Intel NUC 13 represents a consolidated approach to PC computing by deviating from traditional pre-fabricated models. This compact yet efficient computing solution upholds performance standards while offering the added convenience of a small form factor.

Read the review here.

Here you can download the new ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Windows XP 32-bit 

Highlights of the Catalyst 8.6 Windows release include:

• 3DMark Vantage: Performance increases between 10% to 15% across the ATI Radeon

Today a review on BFG's GeForce GTX 280 1024MB OC edition. It had to go something like this; the minute BFG finished designing this product they got all giddily and figured .. ooh we gotta send Guru3D one. Sure thing, hey bring it on.

So a couple of days ago, prior to the actual GTX 200 series product launch, we received that OC model from BFG. BFG figured, hey for the same launch price we can introduce a slightly overclocked version, fire off a life-time warranty at it and slap an OC label on there.

Read the full review here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/bfg-geforce-gtx-280-oc-edition-review/

GeForce GTX 280 Dual and Triple SLI

Today ladies and gentlemen we'll not spend 650,- USD on a graphics card .. no kind Sir, we'll put down 1300 USD on the table and see what two of these cards can achieve performance wise. Expensive ? Yeah, Stupid ? yeah, ... Guru? Yeah ... kick'ass man.

And just for the sake of it, let's spend 2 grand on GPUs to see what that can bring us. We live and breathe for this stuff. So sure, we'll do a threesome with tree-way SLI as well.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-sli-triple-review-test/

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 review

Today Guru3D brings you a review and test on the GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA launches this new flagship along with the GeForce GTX 260. In this review you can read all you need to know about them. And yes, the rumor was right; 1.4 Billion transistors slapped onto a piece of silicon. Crazy, but oh so much fun. We finally found a product that can play Crysis at a decent resolution with high-image quality settings.

Be sure to check out the review, which you can find right here:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

Nvidia Folding @ Home Client BETA Released

Berberg has anounced that the client has been released as BETA.

If you could, do fold for The Guru of 3D (69411). Do bear in mind, it is a beta and not yet officially supported.

Download the GPU client here: click

We're happy to roll out the beta nVidia client, it's a nice beta, and so here we go...

First and before you do anything else, LOOK OVER THE FAQ. Lots of important things in there that you'll need to know if you do anything beyond run the installer and run it.

Drivers
You MUST use the 174.55 version of the drivers for now. You do not need the other files, just the drivers.

Known bugs:
It's a beta, and yes we meant that, not like Google but like software engineers - expect glitches and updates. The main thing is that the viewer will not work, as we're in the middle of changing how the live coordinates get to the viewer. Other then that, visit our nVidia beta Forum to see what's happening.

Download: 6.12 beta 6

 

GeForce GTX 280 Dual and Triple SLI - tested and reviewed

Today ladies and gentlemen we'll not spend 650,- USD on a graphics card .. no kind Sir, we'll put down 1300 USD on the table and see what two of these cards can achieve performance wise. Expensive ? Yeah, Stupid ? yeah, ... Guru? Yeah ... kick'ass man.

And just for the sake of it, let's spend 2 grand on GPUs to see what that can bring us. We live and breathe for this stuff. So sure, we'll do a threesome with tree-way SLI as well.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-sli-triple-review-test/

A day later than usual as I was on a small trip, but during the GeForce GTX launch a lot of board-parners issued press releases announcing them. Here's a small excerpt of some of them in random order:

BFG Technology GeForce GTX 260 & 280 (watercooled)

Next to the regular models, the BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC 1GB graphics card with ThermoIntelligence water cooling solution offers exceptional thermal performance in a single slot design. Co-developed by BFG and Danger Den, the ThermoIntelligence custom copper water block is totally silent and allows the GTX 280 GPU to be factory overclocked to the highest stable level

The video chipset maker doesn't provide exact details of the scenes, which include a robot attack in a lifelike city and a scorpion near a desert home, but cites them as thresholds that will let movie makers potentially release titles on computers or simply speed up production work. As camera angles can change in real time, a computer version of a movie could let users pick their view of a scene, while cinematographers for traditional videos can get a scene right on the first take by choosing the camera angles and actions while live, AMD argues. Games should also benefit by recreating scenes from some movies almost shot-for-shot.

No clues are given as to the release date of consumer hardware capable of supporting the level of visual effects shown in the Cinema 2.0 presentation, though AMD confirms that the chipsets will appear in ATI Radeon HD video cards. Leaks point to an initial release of the Radeon HD 4800 series using the chipset in late June.

We have a small movie, click here.

The Khronos Group late yesterday established a new alliance between vendors that could see standards for high performance computing such as OpenCL gain a foothold across many operating systems and hardware platforms. Called the Computer Working Group, the team includes graphics rivals 3DLabs, AMD, and NVIDIA, processor makers such as ARM, Freescale, Intel, and Qualcomm, and end product manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia, all of whom hope to create and maintain genuinely open and royalty-free standards for using newer graphics hardware to process very demanding compute tasks.

The Working Group isn't limited to a specific standard but is likely to start with the OpenCL standard expected to appear in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The format is now known to have been proposed by Apple and would let developers tap into both the unused resources for e video chipset as well as the multiple cores of a standard CPU to improve not just business tasks but also more common uses. A fast-enough system using OpenCL could accelerate physics in games or use it to boost image processing speeds, Khronos says.

The move potentially sets up OpenCL as a true standard and could give Macs and mainstream PCs access both to the inbuilt general computing performance of existing video chipsets as well as to imminent graphics and computing cards that are specifically tailored to these tasks. Both NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series and AMD's still unofficial Radeon HD 4800 will both explicitly support non-video processing but are currently tied to proprietary languages that limit the incentive to accelerate specialized code.

OpenCL also potentially broadens the usefulness and operating system support of both AMD's FireStream and NVIDIA's Tesla add-in cards and servers, both of which transform graphics chipsets entirely into dedicated processors for workstation and supercomputer-level tasks.

While Khronos has not said if or when it expects OpenCL to be ratified as a standard by the members of the Computer Working Group, Apple itself plans to launch Snow Leopard in mid-2009 and effectively kick off public accessibility for the technology.

Transcend today released its all-new high speed 64GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk (SSD) for consumer electronics as well as industrial systems and military applications. Transcend

With each launch of a major new GPU, NVIDIA will release a technology demo which is designed to showcase the power of its new graphics chips. It creates some early excitement for their upcoming product.

Check this one out, one of the best tech demo's ever made.

Download - Click here

Japanese researchers have put another dent in Quantum cryptograpy's reputation as the final word in secure communications.

Transmissions sent using the technique are protected from eavesdroppers by the fundamental rules of quantum physics, at least in theory.n practice, implementation weaknesses can leave a narrow door for attackers, and Japanese boffins have developed an idea for a quantum eavesdropping device that can exploit one such weakness.

Quantum cryptography is designed to allow users to exchange secret keys. The polarisation of individual light photons determines one bit of a key. The rules of quantum mechanics mean that any attempt to intercept this data irreversibly alters it.

Because of this effect, any attempt to eavesdrop a key would be detected as a unacceptably noisy communications path.

The loophole exploited by Japanese boffins is that it might be possible to make a partial copy of a quantum key without tripping an alert that a communications path has been compromised. This partial copy might be used in subsequent cryptoanalysis. The technique relies on constructing an optical cloning circuit and a measuring device, as explained in a paper by the researchers here (pdf).

Boffins led by Yuta Okubo at the University of Tskuba in Japan have not yet built a device that implements the approach. Nonetheless the research is a concern for banks and government agencies that bought quantum cryptography systems in the belief they were inherently secure.

The Japanese research follows an earlier study by boffins in Sweden examining another practical shortcoming with quantum cryptography systems. As previously reported, the weakness identified by the Swedish team involved shortcomings in how systems verify that the content of a message has not been altered in transit.

Are governments trying to instigate fear for more control or what is going here? (imo)

Whitehall was left combing its season ticket loan records this weekend as another set of top secret papers did the rounds of the 5.45pm from Waterloo.

Just days after a Cabinet Office worker left a stack of top secret anti-terrorist papers

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 review

Today Guru3D brings you a review and test on the GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA launches this new flagship along with the GeForce GTX 260. In this review you can read all you need to know about them. And yes, the rumor was right; 1.4 Billion transistors slapped onto a piece of silicon. Crazy, but oh so much fun. We finally found a product that can play Crysis at a decent resolution with high-image quality settings.

Be sure to check out the review, which you can find right here:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-280-review-test/

• Ethernet Driver (v67.80) WHQL
• SATAIDE Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
• SATARAID Driver (v10.3.0.21) WHQL
• RAIDTOOL Application (v10.3.0.21)
• SMU Driver (v1.45) WHQL
• SMBus Driver (v4.64) WHQL
• Installer (v5.93)

Download :

  nForce Driver 15.17 - XP 32-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - XP 64-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - Vista 64-bit
  nForce Driver 15.17 - Vista 32-bit

Thanks go out to forum visitor Applejack who reported the new updates. We have a discussion thread open on these drivers right here.

AMD today introduced its next-generation stream processor, the AMD FireStream 9250 at the International Supercomputing Conference. AMD FireStream 9250 is specifically designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC), mainstream and consumer applications. AMD FireStream 9250 breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance. It occupies a single PCI slot, for unmatched density and with power consumption of less than 150 watts; the AMD FireStream 9250 delivers an unprecedented rate of performance per watt efficiency with up to eight gigaflops per watt. The AMD FireStream 9250 stream processor includes a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation delivering more than 200 gigaflops, building on the capabilities of the earlier AMD FireStream 9170, the industry

Auzentech reveals today its non-downsampling, HDMI 1.3-native, PCI express audio combo card: Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater 7.1. The Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater 7.1 accepts video from either an internal or external connection, mixes it with digital audio, and outputs the combined video and lossless multichannel audio via a single HDMI

Guru3D - Driver Sweeper is a fast tool to remove driver leftovers from your system. Driver Sweeper is very easy to use. You only have to select the drivers you want to clean.

The best way to clean drivers is to first uninstall the drivers using the official uninstallers, reboot in Safe Mode and run Guru3D - Driver Sweeper. However, rebooting and not going into Safe Mode also works, but can cause some files not to be cleaned.

What can it be used for ?
The current supported drivers are NVIDIA (Display and Chipset), ATI (Display), Creative (Sound), Ageia (PhysX), MMouse and Realtek (Sound).

All the settings are saved in an ini file. Nothing is created in the registry, so it's possible to use it as a portable program. Log files can be saved to the harddisk and viewed as well. You can find the logs under the Tools menu.

System requirements:
The Guru3D - Driver Sweeper is fully tested on Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported.

More info and revision history can be found here:

• Official Guru3D - Driver Sweeper homepage click here.
• Official Guru3D - Driver Sweeper forums click here.

Download:

• Guru3D - Driver Sweeper (Setup)
• Guru3D - Driver Sweeper (no installer)