBM's 90-nanometer technology to reduce heat and improve performance. The chip's 21.6GB-per-second front side bus architecture was customized to meet the throughput and latency requirements of the Xbox 360 gaming platform software, the company said.
Quote
An IUCN report released on Tuesday said that up to half of the world's coral reefs might be lost in the next 40 years unless urgent measures were taken to protect them against climate change and other threats. As much as 20 percent of the earth's coral reefs have been effectively destroyed, Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of IUCN Marine Programme, told the conference on Tuesday.
Quote
Unfortunately, not all of the headphones' features work with the video iPod. That's because Apple's latest player, unlike previous iPod generations, doesn't have a small connector near the headphone jack. With both the latest iPod and the recently introduced Nano, Apple has done away with the top connector, rendering a whole slew of existing iPod accessories incompatible with the newest players.
Quote
Alpha made landfall on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic early on Sunday. Its intensity was mild compared to Wilma’s, but it did bring heavy rains to an island prone to disastrous flash floods and mudslides. Heavy rains on Wilma’s outer fringes were blamed for at least 10 deaths in Haiti.
Quote
NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2018 and later on to Mars. But a round-trip mission to the Red Planet would probably last at least 30 months and carry six to eight people. That would be a hotbed for intense crew relationships, says a report by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
Quote
The latest incident of bird flu in European Russia killed 12 hens at a private dacha, after which authorities culled 53 ducks and hens at the locality and imposed a quarantine. The outbreak was in Tambov, 400 km (250 miles) southeast of Moscow last week, a senior regional animal health official said on Monday.
Quote
Nearly 50 million copies of OpenOffice have been downloaded, but only recently has the software become a more serious threat to long-dominant Microsoft Office. Version 2.0 brings some significant new features, and Google has pledged to help distribute OpenOffice through a high-profile pact with Sun. But perhaps more significant, OpenOffice.org uses the standardized OpenDocument format that stands in stark contrast to Microsoft's proprietary formats.
Quote
Although the requirements apply just to financial services companies, the policy could stimulate wider use of two-factor authentication by other merchants that are willing to "federate" their Web sites with banks, said Michael Aisenberg, director of government relations for Internet services provider VeriSign Inc.
Quote
While some strains of H5N1 are resistant even to Tamiflu, they are thought to be too weak to pose a serious threat. But H5N1 is so virulent that the drug may not save the patient. In experiments published in July, the equivalent of the 10-capsule course of treatment used in humans saved only half of infected mice, and even 16 capsules saved only 80 per cent.
Quote
The current bipartisan effort in Congress to enact legislation requiring companies to help prevent identity theft is a positive sign. Whether the new laws succeed, however, will depend on how our legislators interpret the problem. If they focus exclusively on defense against outside attacks, their efforts will likely fall short. If the lawmakers also address the insider threat, we should all be able to breathe a lot easier.
Quote
In a recent report from IIIR on the name dispute, however, the company said it "considers the proposals it made to Google for settlement of this matter to be fair and reasonable to both parties." In a valuation of the Gmail trademark conducted in a draft discussion document in December 2004, IIIR set the brand's worth at between $44 million and $60 million (25 million pounds and 34 million pounds) although the company later said it would settle for a considerably lower sum.
Quote
Because ID has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organisation, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper, Behe admitted that the controversial theory would not be included in the NAS definition. “I can’t point to an external community that would agree that this was well substantiated,” he said.
Quote
You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers (for a list of the printers we investigated so far, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php). The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope (for instructions on how to see the dots, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/).
Quote
The iPAQ hw6500 series will be available at Cingular outlets and HP's online shop for $449 with a two-year Cingular service contract. Unlimited data service is available for $39.99 per month with a qualified voice plan, the companies said.
Quote
MySQL 5.0 will add enable developers to write stored procedures, which are programs that run in a database, as well as distributed transactions. It also will support triggers, which set off an event programmatically, and views, which enable administrators to restrict portions of a database from being seen without the right authorization.
Quote
Greek agriculture minister Evangelos Bassiakos says experts will need "seven or eight days" to determine whether the virus is the H5N1 strain. The European Commission says that it is planning to ban the export of live birds and bird-related products from the Chios area, if test results due on Tuesday confirm the presence of the H5 strain there.