MSI WAS SHOWING off its 890FX board at CeBIT a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve now managed to score the first official pictures of the 890FXA-GD70 board. All we can say is that it looks like MSI has a winner on its hands and this should be worth a look for anyone that’s considering getting one of AMD’s upcoming Phenom II X6 processors.
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THE ONE DOWNSIDE of Intel’s Extreme Edition CPUs that makes most people shy away from them is the sky high price tag, but it looks like Intel is getting ready to take a leaf out of AMD’s book by releasing what will hopefully be more cost conscious overclocking CPUs with unlocked multiplier carrying the K suffix.
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INTEL IS SAID to be shipping 20 percent more chipsets than CPUs which makes for a fairly skewed ratio, as most users would upgrade their CPU, not their motherboard. In this case though it turns out that it’s the motherboard manufacturers that are hoping for better times and are placing large chipset orders with Intel.
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ACCORDING TO NEC, it has been six months since the launch of its USB 3.0 controller and we’ve yet to see a single competitor, but we’re now hearing that Intel is getting ready to enter the market with its own device.It won’t be part of Intel’s chipsets for now and it seems like there are several reasons for this.
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TINY MOTHERBOARDS SEEM to have become all the rage these days, and we’re not talking underpowered, feature derelict things either. Instead it seems like most of the motherboard manufacturers are pushing out some pretty serious hardware in the mini-ITX form factor, which has yet to take off in the consumer space outside of Atom systems.
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FOR THOSE OF you that are looking for an affordable card to power five displays, look no further, as PowerColor has announced its new Eyefinity 5 HD5770 graphics card which as the name suggests, will handle five displays, unlike the Eyefinity 6 cards which work with six.
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DESPTITE LACK OF support from both Intel and AMD, it seems that USB 3.0 is set to be something of a hit. NEC has announced that it has so far shipped no less than 3 million of its USB 3.0 controllers and that it’s getting ready to ramp up production.
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SPECULATIONS ABOUT A smaller Xbox 360 have taken off again today after a picture of what is said to be a new Xbox 360 motherboard has appeared on a Chinese forum. Rumours of a smaller Xbox 360 started way back in 2008 with speculations about a 45nm chip codenamed Valhalla that was supposed to appear last year but never showed up.
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IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a somewhat more affordable Xeon system, then Intel’s latest 32nm Xeon L3406 might be of interest to you, as the new CPUs start at as little as $189 for a dual core, quad threaded model. Although this CPU will fit in various motherboards, the ideal companion would be a motherboard with the Intel 3450 chipset and guess what, Asus has just announced a new motherboard based on just that chipset.
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THE EARLY RUSH to place pre-orders for the iPad has slowed down to something more akin to a trickle only days after Apple opened up its US pre-order program. On Friday last week, Apple had as many pre-orders as 25,000 an hour, but by Sunday this had slowed to a much more reasonable estimate of 1,000 units per hour.
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IT APPEARS THAT the SSD price war has finally started, at least on the entry level end of the market. Intel has announced that it is dropping the price for its entry level X25-V 40GB drive to an affordable $125, which appears to be a pretty good deal.
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ALTHOUGH A HANDFUL of USB 3.0 thumb drives have made it on to the market, it appears that they’re not as easy to make as one would at first think. It’s still early days of the USB 3.0 interface, although we’re starting to see a steady stream of USB 3.0 devices and most of them are hard drive related.
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IF YOU WANTED an iPad and haven’t placed your pre-order already, then it might be too late, as it seems like the iPad, despite plenty of criticism, is set to be yet another huge success for Apple, at least if estimated pre-order figures are anything to go by.
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3D API’S MIGHT not be the most exciting thing in the world, but without them we wouldn’t have any kind of 3D graphics which would make computers a lot less fun and a lot less useful for many users around the world. Khronos has announced its latest version of OpenGL which simply gets a version bump to 4.0.
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RUMOURS HAVE BEEN circulating for a while now that Apple is getting ready to refresh its range of Mac Pro computers and it looks like we’re getting close. However, it seems like this Apple refresh will happen at the same time Intel is making its new six-core CPU’s ready. Coincidence? We think not.
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