Men Free Blog

Alienware has currently stuffed NVIDIA’s top-end GTX 280 graphics card to its Area-51 desktop, but if that is not your thing, you can rest insured overly association is now presenting the high-end luxuries of ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 as well. That option, that Alienware helpfully reminds us provides 2.4 teraflops of graphics power, is accessible in the company’s Area-51, Area-51 ALX, and Aurora desktops, every of that furthermore extend the still pricier opportunity of double HD 4870 X2 cards in a CrossFireX configuration. To go for overly latter bit of excess, however, you will too hold to bump the fuel provide up to a thorough 1,200 watts, notwithstanding we are prophesizing such a will not be too even of a uneasiness for any individual given anticipated presently route.

As if the total defective NVIDIA GPU crisis couldn’t get any a good amount confusing, The Inquirer is now reporting the the original batch of bad GPUs may be far of the end of NVIDIA’s problems. Apparently, five unspecified team partners are now alleging the they’re seeing G92 and G94 chips anticipated bad at “high rates” as well, and in both desktop and laptop cards no less. That includes 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS graphics cards, “several mobile flavors” of the 8800, “most” of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants, all of that are established on the G92. As for the G94, it turns out the clearly card affected is the 9600GT. Of course, none of the present is approximately as set in stone as the original lot of problems, but we hold a sneaking suspicion currently will not be go on we hear up it.

NVIDIA’s so much pushing the GPU-as-CPU angle at SIGGRAPH currently year — we have currently witnessed the PhysX and CUDA-powered GeForce Power Pack for consumers, and the firm is too updating the Quadro Plex chain of Residual co-processors for workstation customers. The new Quadro Plex 2200 D2, calculated for sizeable datasets and models, manages information in two Quadro FX 5800 GPUs (totalling 480 CUDA cores) and 8GB of RAM, additonally the Quadro Plex 2100 D2 is optimized for substantial multidisplay rigs investing in one Quadro FX 4700 GPUs and substantiation for up to eight monitors. Sounds fun — and we are predicting the families who can justify the $10,500 appearing market value for these types of rigs imagine so too.

There are more inexpensive computers out there, and still dwindled computers out there, but the ASUS Eee Box looks as if it’s to strike a similar chord to who of its laptop counterpart — firm minimalism, easily a dash of design sense, and a lovable costs point. J&R has began marketing a $350 version the computer in the States, comprehensive providing Windows XP, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, WiFi, memory card reader, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. We’re acutely to the prospect of quick-boot Express Gate Linux tomfoolery, providing a seven instant boot minute all that is keeping us according to web browsing, Skype and IM — oh, and getting one. Black and grey versions are obtainable now.

NVIDIA isn’t joking around when it says it’s after a dominant position in the consumer tech industry, and it’s apparently willing to take some aggressive steps to get there — like totally revamping its product lines. Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, NVIDIA veep Roy Taylor (the same guy who said Intel was “dead”, you remember him), said that his company needed to “simplify the product line for consumers,” and that if NVIDIA is going to “widen our appeal, there’s no doubt we have to solve that problem.” No specific plans were offered, but might we suggest a moratorium on the random-numbers-and-letters product-naming scheme? Just a thought.

Read

AMD may be busy sorting out issues with its quad-core Phenoms and hard at work on “completely different” chip architectures, but that isn’t stopping the company from aggressively updating its roadmap, announcing today plans for 6- and 12-core server-grade Opterons. Both the new 6-core chip, codenamed Sao Paulo, and the 12-core unit, codenamed Magny-Cours, are based on a brand-new platform called “Maranello,” and slotting in to replace the planned 8-core Barcelona chip, which appears to have been canceled. According to AMD, 12-core chips are easier to manufacture, so it’s going to skip over 8-core chips and go straight to the good stuff. That must be news to Intel, which is planning on shipping 8-core Nehalem chips later this year, and will probably then hold the coveted “number-of-cores” crown until AMD releases the 12-core chips in 2010. There’s no word on whether any of these chips can make these processor roadmaps comprehensible or even chronological, but we can dream, can’t we?

[Via TG Daily]

Read

It looks like a group of researchers at UC Berkeley have come up with a rather unique way of solving the problem of getting supercomputers past the processing power / energy consumption barrier, with them now touting the possibility of using millions of low-power embedded microprocessors instead of conventional server processors. That tantalizing prospect has apparently already lead to a deal with Tensilica Inc, which will provide the Berkeley researchers with some of its Xtensa LX extensible processor cores to use as the “basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design.” Ultimately, the researchers say they could one day build a massive supercomputer consisting of 20 million embedded microprocessors at a cost of $75 million, which they say would have a power consumption of less than 4 megawatts and a peak performance of 200 petaflops. That, they say, would be enough for it to create climate models at 1-kilometer scale or, as the researchers put it, more than 1,000 times more powerful than anything available today.

[Via TG Daily]

Read

At last the moment you’ve been waiting for. Microsoft wants to hit your version of Windows with an update, and this time you don’t have to go rummaging around the internet to find it: just fire up Windows Update and let Microsoft do all the work. After a few false starts XP users get the much-anticipated SP3 update, which promises speed boosts and some of the fancy security features found in Vista. If you’re a Vista user you’re also in luck, since Microsoft has restarted its Vista SP1 distribution after some compatibility problems with Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Sounds like a party.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read

Intel has been boasting of DirectX 10 support for its various integrated graphics options for some time now, but it’s only just recently gotten around to actually releasing a Vista driver that brings its GM965 and G35 Express chipsets up to speed. Of course, NVIDIA just couldn’t help itself from getting a few (more) digs in at Intel’s expense, and it’s now kindly provided a few benchmarks to show just how badly Intel’s integrated DirectX 10 solution stacks up against the bleeding-edge DirectX 10-ready games it now ostensibly supports. They couldn’t find a single game that was able to crank out more than 5 fps, even at a lowly 1280 x 1024 resolution and with the usual graphics intensive settings turned off. Then again, 4.4 fps in Crysis is pretty much par for the course.

Read - Crave, “Intel updates graphics with multimedia capabilities”
Read - Hardware Secrets, “Are Intel chipsets really capable of running DirectX 10 games?”

Do you absolutely love Gateway desktops? If you said yes, prepare to be seriously stoked. The company is releasing a slew of new systems this week, ranging from cheapos starter to pretty heavily equipped gaming / multimedia models. We’ve got all the info that’s fit to print (and frankly, some that isn’t), and we’ve rounded up the basic specs and features after the break. Enjoy!

FX7026

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 CPU Overclocked NVIDIA 8800GT graphics chipset 4GB of RAM 640GB hard drive $1,099.99 Available at retail locations
GT5670, GT5674, GT5676 and GT5678

AMD Phenom quad core, or triple core processors 3GB or 4GB of RAM 320GB to 750GB hard drive capacities NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE or ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics chipsets $549.99 to $849.99 Available at retail locations
FX541

NVIDIA SLI-capable motherboard Dual PCIe x16 slots with SLI support $1,199.99 Available online
FX541XT

Factory overclocked CPU
NVIDIA SLI-capable motherboard Dual NVIDIA 8800 GT factory overclocked video cards in SLI mode $3,499.99 Available online
DX442

Intel Pentium Dual-Core, Intel Core 2 Duo, or Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Intel G33 chipset with GMA X3100 Graphics 2GB or 3GB of RAM 320GB or 500GB hard drives $549.99 to $999.99 Available online

Read