Hardware Revolution

Here’s this week round-up of hardware news, from various sources, with my personnal opinion on them:

OCZ Offers Enthusiasts “Do-It-Yourself” Notebooks. Finally a move in the good direction! Gamers have been waiting for years to customize their own gaming laptop! Thumbs up for OCZ! Apparently, you will be able to even choose your video card in a close future.
At X-Bit Labs

GDDR5 in Production, New Round of Graphics Cards War Imminent. With speed of 3.6ghz, 4.0 and 4.5ghz(!), those chips will offer unheard of bandwidth and amazing performance! ATI is planning on using GDDR5 on their upcoming Radeon 4770. Existing GDDR3 memory chips may run at 2.0GHz – 2.2GHz, which provides up to 140.8GB/s memory bandwidth in case of 512-bit bus, so if you assume that ATI uses the 4.5ghz gddr5 chips, that would give a 288.0GB/s bandwidth in thoery! Impressive!  At X-Bit Labs

AMD Improves Chip Manufacturing Efficiency. Good move from AMD, anything they can do to reduce production costs and improve efficiency are good news for this company that is definately short on cash. At X-Bit Labs

Super Talent Unleashes Speedy Solid State Drives. The more competition, the better. SSD drives are the drives of the future, a clear improvement over mechanical hard drives. The only problem being the cost and their size at the moment. The only “affordable” drive they offer is 30GB at 299$. I could survive with 60GB on my laptop and that is 449$. I suggest to wait for price drops, as the techonlogy will become mainstream at one point. At X-Bit Labs

Core 2 Quad mobile available for Q4. Finally, laptops will gain access to 4 cores processors! These are great news for any power user that likes having access to a powerful laptop, like me for example At BeHardware

RV770 at the end of June, a few details about it. 50% more stream processors, gddr5 instead of gddr3. Sweet, now we are talking about some serious improvement in the graphic department! I mean, the GeForce 8800GTX is still considered the best single gpu video card, after being introduced in November 2006! At Be Hardware

Seagate: 320Go & 7200tpm in 2” 1/2
While Hitachi, Samsung and Fujitsu already introduced 2″ 1/2 hard drives with a capacity of 500GB but rotation speed of 4200rpm or 5400 rpm, Seagate seems to rather focus on performance instead of capacity and announces the Momentus 7200.3 which has a capacity of 320 GB.

Other than their higher rotation speed, they benifit from a 16MB cache, a SATA-II connection and contains no more than 2 platters. The continous transfer rate announced is 80MB/sec with latency time of 11ms in reading and 13ms in writing, for an average power consumption of 2.1 Watts while working and a 23dba noise level when idle.

They are already available for the XPS line-up of Dell and they are coming up soon for their Alienware models. The price and availability have yet to be announced.
At Hardware.fr (In French)

Next-generation of NVIDIA GeForce video cards specifications unveiled. Interesting, just like the new AMD ATI Radeon cards. I can’t wait to try them!
At Daily Tech

Intel To Update Desktop CPU Lines In Q3. New quad cores and dual cores cpu from Intel. Alright, more competition, lower prices and more choices for all of us. I like that! At Digitimes

Pirate Bay Breaks Into The Top 100 Most Popular Websites. Well, that’s not a surprise for me, with the popularity of BitTorrent based programs. Go Pirate Bay, but remember to check in with your local laws for what is and is not legal. Better be safe than sorry. At Tom’s Hardware

First Intel Atom Motherboard On Sale. Perfect for small computer, to be used in cars and much more. This is only the start of a revolution in the platform for smaller computer!
At Tom’s Hardware

Nvidia Dumps 9000 Series Name: New GPUs Will Be Called GTX 260 / 280. Yes! Finally, no more confusing name for Nvidia line-up of products! It’s about time!
At Tom’s Hardware

Asus To Produce Millions Of Mobos With ‘instant’ OS Technology. What a great idea! That’s perfect when you just want to browse the web and need a quick access to it.
At Tom’s Hardware

This is it for this week news. I hope you’ve enjoyed it! Looking forward to see you tomorrow.
Mathieu