MSI officially announces the R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC graphics card built on the latest AMD 28nm Radeon HD7950 GPU with PCI Express Gen 3 support. MSI's exclusive Twin Frozr III thermal design features dual 8cm Propeller Blade fans to achieve up to 10?

Carrying the model number GV-R795WF3-3GD Gigabyter introduced the R7950 WindFDorce 3 model. The card comes with a Gigabyte's custom-design WindForce 3 cooling solution.

The heatsink is ventilated by three 80 mm fans. The card is factory overclocked out of the box, the GV-R795WF3-3GD comes with clock speeds of 900 MHz core and 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective) memory. It is priced at US $489.99

The colleagues at TPU found pictures of Swiftech's upcoming Komodo full-coverage waterblock for AMD's Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Pricing and availability is unknown:

Called the Komodo HD 7970, the block confines itself to the size of one expansion slot with an included single-slot bracket. The monolithic black design adds a lot to the aesthetics of the card, including its fittings area. The primary material of the block is nickel-plated copper. The portion of the block over the GPU has a 0.25x0.25 Micro Pin matrix, which maximizes heat dissipation to the coolant. Unlike other full-coverage blocks where a portion of the block that doesn't have flowing coolant makes contact with the VRM, the Komodo HD 7970 has "active" VRM cooling, where the area over the VRM has its own coolant chamber, and is part of the coolant's primary flow.

Reported a couple of times altready, Intel now has ofiically added three new IGP-less Core i5 processors to its official price list.

The chips come with their GPUs disabled and can be identified by the model numbers 2550K, 2450P, and 2380P. That first CPU features a fully unlocked upper multiplier, so it's the one you'll want.

Versus the existing Core i5-2500K, the 2550K offers 100MHz increases in base and Turbo frequencies, bringing the chip up to 3.4GHz with a 3.8GHz Turbo peak. Those speeds match the Core i7-2600K, which offers additional cache and Hyper-Threading support missing from the i5 series. Intel is selling the 2550K at $225

Calling it the largest Android malware infection ever, Security software vendor Symantec has discovered 13 apps from three developers (iApps7, Ogre Games and redmicapps) which are carrying the Android.

Counterclank spyware which is technically a trojan and is a minor modification of Android.Tonclank. Some of these apps have been available on Android Market for at least a month. The malware is capable of receiving remote commands without your knowledge and can steal information from your device. According to Symantec, it has infected between 1 million and 5 million Android devices so far.

AMD today released the little brother of the Radeon HD 7970, the Radeon HD 7950 is now alive and kicking. Guru3D.com has prepared a threefold of articles today covering two retail cards, and a 2/3-way crossfire review including AMD's reference R7950 card. Here is an overview of our articles:

HIS Radeon HD 7950 review

It is time for the second product based of the series 7900 though, the Radeon HD 7950 launches today. AMD took the Tahiti XT GPU sliced away some shader units, clocked it a notch slower and planted it onto a new PCB lined up with a new cooler. Overall the R7950 will not disappoint, good performance, impressive power consumption and great heat and noise levels. But will a 400 EUR pricetag however justify this product ?

Direct URL:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/his-radeon-hd-7950-review/

PowerColor Radeon HD 7950 PCS+ review

PowerColor is the first in our line-up of R7950 reviews with a customized model. It is the PCS version that clocks in at a cool 880 MHz on the graphics core with it's memory clocked default at an effective data rate of 5000 MHZ. Armed witha custom cooler it is silent, and even cooler compared to the reference model.

Direct URL:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/powercolor-radeon-hd-7950-pcs-review/

Radeon HD 7950 Crossfire review 2 and 3-way

We have three Radeon HD 7950 cards in house -- anyone smells Crossfire ? We'll setup these three cards up in multi-GPU mode (two and three-way) clock them standard and test multi-GPU performance -- taking it to the next level, multi-GPU gaming. As if you figured just one card would be interesting, you have no idea what's coming at you with two and three cards. Have a peek at the offering, and then march onward into the review, hihoo Tahiti PRO

Direct URL:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7950-crossfire-review-2-and-3way/

After a year from the release, LuxMark v2.0 has been released.

LuxMark v2.0 includes SLG2 as rendering engine with Metropolis Light Transport, Multiple Importance Sampling, Image reconstruction done on the GPU, support for multiple OpenCL platforms (i.e. Nvidia users can use Intel or AMD CPU device) and many more new features.

The new features rise the complexity of the benchmark of nearly one order of magnitude and it should be able to put some serious stress on the new generation of GPUs. The capability to submit results to a centralise WEB database looks like the most interesting new feature of LuxMark v2.0.

Features

* Open source
* 100% OpenCL
* Cross platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc.)
* Complex/real world code used as GPU computing benchmark
* Support for OpenCL GPUs-only, OpenCL CPUs+GPUs, OpenCL CPUs-only and native CPU-only benchmarking
* Support for Interactive mode
* Easy to run
* Multiple scenes usable as benchmarks

New in LuxMark v2.0:

* Totally new rendering engine based on SLG2 with Metropolis Light Transport, Multiple Importance Sampling, Image reconstruction done on the GPU, ecc;
* Multi-platform OpenCL support;
* 2 new benchmark scenes, for a total of 3 benchmarks with a raising complexity (~200,000, ~500,000, ~2,000,000 triangles);
* Run the benchmark only on the OpenCL devices you selected on the device panel;
* Added the possibility to submit the scored result to a centralised result database

Download

We have three Radeon HD 7950 cards in house -- anyone smells Crossfire ? We'll setup these three cards up in multi-GPU mode (two and three-way) clock them standard and test multi-GPU performance -- taking it to the next level, multi-GPU gaming.

PowerColor is the first in our line-up of R7950 reviews with a customized model. It is the PCS version that clocks in at a cool 880 MHz on the graphics core with it's memory clocked default at an effective data rate of 5000 MHZ. Armed witha custom cooler it is silent, and even cooler compared to the reference model.

It is time for the second product based of the series 7900 though, the Radeon HD 7950 launches today. AMD took the Tahiti XT GPU sliced away some shader units, clocked it a notch slower and planted it onto a new PCB lined up with a new cooler. Overall the R7950 will not disappoint, good performance, impressive power consumption and great heat and noise levels. But will a 400 EUR pricetag however justify this product ?

Each month here at Guru3D.com we feature one of you guys, your PC, your DIY project. It is quite honestly amazing how much detail and dedication you put into an PC, and every now and then it really shows. This months entry shines in an stylish design, once you lay your eyes on it, it will make an impression.

The Rig of the Month January 2012 oozes with style and design, the detail is just intense. Kerekes J

Well, we need to see Ivy bridge first, but with the introduction of Haswell in 2013, Intel reportedly wants to take the video decoding capabilities of its integrated GPUs one step further by adding hardware decoding support for 4K content, as well as a series of new post-processing features.

As VR-Zone reports, the integrated graphics core found inside Haswell is expected to include full MVC and SVC hardware encode and decode, as well as much faster AVC processing.

Both of these features are required for accelerating 4K video playback, which should become a major selling point for Intel

According to unnamed sources gathered by Kotaku, the next-gen Xbox will support Blu-Ray discs as well as DVDs, will be up to eight times as powerful as the current Xbox 360, will feature smaller controllers, and will launch with a new version of the Kinect. That's the good news. The bad news: The console will supposedly not allow gamers to play used games.
Sony's PlayStation 3 currently supports Blu-Ray, which can contain 25 or 50GB of data compared to DVD's 9GB.

But that disc detail could be far less impactful to the next generation of game consoles than the assertion I've heard from one reliable industry source that Microsoft intends to incorporate some sort of anti-used game system as part of their so-called Xbox 720.

It's not clear if that means that the system wouldn't play used games or how such a set-up would work. Obvious approaches I'm theorizing here like linking a copy of a game to a specific Xbox Live account could seemingly be foiled by used-game owners who would keep their system offline. My source wasn't sure how Microsoft intended to implement any anti-used game system in the new machine.

A push in any way by Microsoft against used games would likely be cheered from publishers sick of seeing retailers like GameStop crow about their revenues from the sale of used games. But it could potentially anger consumers who rely on buying cheaply-sold used games or even pass games to relatives or friends.

One source familiar with Microsoft's plans for the new Xbox said Microsoft plans to ship their new Xbox with a new version of its red-hot Kinect hands-free sensor system. The new Kinect would contain an on-board processor, a feature originally intended for the first Kinect. That processor would enable a new Kinect to more effectively detect users' motions.

The Leo demo showcases a real-time, DirectX 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used -- all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage.

Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface.

 Finally, the lighting in this demo is physically based in that it is fully HDR and the material and reflection models take advantage of the ALU power of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPU to calculate physically accurate light and surface interactions (multiple BRDF equations, realistic use of index of refraction, absorption based on wavelength for metals, etc).

Download here

Intel is making good progress with next year

ASUS is working on a series of notebooks with integrated Kinect functionality. The Daily reports ASUS has created Kinect-enabled notebooks:

We had a chance to check out a pair of prototypes incorporating Kinect sensors over the last few days. The devices, which at first glance appear to be Asus netbooks running Windows 8, feature an array of small sensors stretching over the top of the screen where the webcam would normally be. At the bottom of the display is a set of what appear to be LEDs.

A source at Microsoft has confirmed that the devices are indeed official prototypes of laptops featuring a Kinect sensor. In terms of functionality, there are hundreds of different ways that motion control could be leveraged in a portable. Gaming has the most obvious applications, but a Kinect-enabled laptop could also toggle between programs with the wave of a hand, or media controls could be tweaked with the wag of a finger. What

Power Ethernet reveals the PE Socket, a new Powerline networking product that has been integrated directly into an electrical socket. The PE Socket features one power socket and four Ethernet network ports in a single wall outlet. The product is currently only available in the UK, and pricing is pretty high at

Google has published Google Earth 6.2. This new release offers a seamless globe, as the search giant devised a way to harmonize aerial photography taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. The new rendering method delivers a harmonious landscape rather than a stitchery patchwork of different images.

Additionally, Google Earth 6.2 also offers new Google+ features and search improvements. Full details at the Google Blog.
The Google Earth globe is made from a mosaic of satellite and aerial photographs taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. Because of this variance, views of the Earth from high altitude can sometimes appear patchy.

Today, we