TweakTown

"Up on the bench today we have a special DIY workshop tutorial in building your own LAN party case on a budget. We take an ordinary cheap flight case and mount a full PC inside so you can truck it to and from the party with ease.

... The motherboard is a GIGABYTE mATX GA-G33M-DS2R and while this means I cannot SLI it up, it also means that it fits in the case! A newer chipset like the G33 is perfect; supplying onboard sound and LAN and keeping it budget at the same time. We’re not going to break the bank on something that will be shoe horned into a cheap-ass case from a DIY store.

Focusing on the CPU; I might get some flak for this, but I stand by it. I picked up the lower spec new Core 2 Duo 45nm Wolfdale. Why? – Well, it’s cheap, it’s available and it overclocks like a monster! The 3GHz model isn’t that much more expensive, I realise that. But it just wasn’t necessary. If you balance the system as a whole then it shouldn’t have a problem with a slightly lower spec CPU. Not to mention, the thermal output of the lower spec is better, so it won’t cook the inside of the case.

The big question was how to power this rig and we wanted a PSU that was adequate for what we had, but at the same time had a nice big fan that was seriously hush hush."

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BBC

"Ministers have been accused of a "massive failure of duty" after thousands of criminals' details, stored on a computer memory stick, were lost. The Tories say the Home Office appears "incapable" of keeping data secure and criminals may seek compensation.

Details of 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales were lost by private firm PA Consulting. The Home Office said a full investigation was being conducted.

The information commissioner's office described it as "deeply worrying". PA Consulting has searched its premises and looked at CCTV recordings in an attempt to recover the missing memory stick - a commonly used portable storage device for computer files. It is not clear how it came to be lost. "

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HardOCP

"The falling prices of NVIDIA’s latest video cards have brought the GeForce GTX 260 down to ATI Radeon HD 4870 levels. We have a brand new ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP to stack up to the Radeon HD 4870 and see how they perform in Crysis, Age of Conan, and Call of Duty 4.

... The ENGTX260 TOP is ASUS’s fastest overclocked GeForce GTX 260. It has a GPU frequency of 650MHz, a stream processors clock speed of 1.4GHz, and a memory frequency of 2.3GHz. This puts it at 74MHz on the GPU, 158MHz on the stream processors and 302MHz on the memory over reference frequencies. Other than the overclock, everything else on this card is of reference design."

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Digitimes

"With more PC vendors starting to join the netbook market, Intel is expanding its Atom processor capacity and is expected to ship up to 20 million units this year, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

In addition to Asustek Computer, Acer, Dell and Lenovo, Japan-based Sony and Fujitsu are also expected to join the netbook market in the fourth quarter, according to the paper. BenQ, Lenovo and Asustek will also launch MID (Mobile Internet Device) products in the fourth quarter, all of which are expected to increase demand for Atom CPUs, added the paper."

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Techreport

"MSI's long-awaited entry in the netbook market has arrived in the form of the Atom-powered Wind U100, which features a 10" screen, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, an 80GB hard drive, and a 92% keyboard. Read on to see if MSI's design is a cut above the rest.

... As far as specifications go, the U100 doesn't diverge wildly from the modern netbook template: it features an Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.6GHz, an 80GB 5400-RPM hard disk in a 2.5" form factor, 1GB of DDR2-400 RAM, and 802.11b/g wireless connectivity. The Wind also houses a comfortably-sized 10" widescreen running at 1024x600 resolution. You can get the system in black or with our review unit's simple and attractive white finish."

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CPU3D Preview: Gigabyte Geforce 9800GT (512Mb DDR3)

Nvidia have just released their latest 9800GT GPU which is based on the G92. It's designed and aimed at the mainstream market and will be the replacement for the 8800GT. We take a look at the Gigabyte Geforce 9800GT, which features a 600Mhz GPU, while the 512Mb of DDR3 ram is  clocked at 1.8Ghz. What's more Gigabyte have included a pre-installed Zalman cooler for unrivaled performance.

           

This card will compete directly with the Radeon HD4850, with prices at less than $200.00 (£100.00). It should be interesting to see how the Geforce 9800GT will perform. Watch out for a full review coming soon ... in the meantime, take a look at the photo gallery below.

Hexus

"Intel has officially acknowledged the existence of Nehalem, its next-generation microarchitecture, during several keynotes during this week's Intel Developer Forum Fall 2008. It's even been productised to Core i7, so it's real, very real.

However, as much time as Intel has put into disclosing what makes this particular core such an engineering leap forward over the present generation, hard-and-fast performance numbers have been difficult to come by - kind of surprising for a chip that launches in the next few months, right?

One would expect a class-leading architecture which will become the backbone of Intel's server, desktop and mobile parts for at least the next two years, to be heralded with the usual glut of 'oh-my-lord-it's-fast' benchmarks, suitably skewed (ahem, normalised) to AMD's fastest, thereby showing the delta that, Intel believes, exists between the semiconductor rivals' best.

So why no angelic trumpets and red-carpet treatment for a design that, on paper, takes present Core 2 (Penryn) to the cleaners in a number of memory-bandwidth and heavily-threaded instances?

Is it because of AMD?

Could it be that AMD's announcement that it will pull its next processor update, Shanghai, forward to Q4 2008 has Intel execs quaking in their expensive suits? We don't think so, because Shanghai's performance improvements over current-generation Barcelona are generally known, and it'll struggle to add more than 20 per cent extra oomph when evaluated on a clock-for-clock basis against Phenom X4. Knowing this, Shanghai will probably perform somewhat akin to Intel's Penryn.

Could the lack of numbers have something to do with Nehalem's performance not being quite up to scratch? That seems highly unlikely, especially if our Nehalem performance preview is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt that our 2D numbers will stack up against retail samples.
It's a question of economics, we reckon

Ultimately, we reckon that Nehalem performance has been deliberately kept under wraps by the powers that be. Why? Because letting a full suite of numbers out for public consumption, which has been Intel's method of disseminating its engineering excellence since first-generation Core microarchitecture hit AMD Athlon in the nuts, inextricably dampens - nay, crushes - sales of present-generation parts.

As a consumer or business, why would you buy a Core 2-based system when something potentially better, lots better, is just around the corner? - a product that will require a new motherboard and, potentially, new memory - kerching! Knowing just how much of a whipping Nehalem can potentially hand to Penryn in heavily-threaded scenarios, Intel would be driving potential customers away from mid-to-high-end sales of a chip that's been yielding well for some time. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes to mind.

Intel is scared of Nehalem, insofar as its prodigious performance makes Intel's current line-up look, well, a little tardy by comparison, and why tell people that when there are millions of Core 2-equippe d machines waiting to be sold at the likes of PC World and Best Buy? Why spend $400 on a chip, or $2,000 on a system, now when the same money will buy you so much more performance in just three months?

Of course, after so little sleep during IDF, this particular hack could well be off his rocker. We'll let you decide."

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Hardware Infos

"Its said on IDF that the next memory type, DDR4, will come in 2012. DDR4 shall start at 2133 MHz and 1.2 Volt. Only a year later DDR4 shall specifice up to 2667 MHz by 1.0 Volt."

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Hardware Infos

"It looks like that Nvidia brings in mid-September a new GTX 260.
While the clock frequencys are the same (576/1242/999 MHz), Nvidia has increased the shader cluster from 8 to 9. So the chip has got 216 SPs (9 shader cluster * 24 stream processors) and 72 TMUs (9 shader cluster * 8 texture cluster) instead of 192 and 64.
With this modification the GTX 260 runs up to 12.5 percent faster and shall overtake AMD's HD 4870 easily."

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DailyTech

In the past, sellers could elect to designate an item as "Buy It Now", but this typically carried heavier fees.  Now eBay is overhauling its fees structures to change this.  Under the new system, which goes into effect in mid-September, sellers will be able to list "Buy It Now" or “Fixed Price” items for only 35 cents for listing that range up to a 30 days in duration.  This will also extend the amount of time the items are on site. Though some buyers may perceive the new policy as buyer-unfriendly, eBay CEO John Donahoe says that move is quite the contrary.  Experts are reticent about eBay's moves, but agree change is needed.  Scot Wingo, chief executive of the market research firm ChannelAdvisor states, "Buying online has changed.  Retail sites no longer make customers choose between convenience and price.  The current system puts eBay at a disadvantage."

Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplace, which includes the eBay site, admits, "Clearly there’s a strong buyer preference for fixed price.  We love the auction model.  It’s still a great model for certain types of sales."

Many sellers are praising the move.  Rhonda Shrader, a maker of women's clothing from San Francisco says she already changed most of her items to fixed price, so the cuts are especially helpful.  She says today only 10 percent of her sales come from auctions.  She adds, "I think the auction was a novelty at the beginning, but now people want what they want, when they want it."

 Wingo commented that in the past there was opposition to fixed price sales at eBay, due to its auction roots.  He continues, "The previous management tried to fight it.  This management is more willing to ride along with it."

The changes come just before the holiday shopping season in which eBay hopes to turn around slumping growth and show off a strong performance."

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Dailytech

Lucid isn't just redeploying existing technologies -- it's improving on them.  AMD/ATI and NVIDIA use two technologies for their multi-GPU solutions.  One is split frame rendering, in which each card renders a part of the frame.  The drawback of this is that it requires synchronization of all texture and geometry data on both GPUs and thus memory bandwidth limitations from a single card remain.  The other solution commonly used is alternate frame rendering.  This approach also has a significant downside, in that it introduces latency in the time it takes to switch between GPU connections."

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