Typically known for its business storage, Fusion-io provided a glance at an upcoming solid-state drive built for very high-performance home systems. The ioExtreme card will hold just 80GB but switches from SATA to PCI Express and is tuned for sheer transfer rate above all else: data reading speeds hover between 500MB and 700MB per second, or about five times as quick as current SSDs. The extra speed is pitched as ideal for particularly disk-heavy tasks such as compiling code, content editing or large games.

The card is still in the development stage and hasn't received its official operating system support or complete technical details. Fusion-io plans to release the ioExtreme in early 2009 and is targeting a price below $1,000, putting it in the same price range as high-end traditional but slower SSDs.

Rap-rocker Kid Rock has chosen Rhapsody as the exclusive online sales venue for his music, the owner of latter party has announced. Real notes that Kid Rock's albums have not been available online in any legal manner in the past, whether for download or streaming; as of today, the artist's entire collection should be available for purchase or streaming through the subscription version of Rhapsody.

The decision is notable mainly because of Rock's outspoken dislike for the iTunes Store, in spite of its prominence as the most financially successful music download site. His most recent album, Rock N Roll Jesus, has nevertheless sold over 1.7 million copies, which the Wall Street Journal observes is an impressive figure in a world of deteriorating CD sales. Many parties are said to be irritated with the restrictions of iTunes, which can include DRM, an insistence of selling tracks separately, and pressure to offer exclusivity in exchange for advertising on the iTunes homepage [via Macnn].

Earlier this week in Japan the CEATEC was held, ATI graphics department senior vice president and general manager Rick Bergman announced the company

ThermalTake announced its BigTyp 14Pro processor cooler will be available later this month. This cooler features a mirror-coated copper base, six copper heatpipes and a 140mm blue LED fan. The BigTyp 14Pro is compatible with Intel LGA775 and AMD Socket AM2/AM2+ processors and features a VR Fan Knob to adjust the fan speed.

According to the specifications, the 140mm fan has a max airflow level of 85.76CFM and a noise level between 16dBA and 24dBA. The ThermalTake BigTyp 14Pro measures 156mm x 155mm x 128mm and weighs 800g.
BigTyp14Pro is without a doubt an impressive upgrade; the innovative stream shaped fan cover is not only there for styling purpose, but it also serves to speed up the air circulation. The mirror coating copper base seamlessly contact with the CPU and works with the 6 copper heatpipes to efficiently transfer the heat to the fins and 14cm large fan for heat dissipation process. VR

Wowzers, now that is a cool looking mainboard for sure. Some user over at the xtreme systems forums posted photo's of the up and coming Gigabyte EX58-Extreme mainboard, obviously for Intel nehalem, i7. You are looking at a non final v0.2 sample.

 Notice that there are waterblocks on there at the Northbridge location (X58 chip), leading to the mosfets.

That is looking impressive for sure.

Court documents said the swag looted by Victor Papagno was valued at over $120,000 and included a wide variety of items, from printer toner and software to hard drives, personal computers and other pieces of office equipment.

A local TV station reported that Papagno boosted so much stuff over the years that at times he had to store some of it at neighbors' houses.

Reportedly no national security information was compromised by the thefts, but personal data belonging to 14 laboratory workers was stolen and those people have been notified.

Papagno is looking at up to two years in federal prison when he is sentenced in December [via Inquirer].

Acer has teamed up with car manufacturer Ferrari to bring you a limited edition LCD monitor known as F-22Bid- A natively 1680

A review on the Phenom X4 9950 BE processor. The BE editions in essence are the 'regular' processor, yet they passed quality and analysis for better overclocking performance and have their multiplier unlocked. This obviously is the product we'll be testing today. We'll conduct our test in two ways though, first off we'll check baseline performance just like the regular Phenom X4 9950 and then start an overclocking session. Throughout our benchmarks we'll show you the results on both that baseline and overclocked performance with all benchmarks.

This is AMDs is the cream of the crop processor of the quad-core product line, it runs at 2600 MHz on all four cores with a multiplier of 13. But really, it doesn't mind clocks over 3000 MHz either. And that's what we'll show you in today's article.

You can read this Guru3D article here.

The new Realtek HD Audio 2.05 driver is available for download.

Realtek HD Audio Driver supports all of Realtek HD Audio Codec in Vista/WinXP/Win2000/Win2003 .

1. Vista WHQL Supporting: ALC882, ALC883, ALC885, ALC888, ALC889, ALC861VD, ALC660, ALC662, ALC663, ALC260, ALC262,ALC267, ALC268, ALC269, ALC272, ALC273, ALC887
2. Windows 2000/XP WHQL Supporting: ALC880, ALC882, ALC883, ALC885, ALC888, ALC889, ALC861VC, ALC861VD, ALC660, ALC662, ALC663, ALC260, ALC262, ALC267,ALC268, ALC269, ALC272, ALC273, ALC887
3. HDMI Device WHQL Support: ATI HDMI Devices
4. OS Supporting: Microsoft WindowsXP, Widnows2000, Vista x86/x64
5. Pack with Microsoft High Definition Audio UAAV1.0a(5013)

Add/Fix

1. Driver:
2. Customizations.
3. Meet Microsoft OEM Ready program requirements.
4. Package: Meet Microsoft OEM Ready program requirements.

Due to the UBER slow servers from Realtek we made a package containg both the XP and Vista drivers, recompressed for a real small download size.

Download - Click here.

SmartFPS.com is a free software to benchmark latest videocards and processors by real world games like Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Unreal Tournament 3, Call Of Duty 2, Battlefield 2, Serious Sam 2, Call Of Juarez, Quake 4, Prey, The Chronicles of Riddick: EFBB and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Just download demo versions of these games for free and click one general button in SmartFPS.com. After benchmark process you are receiving quality performance results in AvgFPS (average number of frames per second) for your PC components like GPU, CPU, RAM and Mainboard.

Download - click here

This driver originates from NVIDIA's developer zone. There's not much info on it other than it's a small update over the recently released WHQL driver.

We have a discussion/feedback thread open on these drivers right here.

A bucket load of GeForce graphics cards are supported though.

Download:

  GeForce ForceWare 178.15 Vista 64-bit
  GeForce ForceWare 178.15 Vista 32-bit

Word on the street is saying that AMD is on schedule with its release schedule of their new 45nm processors. In fact the first samples of their 45nm Shanghai based server processors already have been shipped to OEM customers. Servers based on this CPU will be available this year as originally planned.

The AMD processor under codename Shanghai is designed to compete against the Intel Nehalem processor, especially in the volume two-socket server market.

AMD is not afraid of a new mistake like we've seen with the Barcelona TBL bug and assured that after mess, the validation process was heavily increased to prevent something like that from happening again. The 45nm Shanghai processor has as stated a very small 45nm fab processes. As a result there should be a 35% performance advantage over the last gen 65nm Barcelona processors. AMD will not yet release info on clock-frequencies but claims the chip has 6Mb cache on board and a very friendly TDP of 75 Watt. AMd slipped that they'll also make a low TDP 55W version, yet also 105W SKUs for the brute real force.

Since this is the groundwork for their upcoming desktop 45nm processors, we'll follow it closely.

courtesy of chip-architect

AMD is hinting at new technology show by showing a pre-production version of a Mobility Radeon HD 4000 chipset. Although AMD has yet to publicly discuss the hardware, the company's booth at the Japanese expo contains a clearly identified test bed with the notebook-oriented chipset demonstrating its full hardware Blu-ray video decoding.
The demo unit has a large expansion card and a desktop-class cooler but is believed to be using these only for simplicity's sake in the development phase. Most production notebooks often use custom-designed cooling and embedded graphics that are impractical outside of complete systems.

AMD is believed to be launching the first Mobility Radeon HD 4000 chipsets later this year with basic, mid-range and high-end versions that mirror their equivalents in the current 3000 series.

Western Digital has new GreenPower Caviar hard drives with higher-density platters and larger caches. The upgrades use a smarter seek algorithm and aggressive caching to drop power use by about 20 percent versus the company's regular hard disks. This next update is also about 10 percent faster than earlier Green drives, according to the company's claims, and uses new storage that carries as much as 333GB per platter on the drive as well as 32MB of cache for every model. The new HDDs are more power efficient and faster as well. The 1TB second-gen Caviar Green retails for around $219 but you can also get it in 500GB, 640GB and 750GB capacities.

WD says its new Caviar Green 1TB hard drive has 333GB platters and 32MB of cache, compared to a respective 250GB and 16MB for the old model. Those tweaks reportedly reduce power draw by up to 20% and increase performance by up to 10%. Considering the original remains the most power-efficient 3.5" terabyte hard drive, a 20% drop in power consumption sounds like a big achievement.

With that said, we should point out several caveats. The Caviar Green series uses lower spindle speeds than typical 7,200-RPM drives, which reduces performance. Also, the company's 300GB, 10,000-RPM VelociRaptor actually draws significantly less power than the current terabyte Caviar Green, probably because it's a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" sled.

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