It's quite late to the market, but AMD recently released the non-X SKUs of several processors. Today we look at the AMD Ryzen 5 5600. The processor has a locked multiplier but still is configured at 6 cores and 12 threads. With a base clock of 3.50 and boost speeds up to 4.40GHz, this boxed processor is just 199 EUR, and could be a really good deal for a nice gaming rig.

Read the review here.

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.

It

Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, wrote in an email that Microsoft's upcoming operating system, Windows 7, will not have native Blu-Ray playback support. Despite that, you will be able to burn Blu-Ray discs as an integrated feature though.

This means that you still will be required to buy dedicated software like Power DVD, for example, to watch Blu-Ray movies in Windows 7. On the other hand, OEMs and Blu-Ray drive makers will be able to extend the Windows Media Center, in order to support Blu-Ray playback by means of a codec.

"Blu-Ray support will be provided by PC makers or BRD drive makers. We have new extensibility in media center for those that provide BRD playback to support integrated playback. We do have support for burning BRD data discs," Sinofsky wrote.

Though ECS has no presence on CeBIT they did announce a couple of things on-line. Among them, to much surprise, the first  AMD 880G chipset based motherboards. The board comes with a pair of beefy chipset and MOSFET coolers, being an AM3 board supporting DDR3-1333 memory instead of DDR2/AM2/AM2+.

AMD 880G chipset will form part of the AMD Live! "Pisces" platform.AMD 880G will feature a integrated Radeon HD 3450 (RV620) DX10.1 graphics core, DDR3 support, HyperTransport 3.0, Universal Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2), Hybrid Crossfire with a discrete Radeon HD 3450 graphics core through a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, Display Port/HDMI/DVI/SurroundView support. AMD 880G will be paired up with SB710 Southbridge offering 12 USB ports and 6 SATA ports.

AMD is also touting much on their new OverDrive 3.0 that support AM3 platforms featuring Smart Control that boost clocks on demand, Application Specific Profiles that optimise system settings upon application detection and Hardware Monitoring support with fan control.

HWiNFO32 is a professional hardware information and diagnostic tools supporting latest components, industry technologies and standards. Both tools are targeted to recognize and extract the most possible amount of information about computer's hardware which makes them suitable for users searching for driver updates, computer manufactures, system integrators and technical experts too.

• Fixed reporting of temperatures for ADT7473 sensor on nVidia GPUs.
• Added preserving of sensor settings.
• Added preliminary Jasper Forest support.
• Fixed Poulsbo memory timings.
• Enhanced memory timings for some chipsets.
• Added preliminary Nuvoton W83795G/ADG HW monitor support.
• Updated reporting of PCI Express slots in system.
• Changed reporting of QDF only for ES and SSPEC for Productions parts when possible.
• Improved identification of Yorkfield and Wolfdale-DP reduced-TDP CPUs and Penryn SFF platforms.
• Several other minor updates and bugfixes.

HWInfo can be downloaded from this page.

Sometimes very entertaining products can be the cheapest ones around. Especially for graphics cards this rule applies very often. In the high-end segment you need to have luck to tweak and overclock or pay a premium price for customizations. In the lower-end and budget products we often see the most wicked stuff that is very tweakable and versatile.

Today we review such a product. For 60 bucks you can pick up a HIS Radeon HD 4650 512MB iSilence4, it comes completely passively cooled thanks to a Zalman cooler. Not exactly a gamers dream .. but for HTPC users its just really affordable stuff.

You can click here to read this review.

Numark has announced that its high-end DJ controller, the NS7, will ship worldwide beginning March 24th. The system was designed in collaboration with software-developer Serato Audio Research to works with the ITCH software interface. NS7 features two seven-inch motorized platter controls, each built from aluminum and offering adjustable torque settings. Genuine vinyl records with 45RPM adapters are placed on the slipmats.

A DJ mixer is located between the decks, offering replaceable, digtal VCA crossfaders and line faders along with a variety of rubberized knobs, switches and buttons. Over 100 LEDs and 100 individual controls are available, providing full interaction capabilities with ITCH, while an integrated notebook stand can be used to mount the computer and hold it above the table.

Each deck offers a Serato-style loop section for creating manual and automatic loops, along with an automatic BPM analyzer. Controls include doubling, halving and shift, among others.

The controller integrates a 24-bit digital audio interface with mic and line inputs along with headphone and system outputs. The company claims that the single USB cable carries data between the computer and controller at twice the standard MIDI rate.

The Serato NS 7 carries a retail price of $1600 and an estimated street price of $1300.

Yesterday both Windows Vista Service Pack 2 RC and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 RC have been made available for public download. This build is the same one that was sent to testers last week.

For download links clickedyclick below:

• Five Language Standalone DVD ISO for Windows Server 2008 x86/x64/ia64 and Windows Vista x86/x64
• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x86 version
• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista x64 version
• Windows Server 2008 - Five Language Standalone for ia64-based systems

Known motherboard manufacturer ABit as expected is closing its doors forever.  

Initially abit was to move into the consumer electronics market with products like digital picture frames and mobile internet devices. But then came the economic crisis. ABits parent company USI has now decided to pull abit out of the channel market entirely. Abit's marketing director Thore Welling commented:

After 20 years in the market the abit brand now bids farewell, so it's also time for me now to lock the doors of the marketing department. That's it for good now.

If this information confirms, the whole liquidation of abit should be finished in around a month.