Radeon X1650GT: a bargain?

ATI releases more GPUs using 80 nm fabrication process. The manufacturer will announce soon the Radeon X1650GT based on RV560. The product will be right between the Radeon X1650Pro and X1650XT. Compared to the latter, the Core/memory duo is clocked at 575MHz/675MHz instead of 450MHz/600MHz.

Even if it isn’t extremely powerful, the MSRP of $75 could be really interesting especially thanks to the pretty similar memory frequency (-11%) and the possibilities of core overclocking. Now, we will have to find out whether if the number of units will be identical to the higher end version. FYI, the price of the Radeon X1650XT is around 135€.

Quadro FX 4600 and FX 5600

Today, Nvidia announced the release of professional Quadro FX 4600 and Quadro FX 5600 cards based on G80 (already equipping the GeForce 8800).

The Quadro FX 5600 is clocked at 600/800 MHz, instead of 575/900 MHz for the 8800 GTX. Memory is notably slower and the bandwidth is reduced to 76.8 GB/s. The counterpart is that the memory is two times bigger (1.5GB)!

The Quadro FX4600 is the workstation equivalent of the GeForce 8800 GTS but unlike the latter the memory interface is 384 bit instead of 320 bits. Memory bandwidth will be comparable at 57.6 GB /s (instead of 59.6 GB /s). Memory and core frequencies will be respectively 600 MHz and 500 MHz.

As usual, the cards will have specific drivers for 3D pro software and this explains the price of $2999 and $1995. They will be integrated and distributed in Europe and in the US by the usual partners: HP, Dell, IBM, Sun and PNY Technologies. NVIDIA also published a couple of benchmarks with Viewperf in this page.

Fujitsu Announces World's First 160GB 7200RPM SATA Notebook HDD

Fujitsu has unveiled the world's first 160GB 7200RPM SATA hard disk drive (HDD) for notebook computers. The new MHW2160BJ notebook HDD will be available for high-performance notebooks beginning in May of this year.

The 2.5" HDD features a SATA 3.0Gb/s interface and has best-in-class acoustic levels of 2.5 bels at idle. The drive also sips power and only consumes 2.3 watts or less when reading/writing data.

2.5" notebook HDDs currently max out at 200GB and are only available with a spindle speed 4200RPM. Likewise, 7200RPM hard drives until now have topped out at 100GB. Fujitsu's new 160GB 7200RPM HDD strikes a nice balance between both extremes. Pricing, which is sure to be extravagant, has not yet been announced.

Acer : 22'', 2 ms to be released soon

End of March, Acer will release the AL2251WA, the first 22" of the Gamer line. The manufacturer announced that it will feature a TN 2ms CrystalBright panel. This means that the panel will be glossy, have vivid colors and will reflect light sources in the room.

Acer's current MSRP will be a little over 400€ but it isn’t definitive. If the monitor is released at this price, it will probably have some difficulties to compete with the Samsung SyncMaster 226BW. This newly released LCD display has a mat panel and is priced below 400 euros.

Asus, Samsung and Acer have all released 22" monitors with response time of 2ms. 22" are getting faster and this will motivate those who haven't yet fallen for this new diagonal because of the afterglow risk. We can also reasonably hope that the two monitors will have better color adjustments than the Asus which rendering was particularly terrible.

Forceware 101.41 for Vista : SLI

More than one month after the release of Windows Vista, Nvidia finally releases official drivers (which are still in a beta version) supporting SLI with GeForce 7 (they also makes it possible for the GeForce 7950 GX2 to provide correct performances). The list of issues corrected is quite long and some of the options, such as SLI antialiasing, aren’t yet implemented. In other words, even if drivers are improved, there is still a lot of work to do. To download the 32 bit version, go to this page and for the 64 bit, go to this one.

HP printers : WiFi for everyone

HP releases two new middle range inkjet printers: the Deskjet 6940, 129 € and the Deskjet 6980, 179€.

The two of them have USB, network interfaces and the D6980 is WiFi compliant (802.11g/b). Print rates announced are very high: 36 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white and 27 ppm in color.

The two models print photos at the standard 4"x6" and panoramic format (up to 215 x 615 mm) with or without white border.

They are Windows, 98 SE, Me, 2000 Professional, XP and Macintosh Mac OS X v10.2, 10.3 and ulterior versions compatible.

Seagate: 16 million PMR hard drives sold

If Maxtor started demonstrating PMR technology ((Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) three years and a half ago (news in French), the technology only became massively available in our computers in 2006. Seagate (who in the meantime acquired Maxtor) announced to have sold 16 million PMR hard drives since the introduction of the Momentus 5400.3 2.5", first hard drive of the company using this technology, in December 2005.

Since that date, the market leader made PRM available for entire product line. According to an Analyst of iSuppli, it will represent 75% of the production by the end of the year.

PMR reduces the surface occupied by each byte present on the platters by positioning them vertically instead of horizontally. This increases the number of bits per platter. Beside the density increase, it also leads to higher performances.

Athlon 64 EE 65nm: 45 Watts yes, but...

Additionally to the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ announcement, AMD unveiled two new low power consumption processors: the Athlon 64 3500+ EE and 3800+ EE. Respectively clocked at 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz, they use 65 nm fabrications process, have a TDP of 45 watts but only one core and 512KB of L2 cache. Prices for 1000 units will be of $88 for the 3500+ EE and $93 for the 3800+ EE. An important point to note is that AMD’s product line already includes an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and an Athlon 64 3500+ with a TDP of 35 Watts. However, their fabrication process is 90 nm, they are only available in very small quantities and despite the smaller fabrication process AMD couldn’t reach the same level of dissipation.

Four 45 nm factories for Intel in 2008

Today, Intel announced that it will invest $1 billion to $1.5 billion in its Rio Rancho site to retool Fab 11X for production on Intel's next generation 45 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process. Once the transition will be completed, Fab 11X will be the company's fourth factory scheduled to use the 45nm process.

Intel’s current production of 45nm products is done at the Oregon development Fab D1D but the company is currently building two other factories, the Fab 32 in Chandler, Arizona and the Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel. Investments are respectively of $3 and $3.5 billion and they will begin production end of 2007 and during the first quarter 2008.

Intel will release Core 2 processors using 45 nm process in the end of the year, but mass availability will be logically in the beginning of 2008.

Radeon X1950 Pro Silence Edition

PowerColor will release soon a Radeon X1950 Pro Silence Edition. For this new version, the subsidiary of TUL has replaced the radiator/fan duo by a passive and rather impressive Artic Cooling Accelero S2 dissipation system based on four heat pipes. An interesting fact, is that Artic Cooling doesn’t speak of the Accelero S2 / X1950 combination on their website and is limited to the X1650. PowerColor has chosen standard frequencies, 575 MHz GPU and 690 MHz GDDR3 memory (256MB). Temperature reached will be a reasonable 63°C and of course a correctly ventilated tower will be required .