Filed under: Gaming
Looks like all the Cinema 2.0 fuss that AMD has been blustering about with its new RV770-based GPUs is fully warranted. The benchmarks are in and AMD’s new $549 ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 — what AMD calls the “world’s fastest graphics card” — is an out and out screamer, besting the best cooked up over at NVIDIA thanks to that RV770 GPU pair nuzzled up next to 2GB of GDDR5 memory. As noted by PC Perspective, the new champ, “is able to run away from NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 280 1GB card handily. Our various game tests proved this - Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and GRID showed big gains for AMD’s new card at resolutions 2,048 x 1,536 and 2,560 x 1,600,” though performance gains are less dramatic as resolutions drop to 1,600 x 1,200. Not that any self-respecting gamer would push so few pixels. CrossFireX performance was disappointing, however, as the systems didn’t scale well when going from 2 to 4 GPUs. In fact, Crysis seemed to barely notice the additional CrossFireX horsepower, something that should be corrected with future driver releases. Make no mistake though, as power-hungry, expensive, and hot-running as the new HD 4870 X2 may be, it’s a big day for AMD as it retakes the graphics crown from NVIDIA, as short-lived as this victory may be.
Read — HotHardware
Read — PCPer
Read — Tweaktown
Read — CustomPC
Read — AMD press release
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Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals
If you find yourself burning through your MacBook or iBook batteries at an alarming rate, perhaps you require a charging solution that’s, shall we say… more robust. That’s where Oncore Power’s psychotic 6-bay charging station comes into play. Never again will you have to suffer the indignation of a powerless laptop with the company’s all-in-one solution to charge every brick in your arsenal at once. The device will juice up three batteries at once, letting you stagger the two bays of three slots so you’re always one stylish wrist snap away from sweet, sweet power. Sure, it costs $395 (and presumably more for the version with included batteries), but you can’t put a price on peace of mind, can you? Oh, wait. You can. It’s $395.
[Via Macworld]
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Filed under: Laptops
Like your laptops to be over-achievers? Like, the really annoyingly stacked variety of over-achiever? Enter Lenovo’s newest outrage — the ThinkPad W700. Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing… and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what’s happening under the hood you ask? Well for starters the 17-incher sports the first ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that’s fully kitted out — the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there. Take a look at our hands-on below and see the beast for yourself.
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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
Sure, times might be tough at AMD, but that’s not stopping the crew at ATI from gunning for NVIDIA’s newest gear — the company just announced the new HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2. Aimed at the “super high-end” of the market, the $399 4850 X2 and $599 4870 X2 feature two GPU chips on a 625 or 750MHz bus, respectively, with up to 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 RAM. ATI says that there’s a 20 percent overhead from pairing up the processors, so the X2s should offer 180 percent of the single GPU cards — certainly enough to outgun a single NVIDIA GTX 280, and reportedly enough to match a dual-280 setup depending on the game. We’ll see for sure when the inevitable flood of benchmarks hits when these bad boys arrive next month — any gamers out there going to take the plunge?
Read - ExtremeTech
Read - CNET
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Filed under: Cellphones
Sure, we’ve already gotten a chance to play with the Nokia N96 — and even seen a couple reviews — but you know Uncle Sam’s got to get his taste before this thing gets its rumored launch later this month. Yep, nothing spectacular in the test reports, but if you’ve got a thing for industrial photography of circuit boards under florescent lights, you might want to hit the read link while you’re alone.
[Via Cellphone Signal]
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Filed under: Laptops
Averatec reliably cranks out stylish-but-generic takes on most new hardware trends, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the company is prepping a netbook. Although nothing’s been locked in, it sounds like we should expect an Eee 1000-class machine, with a 10.2-inch screen and an Atom processor — but it’ll also have a “real” Shift key, a 120GB drive, and a $399 - $499 price tag. We should fine out more by Christmas, when this thing hits stores — but will anyone care by then?
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Wearables
We’re only at the nano scale folks so you’ll have to keep those high school fantasies of an invisibility-cloaked romp through the girls’ locker room tucked away for now. Still, two teams of US government funded researchers under the direction of Xian Zhanga at UC Berkeley say that they’ve developed a material which can bend visible light around 3D objects, effectively making them disappear. While similar to the negative refractive properties of materials developed back in 2006, UCB’s so-called meta-material is easier to work with and absorbs far less light than those earlier products. As such, the material could scale to the size of invisibility cloaks to hide objects such as tanks or mischievous boy-wizards. However, that day is a long ways off. In the short term, the meta-material will most likely find use in the far less interesting (to consumers, anyway) application of building better microscopes.
[Via BBC News]
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Good news for lovers of the colour pink, with Fujitsu giving an official unveiling of its pastel-shaded budget laptop, the Fujitsu LifeBook U2010 netbook.
Ok, there are other colours available (notably silver and blue), but with two shades of pink available at launch, it’s only a matter of time before the term ‘handbag-friendly’ appears in a sales pitch. It’s not all about the looks though, with the U2010 offers an interior to match the exterior.
That includes a 1.6GHz Atom processor, a 64GB sold state state (or a standard hard drive, should you prefer to go old school), a 5.6-inch WXGA display with Raku Raku zoom for a closer look, 1.3 megapixel camera, an impressive nine hours of battery life (if you use the SSD drive) and built-in wireless music streaming to any FM device, which should save you the cost of a car transmitter.
What we don’t know is a price or UK release date. But it’s likely to be soon and with a price as small as its screen.
Fujitsu (via Pocketables)
With the Olympics being held in China’s capital, Beijing, you’d hope there’d be some dodgy, low-cost electronics to celebrate the successful start to the fortnight of international sporting competitions. Fortunately, there is! Here’s an MP3 player designed in the shape of the Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed the ‘Bird’s Nest’, and displaying proper Beijing Olympics logos and everything.
We’ve no idea whether the logos have the official seal of approval - it seems unlikely - but these little devices pack in up to 4GB of storage space, an LCD display in the middle of the miniaturised stadium and full audio controls on the underside. It claims to play a wide range of digital music formats, including MP1, MP2, MP3, WMA, WMV, ASF, WAV and more.
The list price sets it in about the 15 quid region - certainly not bad for 4GBs of plug-and-play storage on a dubious bit of tourist tat. That also gets you seven equaliser settings, presumably ranging all the way from tinny to humming, an optional FM receiver for catching all the Five Live coverage, and a built-in microphone.
Product page (via ChipChick)
Filed under: Robots
Although it hits retail on Thursday, you might want to get your pre-order in now given the way these things tend to go scarce near the Xmas rush. We’re talking about Elmo Live of course, the singing, dancing, and story telling robot with wobbly red limbs and interactive sensors scattered around the monster’s face and ticklish belly. Available now for about $65 pre-tax at all the usual on-line shops for our tiniest consumers. We’ve dropped in the video after the break as a reminder of things to come.
[Via I4U]
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Continue reading Elmo Live ready for pre-order by dutiful parents
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