Abee Intros ATX-Ready AS Enclosure DX3

Japanese company Abee may not be the best known of PC makers, but it definitely hasn't been keeping a low profile recently, its latest announcement dealing with, among other things, a model called AS Enclosure DX3.  AS Enclosure DX3 is not the most visually-embellished of PC enclosures, nor the largest or most sophisticated.  Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it can still say that it will keep everything in it running optimally, without having to get the hardware all cramped together.  The whole compactness aspect was already covered by the Acubic M50 HTPC unit after all (read about it here).  The newcomer measures 411 x 219 x 333 mm (16.18 x 8.62 x 13.11 inches) and is a steel-wrought chassis with either black or...

Read more »

FastRa1n 5.0 Promoted as 'Untethered' iOS 5 Jailbreak

FastUnlockiPhone.com, a company that markets and sells alleged iOS jailbreak and unlock solutions, is at it again with a new announcement that their FastRa1n 5.0 can provide an ‘untethered’ jailbreak for those who are rocking the latest iOS from Apple. There is some reason to regard FastUnlockiPhone’s offerings with an ounce of skepticism. First of all, proven jailbreak and unlock solutions are always free. Whether it’s the iPhone Dev Team that developed them, or the code savvy people at Chronic Dev, the tools are NEVER commercialware. FastUnlockiPhone, on the other hand, sells its jailbreak solution. FastRa1n is also potentially nothing more than a repackaged version of one of the aforementioned free tools. I reported on their business...

Read more »

Intel Lowers Prices of Three Sandy Bridge CPUs

Intel has today published an updated price list for its Sandy Bridge processors and, apart from the introduction of the new Core i7-2700K, this also announced lower prices for three of the company's current CPUs. The chips in question are the Pentium G630, Pentium G850, and Core i3-2120 models, all with two processing cores and a 65 Watt TDP. Thanks to the price cuts operated by Intel, the Pentium G630 has now went to the level of the Pentium G620 as it retails for $64 (about 46 Euros), down $11 from its previous $75 (54 Euros) MSRP, while the Pentium G850 has went to the level of its smaller sibling, the G840, since is now priced at $75 US. As far as the Core i3-2120 is concerned, Intel has opted to drop its price down from $138 to $117...

Read more »

AMD FX-6100 and FX-4100 Bulldozer CPUs Arrive in Europe and AMD Develops New Platforms for Ultrabook-Like Laptops

AMD FX-6100 and FX-4100 Bulldozer CPUs Arrive in Europe Almost two weeks after the introduction of AMD's first FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, the FX-6100 and FX-4100 CPUs have now started to make their appearance into stock at various retailers across Europe. Even though officially launched, the chips have been missing from the stores shelves as the Sunnyvale-based chip maker has concentrated its efforts on making available the eight-core FX-8150 and X-8120 processors. This situation will however soon change as SweClockers reports the first batch of FX-6100 and FX-4100 CPUs made its way into German stores, while in Sweden these will arrive sometime later this week. The FX-6100 and FX-4100 pack six and four computing...

Read more »

Thermaltake Readies the Frio Advanced High-End Cooler

Continuing with the tradition, so to speak, of supporting as many CPUs as possible, Thermaltake has created the Frio Advanced, a high-end cooler which, alas, was neither priced nor dated.  Owners of most any contemporary, strong CPU might find use for the new cooler that Thermaltake created.  The company actually issued a whole press release just to announce its impending arrival, even if it didn't give all the specifics.  Indeed, though it is assumed to be soon, the launch date of the Thermaltake Frio Advanced is unknown for now. The same goes for the price.  On the flip side, the company did pretty much describe all the assets of the newcomer in full, from the size and weight to the individual components.  Five...

Read more »

Windows 8 Screen Rotation Design Goals

Because it’s built with next generation form factors in mind, Windows 8 also needs to seamlessly adapt to the way users hold such devices, including tablets / slates.  Microsoft found that testers running Windows 8 would opt to use their next generation device in a way that would best tailor the content to the screen orientation.  As such, the Redmond company optimized the transition mechanism which allowed users to swap landscape and portrait screens.  David Washington, from the Windows user experience team revealed the goals of the landscape and portrait screen orientation:“You can easily rotate your tablet to best suit your task or ergonomic posture. Rotation in Windows is fast and fluid. Windows rotates predictably across the system and apps – keeping the user in control. Developers...

Read more »

Dell Makes Official the XPS 14z Ultra-Thin Laptop

We first got acquainted with Dell's ultra-thin XPS 14z at the IFA 2011 fair in Berlin earlier this year, but now the company has finally announced this new notebook that will start shipping in the US on November 1st . The XPS 14z is actually the second laptop to be released by Dell in its new series of ultra-thin notebooks after the introduction of the XPS 15z. Dell has built this new product range to continue from where Adamo has left off, so it includes a series of design choices meant to make these laptops a lot more compact than their competitors. One of the most important of these is the inclusion of an LG's Shuriken display, which narrows the bezel to the point that the XPS 14z fits inside a chassis the same dimension as that used...

Read more »

Leadtek Outs Custom Cooled GeForce GTX 560 Ti Hurricane

Leadtek has been pretty quiet in the last couple of months, but now the Taiwanese company has gone out of its hiding and announced a new graphics card based on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti design. The card is known as the WinFast GTX 560 Ti Hurricane and it was built in order to feature a high-end custom cooler that was developed in-house by Leadtek. This is designed so that it features a large copper base for the GPU connected to a pair of 8mm cooper heat-pipes which conduct heat to a massive aluminum heatsink. The heatsink spans most of the card and is topped by a pair of 90mm fans specially tweaked to lower the noise emissions of the Hurricane. According to Leadtek, its custom cooler generates only 21dB of noise when running in idle and...

Read more »

Blizzard DOTA Finally Gets Full Details, Screenshots, Video

Blizzard finally revealed to its fans at the BlizzCon event during the weekend the full details on its upcoming Blizzard DOTA release, which aims at bringing together some of the most impressive heroes from Blizzard’s own properties, like Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo, and throwing them one at another in combat. The MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre, kicked off with the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III, has certainly gotten crowded these days, with lots of titles like League of Legends or Heroes of Newerth fighting for supremacy, while big companies like Valve or Blizzard are getting ready to debut their own DOTA releases. After hearing that Valve's own Dota 2 will enter open beta testing soon, Blizzard has also revealed...

Read more »

ECS Shows Off the X79R-AX Black Extreme LGA 2011 Motherboard

Now that we are just three weeks away from the launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processors, motherboard makers are starting to showcase more and more LGA 2011 solutions , the latest to make its appearance being the ECS X79R-AX Black Extreme. The motherboard features the characteristic ECS look and it sport four DIMM slots that are placed around the LGA 2011 socket. These work in a quad-channel mode and support DDR3 speeds of up to 2400MHz, depending on the number of DIMM sockets populated (2400MHz is only supported in dual-channel mode). To the left of the memory sockets, ECS has placed four PCI Express x16 slots, which are driven by the 40 lane PCIe controller integrated inside Sandy Bridge-E processors. Judging from the color coding of...

Read more »

Refreshed MacBook Pro Lineup Leaked and iPad 3 with Redesigned Dock Connector Slated

Refreshed MacBook Pro Lineup Leaked The rumored MacBook Pro refresh is just around the corner, with a proven reliable source now revealing the configurations slated for release as early as this week. Via 9to5mac comes word that Apple is indeed upgrading its Pro line of notebooks. Don’t expect any major overhaul, though. According to the source leaking Apple’s new MacBook Pro configurations, the new 13-inch models will boast slightly higher clocked CPUs at 2.4 GHz dual-core, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive. A slightly more powerful version will ship with a 2.8 GHz dual-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and 750 GB hard drive. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro boasts a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive for an entry-level...

Read more »

Intel Officially Launches Core i7-2700K CPU

Intel kept no secret of the fact that it plans to update its processor portfolio with a new flagship Sandy Bridge part, the Core i7-2700K, and this CPU has now been added to the company's official price list as it began shipping to Intel's partners. Compared to the current top of the line Core i7-2600K, the new Sandy Bridge CPU has a base clock speed of 3.5GHz, which is 100MHz higher than its predecessor. The maximum Turbo Core frequency has also received a small bump as Intel has decided to raise this to 3.9GHz, compared to the 3.8GHz of the 2600K. The rest of the CPU specifications were left unchanged, and the chip includes 8MB of Level 3 cache, Intel HD 3000 graphics with 850/1350MHz clock speeds and a dual-channel DDR3-1333 memory controller,...

Read more »