AMD Desktop Trinity on 1st October

The complete line of AMD’s successful Trinity family of APUs will be available on the free market this autumn. Currently the processors can only be bought inside systems sold by big manufacturer such as HP, DELL, Lenovo and others. The Texas based fabless CPU and GPU designer AMD is currently sending all the Trinity APUs it can make to the big hardware companies to sell them in markets with higher margins like the mobile sector. The company is also letting the market get rid of all the Llano CPUs in stock right now and thus allowing its partners to sell these with a decent profit margin instead of forcing them to give deep discounts to sell Llanos in a market invaded by Trinity. The new generation of APUs from AMD is coming...

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20 GeForce GTX 660 Ti Video Cards Technical Details

Nvidia is preparing a full blown attack against AMD at the $300 price point. The weapon used by the Californian company is the GK104-300-KD-A2 28 nm GPU manufactured at TSMC. The strategy seems to be allowing and even encouraging the partners to use all their creativity on custom designed PCBs and cooling systems and using factory overclocked settings. The cards unveiled by the hardware experts from videocardz.com are almost all clocked higher than Nvidia’s own reference design and the ASUS GTX 660 Ti DirectCU II TOP seems to be the champion. The top performing ASUS card is clocked at a default GPU frequency in 3D mode of 1059 MHz and it has an amazing Boost option of 1137 MHz, Videocardz reports. The 2048 MB of memory...

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ASRock Z77 Extreme6/TB4 Gets Quad ThunderBolt Ports

AsRock has been getting more and more serious in the highend motherboard business lately and the addition of high speed ThunderBolt connectivity to some of its premium mainboards will make these even more highend and seriously expensive. We just reported here that Gigabyte has decided to introduce a microATX mainboard with dual TunderBolt ports, but we’ve also unveiled the fact that those two ports raise the price of the device by more than $50. Sure ThunderBolt is a little faster than USB 3.0 and also has various useful features, but when two ports raise the price of a motherboard by more than 50%, most customers should really think if its all worth it. AsRock’s new version of Z77 Extreme6 will be officially called Z77...

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Gigabyte Q1700 is a 17.3” Notebook Powered by AMD Zacate

Gigabyte is one of the world’s largest motherboard manufacturers and we were quite surprised to see the company venture in the UltraBook market some time ago. Sure Gigabyte made notebooks, netbooks and even mobile phones besides motherboards, but getting so serious to build one of the world’s lightest and thinnest UltraBooks was really surprising. The impression the Taiwanese company has left us was that it was getting more serious about the mobile products just like its main competitor, ASUS. We find out today that this is definitely not the case. Gigabyte seems to be dead set on releasing mediocre products that have nothing to differentiate themselves, but absurd specifications, uninteresting features and an absurd price...

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Windows 9 to Be Codenamed Windows Blue

Following the release of Windows 8 to manufacturing, Microsoft is expected to shift its entire focus on the release of the next flavor of the operating system, supposedly set to hit shelves as Windows 9. No official confirmation on the platform’s availability has been provided as of yet, but rumor has it that Microsoft is already underway with the development process. Some of the company’s employees have already updated their social networking profiles to reflect that, yet no specific info on the OS has been provided yet. However, leaked info that emerged over at ithome suggests that the platform will sport the codename of Windows Blue. We already learned that it might be called internally Windows 9 or Windows...

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Eurocom Scorpius Ultra High Performance Notebook

For those who don't know that high-end gaming doesn't really take an absurd amount of resources, Eurocom has created the Scorpius ultra high performance notebook. The company essentially did its best to make the best laptop powerful, regardless of how much buyers will have to pay for it. We may as well get this out of the way: the lowest possible price is $1,793 (1,458 Euro), but dual-GPU graphics and other top-tier parts will cause the tag to soar to $2,857 / 2,324 Euro, possibly more. “The Eurocom Scorpius is an out of this world High Performance Notebook Computer. Like the mythical creature that stung and killed Orion, the EUROCOM Scorpius will take down any competition standing in its way, while allowing gamers to...

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Transcend aXeRam DDR3 Memory Kits

Well-known DRAM and storage manufacturer Transcend has just launched two new DDR3 memory kits. The new sets come with big aluminum heatsinks and can handle more voltage than the reference DDR3 JEDEC specification. Transcend dual-channel memory kits are officially called aXeRam DDR3-2133 2x 4 GB and aXeRam DDR3-2400 2x 8 GB. The former uses a 1.6V DIMM voltage and has 10-11-10-27 latencies while the latter needs 1.65V and has 11-12-11-29 latencies, overclockers.ua reports. Overclockers will surely prefer the DDR3-2400 kit, but even the average user can enjoy some automatic overclocking as both memory kits come with Intel XMP 1.3 support. Both kits use high-quality 8-layer PCBs that are claimed to help with stability...

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Club3D GeForce GT 610 PCI Express x1 Video Card

Traditional AMD video card manufacturing partner has also been manufacturing Nvidia-based cards for a while and today the company is launching a very useful and very cool graphics adapter. The official name of Club3D’s new product is GeForce GT 610 PCI Express X1 and the model number is CGNX-G612LX1. There are numerous computer systems that lack a proper PCI Express x16 expansion slot and Club3D’s new product is the perfect solution to escape from the dreaded performance manifested by the likely low quality Intel IGP. Many users would sometimes want to add more monitors to a system, but although the motherboard has an x16 slot, it doesn’t have a second one. Since almost all PCI Express motherboards have at least one PCI...

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Nvidia Quadro and Tesla Strategy

Fabless GPU and ARM processor designer, American company Nvidia is changing its strategy regarding its professional computing solutions. We’ve reported here about Nvidia’s plans with the Quadro K5000, but now we’ve stumbled upon some new info that describes a likely scenario at the company. There are certainly considerable more servers and workstations that could put a GPU compute card like the TESLA K10 to good use than there are graphics workstations in need of a Quadro K5000 video card. Nvidia practically knows that Tesla has considerably more potential than Quadro and is apparently shifting its focus and concentrating on making this the company’s main professional brand. Of course Quadro has more than a decade of history behind...

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Intel Haswell x86 Processor Core Only Bring a 10% Performance Improvement

The world’s largest CPU designer and manufacturer is working on its next-generation Haswell processor architecture. The company is apparently concentrating on the iGPU part of the new design and somewhat less on the x86 cores. Intel has enjoyed a serious performance advantage over its main x 86 competitors, the fabless Texas-based Advanced Micro Devices, thus the company sees no reason in making a serious x86 performance jump. Therefore, Intel will keep most of its x86 aces up its sleeve and will only trickle out some performance to tempt users to spend money on yet another Intel processor or even the whole platform, Fudzilla reports. On the other hand, on the graphics side, the company is literally quadrupling the number...

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Windows 9 is Already in Process at Microsoft

Windows 8 has RTM’d and is currently getting ready for the grand launch on October 26th this year, but it seems that Microsoft is already looking further away. In fact, it appears that the company has already started to work on the next flavor of Windows, and that it might feature the codename of Windows 9. This info comes from a series of Microsoft employees who have been quick to update their online profiles recently, as Stephen Chapman from MSFTKitchen found out. Some of them are listing Windows 9 as the current project they are involved in, while others are mentioning other names for what appears to be the future Windows release. “Documenting all steps necessary to hand off ownership of the SDK to the Windows...

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Intel Wireless Charging to Arrive on Smartphones Next Year

Intel is reportedly looking into means to pack future smartphones with wireless charging technology, new reports suggest. Through this move, Intel is reportedly looking for means to allow smartphone users to wirelessly charge their devices from ultrabooks without the need to have them placed in a specific position. The company would include ultrabooks with the necessary software and with a transmitter, while offering lower power consumption. The feature, however, is expected to become available only sometime in the second half of the next year, a recent article on DigiTimes reads. The company might not make the wireless charging platform available for broad use, but only inside a small number of handsets. Intel is not...

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