Tech News
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ASUS RoG Maximus IV Extreme (P67) Motherboard Review @ HardwareHeaven
Published: Thursday, January 13, 2011 | By: DeanAsus has just released its newest high end P67 board. The offerings are plentiful, from a free vantage key, to the many ways of adjusting the board. They even throw in an iPod/Pad app and Bluetooth. I wonder if they have a blackberry interface for that yet?
Last week we took our first look at Intel's new Sandy Bridge platform and were very impressed by the CPUs. Intel had also created an impressive board in the form of their DP67BG motherboard but as always there are motherboard manufacturers ready at launch to push Intel's chipset into a whole different league of features and performance.
Today we have one of the first high end P67 based boards on our test bench. With their Maximus IV Extreme ASUS hope to deliver a board which exceeds anything else on the market and we will be testing it in a selection of synthetic and real world tests.....From enticing goodies, to multiple ways of controlling the board, it would seem it’s a solid design. It boasts scores surpassing previously reviewed Intel P67 boards to date. Plus you get the chance to say “There’s an App for that”.
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Intel To Pay NVIDIA Technology Licensing Fees of $1.5 Billion
Published: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 | By: DennisOk so this is rather un-expected and extremely good for stockholders. Not only does Intel and nVidia agree to drop all legal disputes but over the next 6 years Intel will be paying nVidia to use their technology.
For the future use of NVIDIA’s technology, Intel will pay NVIDIA an aggregate of $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual installments, beginning Jan. 18, 2011. NVIDIA and Intel have also agreed to drop all outstanding legal disputes between them.
“This agreement signals a new era for NVIDIA,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s president and chief executive officer. “Our cross license with Intel reflects the substantial value of our visual and parallel computing technologies. It also underscores the importance of our inventions to the future of personal computing, as well as the expanding markets for mobile and cloud computing.”So what does this mean? Based on what I am reading it means that nVidia is once again open to create chipsets using Intel technology along with anything else Intel has a patent on. Likewise it means Intel can integrate SLI technology into their chipsets and use technologies related to GPU technology in their products.
That might be an over simplification but considering that Intel is willing to pay for this six year cross-licensing agreement means there is something nVidia has that they really want. -
OCZ to Quickly Exit DRAM Market, Focus on SSDs - Daily Tech
Published: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 | By: DennisThe title of this news posting does grab your attention, however OCZ didn't give any indication they were going to exit the DRAM market, heck they had 3 new memory products on display during CES.
We still have some commitment on the memory side moving forward and will continue with certain SKUs for a period of time, but the amount of memory sales are going to be non-material to our overall business," said OCZ CMO Alex Mei in a phone interview with DailyTech
Should be interesting to see how all of this pans out.
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Sapphire Pure Black Motherboards - X58 and P67A
Published: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 | By: DennisDuring CES 2011 we were invited to check out the latest motherboards from Sapphire. Normally this wouldn't be anything to special however this time was different. Instead of a mainstream style AMD based system we were presented with two enthusaist friendly boards based on the Intel X58 and P67A chipsets.
We don't have a full set of specs yet, but based on what we have seen these should be perfect for the high end gaming looking to take full advantage of multi GPU configurations.
Be sure to check out the following blog post for more details
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CES 2011 sees a big boost in Attendance.
Published: Monday, January 10, 2011 | By: DennisAnother CES has come and gone and the Ninjalane report card? Well let's say the whole experience was eye opening and very helpful. I set out to get answers to some difficult questions and instead of sugar coating everything I told people how it was. And guess what? It worked. I got some good info from everyone and made some better friends along the way.
The 2011 CES was supposed to be a lack luster collection of exhibitors and record lows in terms of overall visitors. In fact there were upwards of 140k people visiting the LVCC this year which caused a multitude of transportation issues and extremely long lines.
Was this good for the show? I think so.
In other good news the CES event dates are being moved a week and forward 2 days so it will no longer occur over the weekend. This will be good since finding a hotel is always more difficult over the weekend and shouldn't impact attendance on the last day as people are hurrying out to catch flights home.Furthermore, we're being hit with even more amazing news from the show floor: the official show dates for 2012. Rather than pushing CES up against a pair of holidays in Christmas and New Year's Day, the Consumer Electronics Association has finally seen fit to bump things forward a week. CES 2012 will officially be held January 10th through 13th, and we're guessing that most of the press events will start on the 8th or 9th
The schedule change should be good for everyone, of course that only leaves one day for pre-show press events but I have never been a fan of those since they tend to be ALL over the place.
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CES 2001 Starts Today
Published: Thursday, January 6, 2011 | By: DennisIn case anyone has been under a rock for the past week CES 2001 starts today.
Keep watch here for news and such from the event, I normally do daily write-ups from the show however this time around I'm going to try and focus on the highlights (that I thought were interesting) and then later post photo blogs of the other stuff I saw sometime later.
Twill be a little different but should still provide you with some additional info that may or may not have been posted elsewhere.
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Gigabyte G1 Killer - CES 2011 Press Event
Published: Thursday, January 6, 2011 | By: DennisI attended the Gigabyte Pre-CES press conference tonight and was pleased to see they finally unveiled the new line of high end gaming motherboards dubbed the G1 Killer. It is actually unclear as to why they called the series G1 however the "Killer" part is comprised of two parts. First they wanted to give the board a powerful name and "Killer" seemed like a good place to start. Each of the three skews follows a "killer" theme such as "Assassin", "Sniper", and "Guerrilla". The second part comes from the network PHY they used to replace the typical Gigabit controller. To help increase throughput and gaming performance they are using the E2100 controller from Bigfoot networks. Yes, that means there is a Killer NIC on board, complete with buffer memory.
Other cool items found on these boards, Multi GPU support, "real" Creative audio chips, and smart fan headers for better cooling.
While the board does look super cool you have to wonder, did they choose the old EVGA colors on purpose or did it just happen that way.
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ASUS & MSI at CES @ Techgage
Published: Wednesday, January 5, 2011 | By: DennisQuite a few hardware media were at both the ASUS and MSI press conferences, it seems to be the normal thing. Here is what Techgage took away from the events.
At a press conference held well before the official CES launch, ASUS unveiled four new Eee models, all of which are touch-enabled and can be considered "tablets". These include the feature-rich and powerful "Eee Slate" 12.1-inch, the Eee Pad Transformer (a personal favorite), the super small Eee Pad MeMo and also the Eee Pad Slider.
At its pre-CES press conference, MSI touted its huge line-up of P67 motherboards that support Intel's brand-new Sandy Bridge processors, and it also tackled its notebook line-up that looks to cover every budget and need. Of course, we were also filled in on what MSI believes sets itself apart, so read on to see what we saw at the conference.
I was actually at both events yesterday, the ASUS Slate is of great interest to me, finally there is a tablet PC small enough to carry around, big enough to be useful in a business capacity and powerful enough to actually do work.
MSI had some great products on display both in terms of motherboards and video cards; we'll get a closer look at all them later this week.
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CES Pre-Show Day 1 - ASUS Slate Tablet PC
Published: Wednesday, January 5, 2011 | By: DennisCES doesn't officially open for 2 days but there are plenty of events taking place. Its like a show before the show and given that it is almost impossible to see "everything" on display at CES it makes sense to have pre-conferences to help spread the word.
My first stop was an ASUS press conference where they showed off some of their new products complete with live demonstrations. The hottest item there was the new EeePC Slate. As the name suggests it is a tablet PC but instead of running some wimpy processor this thing comes with a Core i5 and reacts to both stylus and finger commands.
The demo consisted of watching the A-Team in 1080p while running thru a 20 step filter action in Photoshop. Very impressive.
Look for it on sale in January for about a grand.
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NL: Review Block - More Processors
Published: Tuesday, January 4, 2011 | By: DennisIn an attempt not to be left out AMD has launched a new Quad Core Black Edition processor dubbed the Phenom II X4 975, it clocks in a little faster than the Hex core and with less processor cache.
Here are some reviews from deep inside the news box.
- AMD Phenom II X4 975 BE & 840 Quad-Core Processors Reviewed @ EOC
- AMD Phenom II X4 975 BE CPU Review on Technic3D
- AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition @ Bjorn3D
- AMD Phenom II X4 975BE and 840 CPU Reviews @ Legit ReviewsOf course there is more Sandy Bridge goodness too, Here are some related motherboard reviews.
- MSI P67A-GD65 @ LanOC Reviews
- Gigabyte P67A-UD4 @ LanOC Reviews
- Gigabyte H67A-UD3H @ LanOC Reviews
- MSI Computer P67A-GD65 Intel P67 Motherboard @ PCSTATSMore to come, likely around the 7th
