OCC TECH NEWS
November 22, 2009
Two complaints have surfaced against Apple from people who had their repair claims denied by Apple techs. Two different users reported that Apple denied their repairs because the computers contained smoking residue. Apple refused to work on these computers as they were ruled to be an OSHA violation. Both Macs were covered under the Applecare warranty program, but neither of them were fixed. One user was able to clean his computer with compressed air, while the other appears to be up a creek without a paddle. There is no mention of smoke damage voiding the users warranty in the Applecare contract.
The latest version of GPU-Z, 0.3.7 is now available. Updates in this version include full support for the ATI Radeon HD 5970 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 video cards, the option to show if a card is compatible with CUDA, PhysX, OpenCL and DirectX Compute, and enhanced accuracy of ATI GPU load monitoring. This new release also has the ability to show the amount of video memory in use for NVIDIA graphics card users, along with other various fixes and updates. GPU-Z 0.3.7 can be downloaded for free here.
Intel's LGA-1156 socket is due to get some new additions early next year including dual-core variants and on-die graphics. These new members of the 1156 family will need a new home: the Intel H57 Express chipset which enables support for on-die graphics.
MSI has unveiled pictures and features of its first H57 offering, the H57M-ED65 mATX motherboard. It features a 10-phase VRM to keep the CPU fed with power and MSI's signature DrMOS heatsinks. This board has no PCI slots and contains two PCIe x16 slots and two PCIe x1 slots instead. Eight SATA 3Gbps SATA ports are available (two are from an extra storage controller) and one legacy IDE connector. The board features an array of video connectors supplied by Intel's Flexible Display technology (on-die graphics) including DVI, VGA, HDMI and Display Port. Other connectivity ports such as USB, FireWire, eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet and 8-channel audio are located on the back panel. Enthusiasts are also catered for with the MSI OC Genie and on-board power/reset buttons. I'd expect to see this board in MSI's H57 line-up in Q1 2010.
Thanks to TechSweden.org for the pictures of MSI's new motherboard.
November 21, 2009
The California Energy Commission has passed a new energy standard to apply to all televisions that will need to be followed fully by 2013. The regulation targets all televisions under 58 inches, and requires a 33 percent decrease in energy consumption by 2011, and 49 percent by 2013. The move to LED back lighting by LCD manufacturers has already put them on track to meet these new regulations. However, the more power hungry Plasma television may have a much tougher time meeting these requirements. Panasonic unveiled its NeoPDP technology at CES last year, which would allow for one third the energy use of older models.
November 20, 2009
With other programs available such as Defraggler , MyDefrag, along with the Windows built-in defragging program, it is hard to choose what application to use to speed up a traditional hard drive. Auslogics also has a product out however for free, called Auslogics Disk Defrag, which has just been updated to version three. In the new version, Windows 7’s superbar progress indicator is fully supported, as well as the ability to free p space before a defrag begins. The program comes in both an installable package and a portable one, and can be installed on basically any storage medium that is large enough. Target files can also be defragged by themselves or a full system optimization can be done if chosen, with intelligent system file placement being an option. Included in the Auslogics Disk Defrag program is a new optimization feature that the company recommends to run around once a week, and though it takes longer than a normal defrag would, it supposedly helps drives health and performance even more. The updated version of the program can be found and downloaded from many internet websites, including here.
November 19, 2009
While it has been talked about for some time since the release of the Google Chrome browser, the Chrome operating system has not been heard about much until now. Google is just today revealing its Chrome operating system to the general public, though no release time or much information at all is being brought forward, besides a possible completion of the project sometime last next year. Awkwardly enough, the operating system runs mainly on a cloud system, with the Google browser being the main interface that users access everything from, including email to word documents. Even regular hard drives will not be supported, and only solid state drives will make it on the list of storage mediums that can be used. Hardware wise, the search engine company is limiting what hardware the new OS will run on, though since it will be open source, it will not be long before mass amounts of different processors, video cards, and sound cards are supported by code edits, though x86 architecture and ARM CPUs are being supported initially. The demo was run on an ASUS Eee PC, even though Google will be selling its own approved hardware when the operating system comes to the masses. Flash is being heavily used throughout the new operating system; however Microsoft Silverlight was not discussed much at all at the unveiling.
NVIDIA's Senior PR Manager Brian Burke has uploaded the first picture of a working GF100 video card on the company's Facebook page. For those of you in the dark, GF100 is the codename for the first GeForce GPU based on NVIDIA's Fermi architecture. The card is running Unigine Corp's DX 11 "Heaven" benchmark on a Dell monitor. It seems as though NVIDIA is trying to reassure consumers that Fermi cards are on track for release early next year in light of last month's revelation that the Fermi Card used in Jen-Hsun Huang's presentation was a mock-up. Whatever stage of development Fermi is in, I think NVIDIA should be concerned with the recent launch of ATI's top-end behemoth, the 5970.
NVIDIA has unveiled its newest driver, GeForce 195.55. This new driver is NVIDIA's first driver to support the GT 240 video card and GPU acceleration of HD videos in Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta, in line with the recently released ATI Catalyst 9.11. SLI support for new games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Borderlands and FIFA Soccer 10 is also included in conjunction with many minor fixes. You may download the NVIDIA GeForce 195.55 WHQL-candidate drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP here.
ATI has released the latest version of Catalyst drivers, version 9.11. The new release is compatible with the ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000 series of video cards. Catalyst 9.11 brings support for hardware acceleration of H.246 videos in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta and enhanced conversion of high quality content to a lower resolution (by ATI Video Converter), along with numerous fixes in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. The release notes for ATI Catalyst 9.11 are available here and you can download the driver from AMD's website here.
November 18, 2009
Patriot Memory today announced the PS-100 series, a new line of solid state drives targeted at consumers looking for the high-performance and reliability of a SSD at an affordable price.
"Our PS-100 is a great option for consumers that want all the reliability and performance of an SSD, but are looking for aggressive pricing," say Eric Ackerson, Patriot's Director of Marketing. "We are excited about getting this product into the market just in time for the holiday season, and with capacities from 32GB to 256GB, the PS-100 family brings improved system performance and longevity with a broad range of capacities and price points."
The PS-100 drives are based on a 2.5” form factor and utilize a 64MB cache and boast power consumption of 5.3W when operating, and .5W when in standby mode. Performance numbers for the PS-100 show sequential read speeds of up to 210MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 150MB/s. While Patriot has said the new drives will be available in time for the upcoming holiday season, specific dates and pricing were not disclosed.
Pandemic Studios, the game developer purchased by EA 2 years ago, will be shutting its doors. This is the result of EA's plan to lay off 1500 people to cut costs. About 200 people will lose their jobs from this closure, with about 25 people being transferred to other studios. Pandemic was started by former Activision Blizzard employees in 1997, and produced games such as Mercenaries and Full Spectrum Warrior. Its last game, Saboteur, will be released next month.
November 17, 2009
Antec today announced the TPQ-1200, the latest addition to its TruePower Quattro line of high-performance power supplies. The TPQ-1200 is Antec’s first 1200-watt model and the first to feature Antec’s new PowerCache technology. With PowerCache, the TPQ-1200 provides an extra power reserve through a high-performance capacitor to ensure an extra margin of stability during even the most sudden changes in system demand. The TPQ-1200 also boasts 80 PLUS Silver certification, meaning the unit is at least 85% efficient at a wide range of operating loads. The unit also comes with Advanced Hybrid Cable Management, Antec's modular cable system that reduces cable clutter and helps improve performance by keeping all necessary cables hardwired. It also features six +12V output circuits to spread power evenly throughout the system, DC to DC voltage regulator modules and high-quality Japanese brand capacitors. Antec backs the TPQ-1200 with a five-year warranty and you should be able to find the unit now at a MSRP of $299.99US.
The original Tempest computer case has been one of NZXT's best sellers and now the company is announcing an upgraded version called the NZXT Tempest EVO. While keeping the good cooling performance of its predecessor, the Tempest EVO sports four 120mm fans with resdegned blades that deliver more air and lower noise levels. The upgrade keeps the bottom-mounted PSU design and offers better airflow and separation of the heat from the CPU. Although it's a mid-tower chassis, the new case focuses on expandability with support for motherboards up the E-ATX size and compatibility with newer high-end graphics cards. The interior of the case is painted black in the upgraded version and comes with room for up to 8 hard drives. You'll also find cable management features, room for water cooling and cutouts on the motherboard tray from easy heatsink unstallation and removal. NZXT is offering the Tempest EVO at a suggested retail price of $99.99US with immediate availability
OCZ Technology, manufacturer of computer parts has officially announced their first 3.5” Colossus Solid State Disks. The new drives will come in capacities of 120 GB, 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB, will use MLC NAND flash technology with an internal RAID 0 architecture and 128 MB of Cache. It will have an aluminium casing, a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, read and write speeds of up to 260 MB/s and a 1.5 million hour mean time between failures (MTBF). It comes backed by a 3 Year warranty and dedicated technical support from OCZ themselves. It can be found for $437.99 for the 120 GB variant, while the 1 TB variant has yet to be listed and no exact RRPs by OCZ has been announced. “The new Colossus Series is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance and is for high power users that put a premium on speed, reliability and maximum storage capacity.”
Just today, the popular Linux operating system that follows alongside Ubuntu and openSUSE, Fedora, has been updated to version 12. With the update come many things, such as improved HD video codecs, Moblin support, improved webcam support, support for Intel BIOS-RAID, more support for Intel hardware, a new Dracut booting system, spanning desktop support, and various other optimizations. KDE has been updated to version 4.3.2, and the Linux kernel has also been brought up to 2.6.31, along with GNOME 2.28 desktop environments with the up-to-date release. With the new editions of Fedora, as well as openSUSE and Ubuntu, users have many options in what Linux operating system they want to use on their personal home computers, or even business environments.
November 16, 2009
Besides the copies of the new Office that were found on a few torrent sites that were rumored to be loaded with viruses, Microsoft has officially put up Office 2010 on Technet in beta form of course. This means that the first beta will soon become available to some users, and the product will be worked on consistently until release. The product will hopefully take to consumers better than the 2007 version did, though the ribbon is a key component to blame on that release when it made its debut. Not much information is known on any fixes, changes, improvements, or additions that have been made to the suite, but soon Technet users will be able to plunge in and take the new Office software for a personal spin and critic it along the way.
The Cray Jaguar is officially the most powerful computer in the world, dethroning the IBM Roadrunner. IBM had spent five years at the top of the list, with the Jaguar, a Cray XT5 model, coming in at number 3. The performance boost was achieved by changing out the quad core Opterons in the computer for the new six core Istanbul processors. The new total of 224,000 processing cores gives the Jaguar a peak performance of 1.75 petaflops. The Jaguar is located at the Oak Ridge National Lab, where it is used for a variety of science and engineering applications.
After having a pretty substantial weekend roundup, we're left with a light start to the week. Corsair's rather substantial Obsidian Series 800D chassis marks the company's first foray into the crowded field of computer cases. Does the Obsidian deliver? Read the review to find out. We also have review coverage of the Kingwin F-35 external HDD enclosure and AVLabs' AVL787 speaker system.
Cases
Corsair's Obsidian Series 800D enclosure @ Tech Report
Speakers/Headphones
AVLabs AVL787 Bedside Companion Speaker System @ TweakTown
Storage/Hard Drives
Kingwin F-35 HDD Enclosure @ Virtual-Hideout
November 15, 2009
November 14, 2009
Lined up in its Inspiron computer models, the new Dell Zino HD is a small computing box that provides decent processing and graphics power for home entertainment. The new computer is similar to a Mac Mini, but sports the Windows operating system and a bit different layout and design. Various upgrades can be applied to the system such as a 1TB hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, 8GB of RAM, as well as a discrete ATI Radeon graphics card instead of the included ATI graphics chip. Though the price of the new Dell Zino HD starts at just $229, the price can easily go up with all the upgrades that can be applied, along with even more powerful processors. Many people are expected to buy the system now that it is available in the United State, especially in a home theatre setting with the computer measuring in at just 7.75-inches and 3.5-inches tall.
November 13, 2009
To both extreme gamers and overclockers, G.Skill has been a reference brand either by their high quality memory or by their great SSD's. Now, G.Skill has proved once again that they are one of the top names in the enthusiast market by launching the fastest CL7 DDR3 memory modules at the moment. While 2200MHz DDR3 memory is nothing new, DDR3 memory at 2200MHz 7-10-10-28 with 1.65 working voltage is impressive, making these modules some of the fastest in the world. The only available kit as from now is a dual-channel 4GB (2GBx2), especially aimed for i7 860 and 870 users. The modules will also feature a brand new heatspreader and will be shipped with the G.Skill Turbulence memory fan to be used for providing cooler memory and improving overclocking capabilities.
The Snapdragon ARM processor from Qualcomm is coming to Lenovo netbooks. The netbook will be available through AT&T, and is built around the 1GHz Cortex-A8 core. The system is being referred to as a smartbook due to the low power ARM chips that power them. The smartbook will run a custom Linux distribution and will have a long battery life. Several other manufacturers are rumored to be designing ARM smartbooks featuring both the Snapdragon and Nvidia Tegra. The smartbook will be launched at CES, so the OCC members in attendance may be able to get their hands on it.
Dell is planning to throw its hat into the smartphone ring. The phone is called the Mini 3 and will be the latest to run the Android OS from Google. It will be available in China by the end of this month with Brazil to follow by the end of the year, and availability in unannounced markets at a later time. The phone will be available for China Mobile and Claro subscribers in the respective countries. Dell is hoping that the large number of cell users in these countries will prove advantageous. However, with several Android phones already released, Dell's phone has some tough competition.
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