Using just 7 watt, but providing light like a regular 40 watt light bulb, the Philips MASTER LED bulb is the first of its kind. Philips states that this LED bulb neither emits heat, UV or IR in the beam, therefore making it ideal for illuminating sensitive objects, for example. According to Philips, it lasts about 45,000 hours, which is up to 45 times longer than incandescent light bulbs and up to 25 times longer than traditional halogen. Currently, the MASTER LED can be used in E27 and GU10 lamp fittings and is already available in Europe for around 50 Euros. In July it should also be available in the USA, as well. Doing the math, in an 18 to 24-hours per day application, the MASTER LED already payed for itself after one year.

The BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 H2O 1GB graphics card features a totally silent, exceptionally efficient BFG ThermoIntelligence

AMD introduced the ATI FirePro 2450, a low profile quad display graphics accelerator that consumes minimal power (less than 18 watts) delivering exceptional power efficiency.

The low power consumption enables cool, energy-efficient operation, as well as superior reliability and longevity. The low profile design of the ATI FirePro 2450 enables IT departments to standardize on one card that can be installed in a broad range of systems, including workstations, desktop PCs and docking stations featuring AMD or other processors. With 512 MB of on-board graphics memory the card delivers high performance while streaming media and running applications in several windows and includes full Microsoft Windows Vista Aero support. The ATI FirePro 2450 supports PCI Express 2.0 and offers two VHDCI connectors with breakout cables for quad DVI-I or VGA support. he new ATI FirePro 2450 graphics accelerator is now available with a MSRP of USD$499

Gigabyte technology already had this marketed on their motherboards, but now available on their graphics cards is their Ultra Durable VGA (UDV) concept.

Graphics cards based on this technology will feature 2 oz copper PCB boards, Samsung/Hynix memory, Japanese solid caps, Ferrite Core Chokes, and Low RDS (on) MOSFET. Gigabyte promises UDV will lower temperatures, cut power consumption and boost overclocking performance.

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA adopts 5 high quality components to make best graphics accelerators.

1. 2 oz Copper PCB Board
   2 oz copper PCB board doubles the copper inner layer of PCB board and provides unrivaled performance compared with traditional 1 oz PCB board.
2. Tier 1 Samsung and Hynix Memory
   Ultra Durable VGA promises 1st tier Samsung/Hynix memory built with 100% fully testing.
3. Japanese Solid Capacitor
   Solid capacitors contain a solid organic polymer, while electrolytic capacitors use a common liquid electrolyte. Our cards use Japanese solid capacitors made by leading Japanese manufactures and offer better electronic conductivity for unrivaled performance.
4. Ferrite Core Chokes
   Ferrite core chokes are comprised of a compound of iron-oxide whose properties hold energy much longer than common iron-core chokes at high frequency. They are able to store energy longer and prevent rapid energy loss at high frequency.
5. Low RDS (on) MOSFET
   Lower RDS(on) MOSFETs are specially designed to produce lower switching resistance for faster electric current charging and discharging.

Ultra Durable VGA Unique Features

• GPU Temperature 5%-10% Down
  2 oz copper PCB board provides dramatic cooling effect on lowering both GPU and memory temperature by doubling the copper inner layer of PCB. In addition, Japanese Solid Capacitor, Ferrite Core Chokes, and Low RDS (on) MOSFET can reduce heat production and the whole GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA design can lower GPU temperature by 5% to 10%.
• Overclocking Capability 10%-30% Up
  Ultra Durable VGA reduces voltage ripples in normal and transient state, thus effectively lowers power noises and ensures higher overclocking capability. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA graphic accelerators improve overclocking capability by 10% to 30%.
• Power Switching Loss 10%-30% Down
  Ultra Durable VGA allows more bandwidth for electron passage and reduces circuit impedance. The reduction of circuit impedance will provide stable current flow and thus improving power efficiency. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable VGA can lower power switching loss by 10% to 30%

CEO Jerry Shen said the firm was working on two SKUs for the keyboard PC: a wireless version and a wired version

We test a product from the guys at Galaxy technology, and that means customization and extra features, all for a fair price.

Custom PCB, custom cooling, custom bracket, HDMI output, black DVI+backplate heck it even packs 1024MB of memory to play around with for roughly the same money as a 512MB model. All fairly impressive really. We'll take the product through an extensive series of tests and will let you know how we feel about it.

Click on the link to read this Guru3D review.

Just in time for this years CeBit, BenQ presented its Pocket Projector GP1 to the public. As the name already implies, its measurement of 136 x 120 x 54 millimeters and its very light weight of only 1.4 pounds/640 grams make this a truely compact design. Additionally, this projector uses LEDs as a light source which is a pretty unique feature.

Here are a few more facts about it: its native resolution is 858 x 600 pixels, it has an 2,000:1 contrast ratio, the LEDs emit 100 ANSI lumens and BenQ rates the LEDs for about 20,000 hours. The noise level during normal operation is 31 dB(A). The ports it provides are VGA, Composite and USB. The expected price for this beamer is supposed to be around 500 Euros or 599 USD and its targeted release date is April.

At CeBIT there was some discussion as to what the new high-end products from ATI will be like. ATI is working on a release for ASIC name RV790 for sure.  First off, everybody agrees .. there will be a release in April from ATI.

Based on the feedback we got back from AIBs it does look like there will be a card called ATI Radeon HD 4890 (a single GPU card). This card will be released to compete the GeForce GTX 260 (not the GTX 285). As it seems the two things different will be the frequencies of the GPU. Rumors are that 850 to 900 MHz is a possibility for the new RV790 GPU (4870 is clocked to 750 MHz). Secondly expect a memory frequency increase compared to the Radeon HD 4870.  Memory wise we expect a slight bump from 3600 MHz towards ~4000 MHz GDDR5.

Of course if you talk about RV790, the conversation quickly jumps towards a possible Ati Radeon HD 4890 X2, and as it seems ... it doesn't look like we'll be seeing a new X2 anytime soon based on RV790 as as released by ATI. Board partners are however free to build an X2 card, but the last time this happened that policy ended up to be a drama as Sapphire really was the only one offering a 4850 X2 board.

We expect an April release of Radeon HD 4890 with a sales price of roughly

Guru3D was at CeBIT 2009 in Germany this year. In this 23 page encounting article Guru3D will show you what was hot and what was not, Loads of photo's on the latest gear, and even some prototype product you have never seen will be on display.

When interested, grab a cup of coffee and have a read and most of all .. enjoy the slide-show as articles wise, CeBIT mostly always has been about watching photo's on the latest and greatest in the hardware industry.

Click here to read this article.

This program allows you to fine tune your GeForce graphics card for the maximum performance possible, with Core/Shader/Memory clock tuning, real time monitoring support including in-game, Logitech Keyboard LCD Display support, and compatibility with almost all EVGA (and other) graphics cards.

Version 1.5

New multi-GPU systems control approach. Now Precision gives you independent access to thermal monitoring, overclocking and fan control settings of all GPUs installed in the system regardless of SLI mode status. Please take a note that the previous version settings and profiles are not compatible with version 1.5.0 and will be lost.

• Added new green and dark skin editions.
• New skin format v1.1 adds bitmap effects support to the skin compiler. Now skin creators can use new technology to simplify skin creation process and easily create different color editions of the same skin by applying various color tuning effects to the same bitmaps during compilation. Built-in blue, violet, green and dark skin editions are based on new technology, so it is recommended to use these skins as bitmap effects usage tutorials.
• Added multi-GPU core, shader and memory clocks and fan speeds monitoring.
• SLI mode status is detected dynamically and displayed properly in system info when SLI mode is being toggled on the fly during Precision runtime.
• Now Precision displays graphics processor codename in system info.
• Fixed memory clock monitoring for G98 graphics processors family.
• Now Precision is able to detect memory clock frequency generator switching to PCIE bus clock and display correct idle 100MHz memory clock frequency on GeForce 9 and older series graphics cards.
• Added -profile0 ... -profile9 command line switches for loading the profiles.
• EVGA On-Screen Display Server has been updated to version 3.1.2. New server provides improved compatibility with SecuRom protected games when high application detection level is selected and fixes issues with starting the server with no server icon displayed in the system tray area under certain conditions.
• Various internal code cleanups and optimizations.

The software also supports output to the G15 display.

Download: click here

Yesterday, Amazon launched an interesting new section of its online store: video games trade-in. This service is currently in a beta testing period and therefore only available in the USA. The trade-in process is fairly simple and works like this:

1. Select the games you want to trade in. The games must be in good condition and your trade-in shipment valued at $10 or more.
2. Print a shipping label and packing slip, package your games, and ship them. Shipping is completely free, as long as you use the pre-paid shipping label from Amazon.
3. An Amazon.com Gift Card with the quoted amount for your shipped games will be deposited into your account upon receipt of games.

A little bit of a downside is the fact that you can't trade in any PC games - at least for now. Accepted platforms are: PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, Xbox, Wii, GameCube, Nintendo DS, PSP and Game Boy Advance. Following the announcement from Amazon, GameStop's shares dropped by 14 percent. GameStop is the current market leader in the USA in that sector.

Adding another item to its successful Eee family, Asus revealed the EeeNAS PC at the current CeBit in Hannover, Germany. The network attached storage server, features 2TB of storage capacity, a 3.5-inch touchscreen display for basic controlling of the device, a sloat-loading DVD-Burner, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and is supposed to be whisper quiet with only 28dB noise output. Obviously, it works both as a media server, as well as a backup device. [via SlashGear]

The Q1EX-71G UMPC from Samsung is the successor of the Q1 Ultra and packs in quite a few interesting features. Weighing less than 1.5 lbs, it measures 9" W x 5" H x 1" D. It has a 7" touchscreen display which supports a resolution of up to 1024 x 600 and 300 nits of brightness. The roughly 4.5 hours of battery life on the standard Li-Ion battery and up to 8.5 hours on the extended-life battery are a nice and welcome improvement, too.

The Q1EX-71G offers 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, a dual array microphone for making phone calls over the Web using VoIP, 2 GB of DDR2 667 MHz RAM, a 60GB HDD, and a VIA Nano ULV U2500 processor running at 1.2GHz. Operating system is the Tablet Edition of Windows XP. Last but not least: it is already available online for 749.99 USD. 

With the expansion of the existing Z5xx series of its Atom processor platform, Intel plans to address the growing segment of embedded computing, such as in-vehicle infotainment, medical, retail and transaction solutions (kiosks, point-of-service terminals), gaming and industrial control and automation. Apparently, they added four new single-core processors to the current line-up, about which not much information was released, so far. The Z520PT, for example, is a 1.3 Ghz CPU, has 512 KB of L2 cache, uses only 2.2 Watts, and works in a temperature range of -40 to +85

Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to make Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7 removable, after all. An early sign for this possiblity can be found in the latest build, 7048, of Windows 7. Using the Windows Features dialog box, users discovered the option to remove the actual executable of Internet Explorer 8. Interestingly enough, this feature wasn't available in the public Beta version of Windows 7. Whether this is a result of the currently ongoing antitrust investigation of Microsoft in the EU right now, or not, is unclear, as an official statement from Microsoft is missing regarding that matter, so far. The European Union is investigating Microsoft for potentially abusing its monopolistic position to drive Internet Explorer's market share.

You know, Elecom MF-SU2 Flash Drives Could Probably Be Smaller Were It Not For The USB Connector. Here

Interesting news. If the rumor is correct then ATI is going to limit the list of supported graphics cards in the next release of Catalyst. Apparantly as of Catalyst 9.4 ATI is going to drop support for the following graphics cards:

Radeon 9500, 9600, 9800, X800, X1800, X1900 and other older desktop video cards.

On the professional side Catalyst 9.4 will no longer support the FireGL X1/X2/X3, V3000, V5000, V7000 and FireMV 2200, 2250 professional cards. Of course owners of these models will still be permitted to download older drivers and use them happily. The ATI Catalyst 9.4 is set to be released next month.

A small hint for ATI owners, we colled all ATI drivers ever since 2006, be sure to check out our downlaod section if you need one.

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