INTEL’S SANDY BRIDGE processors are scheduled for a January 2011 launch, but as you’ve seen over the past few weeks, motherboard manufacturers are already showing off their new motherboard models based on the next generation chipsets. We attended an Asus preview event just over a week ago, but we weren’t allowed to post any details of the new boards until today, so let’s start with a really small board.
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DURING THE NVIDIA earnings report yesterday, the company’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang decided it was time to have a go at tablets, well, at least tablets that weren’t built around Nvidia’s Tegra 2 SoC. He also put some of the blame for the delay of Tegra 2 tablets on Google, as Nvidia, Google and the tablet manufacturers wanted to offer products that will be competitive against the iPad at launch.
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IT’S BEEN VERY clear for some time that the Chinese motherboard makers want a slice of the action, but it’s hard to break into a market where the Taiwanese brands are so well established, so most of their products only go on sale in China. We spotted an unusual P67 board from a Chinese motherboard company called Topstar which we can see why it would have a certain appeal.
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IT’S BEEN SOMETHING of a ride, but Boxee has finally launched the Boxee Box by D-Link. Yes, that is indeed the official name, although we have a hard time seeing how the name of a router manufacturer is going to convince anyone to buy what’s in essence a streaming media player in a rather unusually shaped box.
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FROM TIME TO time there’s a technology company that you’ve never heard of that surprises with a product that you just can’t understand that no-one’s come up with already. We’re not sure if ISYS falls in this category as yet, but its Xi3 modular computer sure made us interested, as we’ve never seen anything quite like it.
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WE CAN’T BE far now from AMD’s introduction of the mobile Radeon HD 6000-series with yesterday’s leak of the new Alienware model with the high-end GPU’s, we found two more models leaked by Acer.
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THIN AND LIGHT notebooks are all the rage at the moment, especially after Apple’s launch of the new Macbook Air. Well, it seems like Lenovo has decided to make its own thin and light model in the shape of the 12.5-inch IdeaPad U260, a fairly modest looking notebook in comparison, but it has a few strengths of its own.
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DELL’S UPCOMING ALIENWARE M17x R3 has leaked and with it that AMD is getting ready to launch the first of its new 6000-series of mobile GPU’s. Not much is known about the new Mobility Radeon 6000-series, but the first two models are rumoured to be the Mobility Radeon HD 6870 and 6970.
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WE’RE FINALLY GETTING close to AMD’s official unveiling of the Brazos platform and some selected media has already been given a hands-on briefing by AMD, although it seems like we’ll have to wait another week until we get to see any benchmark figures. Even so, it looks like Intel is in for an ass kicking, well, at least at the entry level of the market.
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WE’VE ALREADY COVERED Gigabyte’s H67 boards, so today we’re going to look a bit closer at the company’s P67 models, except two of them don’t actually use the P67 chipset. Confused? Well, not to worry, it’s not as confusing as it sounds, but Gigabyte offers two PH67 models and the name gives away what they’ve done here.
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NVIDIA HAS AS yet to get official on its new GeForce GTX 580 graphics card, but several online retailers already have the card up for pre-order with a starting price from $499.99, although many retailers are charging a fair bit more than that depending on the brand of the card. Nvidia also showed off a preview of the GTX 580 at PDXLAN 16.5 and kindly posted a video on YouTube detailing much of what was shown.
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SO FAR WE’VE seen Gigabyte’s high-end boards and a couple of entry level models, but now we can give you the lowdown on just about every model they’ll be launching for Sandy Bridge. We’re going to cover the H67 boards in this article and we’ll be following up with a second article about the P67, as yes, there really are that many boards coming that we can’t properly cover them all in one article.
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GIGABYTE HAS FINALIZED its P67 motherboards designs and we got some hands on time with the first of Gigabyte’s new high-end P67 models, namely the GA-P67A-UD5 and the GA-P67A-UD7. These were the two boards Gigabyte showed off at IDF in September, but back then Gigabyte had covered up some features and wasn’t showing the final board designs.
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ALTHOUGH THERE ARE about half a dozen companies with USB 3.0 host controllers in their product portfolio by now, it appears that getting USB-IF certification is a huge stumbling block. However, Etron is now expecting to be the first of the Taiwanese USB 3.0 host controller makers to pass the scrutiny of the USB-IF and to be allowed to use its certification logo on its products.
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HANDS UP EVERYONE that remembers that VIA still makes x86 processors. Ok, so that might’ve been a little bit mean, but VIA is often forgotten when x86 processors are being discussed, although with the introduction of its first dual core Nano CPU sometime in early 2011, this might change, at least to a degree.
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