X48 Crossfire Performance vs Intel P45 motherboards

X48 Crossfire Performance is already on the market, but the Intel P45 motherboard is not out until later this year however; this does not stop people like TweakTown from putting the pair through their paces. There are a few differences between the two boards, but there is only one thing that matters, and that is with the performance of each board.

Check out what TweakTown has to say, here are their final thoughts “This is really a very interesting article and is something people need to be taking note of. The first thing you need to be checking is if you’re reading a review where Crossfire is being tested. Make sure that the board there using is a x16 / x16 motherboard. The results really do speak for themselves and it’s clear that there is a performance difference between a x16 / x16 configuration which the X48 offers, and the x8/x8 one on the P45.
If you’re really thinking about going down the Crossfire path, we would be highly recommending that you spend the extra money to go to an X38 or X48 based motherboard over the P45. Of course, if you’re not then it doesn’t really matter. With one card the P45 runs at x16, which is exactly what you want.

The thing is, the X48-DQ6 is only about 10% more expensive, so you could easily say that you should just spend the extra money and get that. You may in future go Crossfire without knowing it yet, but admittedly the P45-DQ6 does have some very cool features such as the new ICH10R controller, loads of SATA ports and just some really funky new add-ons like the power buttons on board. Of course, we will cover all these in more detail in our full motherboard review at a later date.

Before you rush out and buy that P45 board thinking that x8 / x8 will be just fine, sit back and have a think if you’re really aiming to go down the Crossfire path in the near future.”

Hands-on with GTX 200 WHQL drivers from NVIDIA

There has been a lot of talk about the new WHQL drivers and how these drivers can give the newly launched GTX 200 series of cards are big performance increase, with this in mind, Tweak Town have decided to give the GTX 200 WHQL drivers a full hands-on review over 14 pages.

In their final thoughts they found these new drivers not live up to what many are thinking, they said NVIDIA may release new drivers that increase the performance of the new GTX 200 series of cards but the new WHQL drivers are not them.

This is what Tweak Town said in their summery “Well, that wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as I had hoped. Spec wise, it seemed extremely possible that we could expect an increase in performance from the GTX 280, but clearly that didn’t happen. I don’t doubt for a second over the coming months NVIDIA will release new drivers that increase the performance of the new GTX 200 series of cards, but this isn’t it.

We will be keeping up with the performance of the GTX 280 and the driver development over the coming months to see what NVIDIA pull out of the hat. While I would normally write some long-winded final thoughts about the drivers, I’m going to wrap it up quickly because I just got word that the NDA for the HD 4850 has been bought forward.

So let’s wrap this up nice and quick. The GTX 280 is still disappointing me and I’m mega excited about the HD 4850. The End! - Look out for our HD 4850 content in the coming hours!”

Read the 14 page review for the full results and charts of the performance.

Mozilla Firefox 3 downloads at 6 or 14 million

None of us can deny how popular the new Firefox 3 download has been, and if you head over to Mozilla they have a Firefox 3 downloads worldwide page. This map allows you to track how many downloads there are in total, as well as for each country. At the moment Firefox say that almost 6 million have downloaded the browser, but when you head over to Download.com their reports are a little conflicting. They are showing that in total there have been almost 14 million downloads and that does not include Mac downloads.

So which site is giving us the correct figures, many would say Download.com and that Firfox are behind. But I would have thought that Mozilla Firefox would have the correct figures, as they are trying for a world downloads record. We reported yesterday that Mozilla were going for a download for world record attempt with their Firefox 3 browser, however there is no such record with The Guinness World Records. Firefox would still like this record, as a result they have put in a petition to put most download software in 24 hours in to The Guinness World Records.

Firefox had asked people yesterday to try and help break the world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours, it is an easy thing that people had to do, and I am pleased to say I was one of them.

Firefox 3 has some great new features, these include, one-click bookmarking, smart location bar as well as lightning fast performance. Security has also been improved with phishing and malware protection. Other features include built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom. All of these make Firefox 3 faster and more reliable.

MSI P45 Platinum top of the range motherboard

MSI have launched the P45 Platinum, this is their top of the range motherboard which has been designed to compete with the likes of Asus and Gigabyte, both of which have high-end P45 offerings. TweakTown has one of these motherboards and has been putting it through its paces.

One thing that we have to point out though, is the fact that their MSI P45 Platinum is an early sample. This means that it is not the full retail package, but the board will be the same that will hit the store shelves. Here are TweakTown’s final thoughts about the board “Intel’s 4 series chipsets are now starting to make mass production. With Computex 2008 finished, and Intel’s official launch of the final chipsets to make the 4 series now unveiled, motherboard companies are able to finally release their boards. As expected, we are now beginning to see quite a few offerings surface.

MSI’s first P45 motherboard has impressed us; despite not having a full retail package with the board, the silicon used was retail quality, so we are testing what you will receive on the store shelves, and what we have found to be very impressive.

The P45 chipset has a good overall feel; its overclocking at this early stage is impressive, and while we only managed to hit 504MHz FSB, we only had a few hours to really test the board compared to a full 24 hrs of tweaking. In just 2 hours we managed to make over 500MHz. We can only see a better result if given more time to play.”

Firefox 3 Release Date June 17 10AM PDT: download for world record attempt

The article wrote earlier today was about the release candidate 3 of Firefox, if your looking for the full release this will be today (June 17) at 10AM PDT and you can download Mozilla Firefox 3 for your part in the world record attempt. Many users have been trying to find out when the official release is and if you want a count down then just match your local time to the information below.

The UK will be able to get Firefox 3 at 6PM and in the US it’s coming at 10AM PDT as stated above. Some users have been up early in the United States waiting for the download and have said “If things don’t go up soon, this whole world record business is down the drain”, I am sure Mozilla know what they are doing and this download and record attempt has been planned for sometime.

Leading up to today’s Firefox 3 release we have seen pledges from many different countries with the UK, Japan, US and Spain all getting over 50,000 pledges. New features in the Official release of Firefox 3.0 include a smart location bar that allows you to type words and they match against your history, your also able to bookmark the sites by just clicking the button at the right of the smart location bar.

If you click the favicon icon next to the URL of the site your looking at, you will get information about that site, although some sites will not have any information about them. Some other features you can get here is information on how many times you have visited this site and a lot more that is dependent sometimes on the website. British Airways even shows you who runs and designed the website.

We all know that Firefox 2 added Phishing protection and now Mailware protection has been added to Firefox 3, this will help protect you in many ways that you did not have in previous versions of Firefox. You can now click to see downloads from the browser with one-click just at the bottom of the browser and you will also find lots of new features that have been added to your download section.

We now have just two hours to go before the worldwide release of Firefox 3; will you help set a new software download record?

Will Steve Jobs allow a download of Firefox 3 on the 3G iPhone?

It was many months ago now that I moved to Mozilla Firefox on Windows from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, now days I work on an Apple Mac computer and although I find Safari better than IE it still lacked the add-on applications that you can get with Firefox. Now in the mobile phone world the Apple iPhone is ruling with its ability to browse the web almost like a desktop computer, I have had an iPhone since its release and often browse the web while walking down the street. Come July 11th, the 3G iPhone will be in my pocket.

Will Steve Jobs allow a download of Firefox 3 on the 3G iPhone?

As we reported earlier, Firefox 3 has been released today and I am now using that updated version of Firefox and loving it. Although Safari does a great job on the iPhone, I know that thousands of iPhone owners will want Firefox on the iPhone for the add-on applications that could be developed and as the iPhone is like no other phone for third party apps, surely Steve Jobs will Officially open up the option for an iPhone Firefox download.

The mobile space needs more phones supporting Firefox and even more so the iPhone, if we had to guess then we should reach a point in the future when Jobs will have to make Firefox available on the iPhone as it will never be able to afford to be seen as lagging in the mobile browsing arena. Although that’s assuming that Firefox can get to a point that they give a better mobile browsing experience than the mobile version of Safari.

Do you think a mobile Firefox could do a better job than the current version of mobile Safari and would you want Firefox on the upcoming iPhone 3G?

Download Mozilla Firefox 3, release date is today: where will this leave Linux users?

Mozilla has finally announced that today is the day for downloading the much anticipated Firefox 3, oh yes June 17th 2008 is a good day for all those that want the new Firefox 3 download. Open source software enthusiasts and developers are planning major parties all over the world to celebrate this brilliant occasion.

Mozilla are trying to get into Guinness World Records, the Firefox team are hoping to set the record for the most software downloads in 24 hours and the total number of unique downloads that take place on release day will be submitted for potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records, it has been said that over one million users have already signed up to pledge their support. So what is the status of Firefox 3 add-on compatibility? Many readers have asked this question, they have also asked that they will not be ready to upgrade their best add-on until the add-ons are supported. Alex Polvi, Mozilla’s Product Manager has written a brief overview that explains the current status of the most popular add-ons. Some of my favorites, like Greasemonkey, Firebug, and Stylish are now all compatible with Firefox 3. Unfortunately, Google Browser Sync is being discontinued and will no longer be supported. Google recommends that users adopt Mozilla Weave or Foxmarks.

Mozilla’s add-on team has been hard at work getting a brand new version of the add-on web site ready in time for the release. The new site now includes a theme browser that displays thumbnails and a new advanced search system, as well as numerous improvements for developers. There are already plans in the works for Firefox 3.1 which has been given the codename of “Shiretoko” (Bless what a nice name), obviously this is in its early stages of development but the schedule indicates that alpha releases could be available as early as July, Prominent user interface features planned for the 3.1 release include tab previews and tag auto-completion. Developers also plan to add several new features to Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine such as the HTML 5 video element and CSS text shadows.

Now we want to know “where will this leave Linux users? Many people know that most users of Linux distributions do not get their Firefox browser directly from Mozilla. Instead, they get Firefox packages through their Linux distributions. The Linux version of Firefox which are sometimes customized by the distribution’s creator, also do not have the “Check for Updates” button enabled in the browser — while the button is enabled on Windows editions. The issue most recently came to the forefront after both Red Hat Fedora and Ubuntu shipped their recent Linux versions with Firefox 3 Beta 5. When the browser’s later Release Candidates 1 (RC1) and Release Candidate 2 (RC2) versions came out, users of the both popular distributions did not immediately get update notifications like their Windows counterparts.

So as said where will this leave Linux users and will they get Firefox at the same time as Windows users?

Visit the Mozilla Firefox 3 download page here

ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition Overclocked: 50% faster than 9800 GX2

We all know how great the old 9800 GX2 GPU was, but there is now a big boy on the block and that is the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition. This Graphics card has been overclocked and is thought to be at least 50% faster than 9800 GX2. As with all GPU’s that state they are a 50 percent faster than another model, this does not always seem to be the case so the guys at TweakTown have decided to put the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition through its paces, they have even pitted it against the top of the range AMD HD 3870 X2.

TweakTown’s thoughts on the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 AMP Edition are “So, that’s the GTX 280. There is no doubt that you’re probably left as underwhelmed as myself at the moment. The rumors that the card was going to be 1.5x faster than the 9800 GX2 were clearly un-true, which is disappointing. But at the same time, it’s probably a bit optimistic.

There are definitely some good things about the card; the performance we got in World in Conflict with AA and AF on is extremely impressive and does show that the card has massive potential.

The other thing that is worth noting is that we still don’t have a PhysX driver for the card, which is a bit of a joke I must say. It seems that NVIDIA these days is so rushed to get the cards out the door that the drivers aren’t yet ready to make full use of the card. This was also seen with the release of the GX2 were the Quad SLI driver wasn’t available at launch.
The other thing is that unlike the 9800 GX2 we tested with today, the GTX 280 is overclocked out of the box from ZOTAC, making the card a little faster than the stock clocked offerings that we will no doubt see.

So what are my actual thoughts on the card? – Okay, yes it’s nice that we’ve got the performance of two GPUs on one card that takes less power, but at the moment an immature driver doesn’t give us the gains that we probably expected to see with a 512-bit memory interface and an increase in stream processors. Do I think that the GTX 280 is going to be performing significantly better in a months’ time? - Absolutely! Will it be too late? - We’re not too sure.

The other thing I have to say before I wrap this all up is that I’ve tested the HD 4850, and I’ve tested it in Crossfire. Now, if I hadn’t tested those cards I may have been more impressed with the GTX 280, but I have. I’ve seen the performance figures the cards put out. We also know the price on a pair of HD 4850s is going to be under $600 AUD, while the new GTX 280 in stock form seems to be launching at the absolute cheapest in Australia in the low $700 AUD area. Ouch.”

AMD FireStream 9250 Processor at Teraflop level: Offers gaming rig additional 5 Teraflops of Power

AMD is gaining a lot of respect it seems when it comes to the it’s second generation FireStream 9250, the second-gen FireStream 9250 has just topped the single-precision teraflop barrier at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany, which is fantastic news to most.

The processor will now take full advantage of AMD’s GPU knowledge to augment the processing power of your loving rig’s CPU with an additional 8-gigaflops per watt of processing from this 150 watt processor, this is a 55x performance rise, when obviously compared to crunching financial analysis code, for example, on a CPU alone. The AMD FireStream 9250 processor will fit into a single PCI slot and will include double-precision floating point hardware performing at more than 200 gigaflops. The all new processor and supporting SDK are due for release in Q3 for $999.

Just so you know it has been said that the 9250 features ATI’s upcoming RV770 GPU at its core and that the foundation of future 4800-series graphics cards. In basic terms this all means 4x cards setup in Crossfire X should indeed be capable of offering your next gaming rig an additional 5 Teraflops or power. Read the full press release below for more information.

Official Press Release:

—Next-generation AMD FireStream™ 9250 processor accelerates scientific and engineering calculations, efficiently delivering supercomputer performance at up to eight gigaflops-per-watt —

At the International Supercomputing Conference, AMD (NYSE:AMD) today introduced its next-generation stream processor, the AMD FireStream™ 9250, specifically designed to accelerate critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC), mainstream and consumer applications. Leveraging the GPU design expertise of AMD’s Graphics Product Group, AMD FireStream 9250 breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision performance. It occupies a single PCI slot, for unmatched density and with power consumption of less than 150 watts; the AMD FireStream 9250 delivers an unprecedented rate of performance per watt efficiency with up to eight gigaflops per watt.

Customers can leverage AMD’s latest FireStream offering to run critical workloads such as financial analysis or seismic processing dramatically faster than with CPU alone, helping them to address more complex problems and achieve faster results. For example, developers are reporting up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes as compared to processing on the CPU alone, which supports their efforts to make better and faster decisions.1 additionally, the use of flexible GPU technology rather than custom accelerators assists those creating application-specific systems to enhance and maintain their solutions easily.

The AMD FireStream 9250 stream processor includes a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation delivering more than 200 gigaflops, building on the capabilities of the earlier AMD FireStream™ 9170, the industry’s first GP-GPU with double-precision floating point support. The AMD FireStream 9250’s compact size makes it ideal for small 1U servers as well as most desktop systems, workstations, and larger servers and it features 1GB of GDDR3 memory, enabling developers to handle large, complex problems.

Driving broad consumer adoption with open systems
AMD enables development of the FireStream family of processors with its AMD Stream SDK, designed to help developers create accelerated applications for AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL™ and ATI Radeon™ GPUs. AMD takes an open-systems approach to its stream computing development environment to ensure that developers can access and build on the tools at any level. AMD offers published interfaces for its high-level language API, intermediate language, and instruction set architecture; and the AMD Stream SDK’s Brook+ front-end is available as open source code.

In keeping with its open systems philosophy, AMD has also joined the Khronos Compute Working Group. This working group’s goals include developing industry standards for data parallel programming and working with proposed specifications like OpenCL. The OpenCL specification can help provide developers with an easy path to development across multiple platforms.

“An open industry standard programming specification will help drive broad-based support for stream computing technology in mainstream applications,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD. “We believe that OpenCL is a step in the right direction and we fully support this effort. AMD intends to ensure that the AMD Stream SDK rapidly evolves to comply with open industry standards as they emerge.”

Accelerating industry adoption
The growth of the stream computing market has accelerated over the past few years with Fortune 1000 companies, leading software developers and academic institutions utilizing stream technology to achieve tremendous performance gains across a variety of applications.

“Stream computing is increasingly important for mainstream and consumer applications and is no longer limited to just the academic or engineering industries. Today we are truly seeing a fundamental shift in emerging system architectures,” said Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research. “As the industry’s only provider of both high-performance discrete GPUs and x86-compatible CPUs, AMD is uniquely well-suited to developing these architectures.”

AMD customers, including ACCIT, Centre de Physique de Particules de Marseille, Neurala and Telanetix are using the AMD Stream SDK and current AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL or ATI Radeon boards to achieve dramatic performance gains on critical algorithms in HPC, workstation and consumer applications. Currently, Neurala reports that it is achieving 10-200x speedups over the CPU alone on biologically inspired neural models, applicable to finance, image processing and other applications.2
AMD is also working closely with world class application and solution providers to ensure customers can achieve optimum performance results. Stream computing application and solution providers include CAPS entreprise, Mercury Computer Systems, RapidMind, RogueWave and VizExperts. Mercury Computer Systems provides high-performance computing systems and software designed for complex image, sensor, and signal processing applications. Its algorithm team reports that it has achieved 174 GFLOPS performance for large 1D complex single-precision floating point FFTs on the AMD FireStream 9250.3

Pricing and availability
AMD plans to deliver the FireStream 9250 and the supporting SDK in Q3 2008 at an MSRP of $999 USD. AMD FireStream 9170, the industry’s first double-precision floating point stream processor, is currently available for purchase and is competitively priced at $1,999 USD. For more information about AMD FireStream 9250 or AMD FireStream 9170 or AMD’s complete line of stream computing solutions, please visit http://www.amd.com/stream.

NVIDIA’s back helping Phenom with its IGP based GeForce 8300 chipset

This is the ZOTAC GeForce 8300 AM2+ Motherboard and it supports quite an array of feature, but its layout does need a bit of work. Overclocking is non-existent; meaning if you’re after a budget booster this board won’t really deliver. Great for HTPCs if you don’t mind using the DVI to HDMI converter.

With NVIDIA back helping Phenom with its IGP based GeForce 8300 chipset, Tweak Town have given the ZOTAC GeForce 8300 AM2+ motherboard a hands-on review and spread the results over 14 pages. In their final thoughts they said “This has been the first ZOTAC motherboard we have managed to acquire, and most certainly won’t be the last. We have more waiting for us. For our first board we managed to get, we were left with a reasonably good impression. However, ZOTAC needs to do a little more planning on its budget boards. While cheaper is better, there is always room for improvement, even on the lower scale.

NVIDIA’s GeForce 8300 chipset is an extremely impressive unit; its IGP is rather good for a cheap offering, but can’t stand up to the might of a discrete GPU. If you’re going for a budget HDMI based setup, the GeForce 8300 will do you if you’re after an NVIDIA solution. It depends on your preference, as we have seen that the NVIDIA and AMD solutions are extremely competitive with each other. So, depending on what you’re after, it’s a bit of a research game these days.

Overall, we were satisfied with the board. However, we hope to see ZOTAC introduce some better layouts on their next series of boards”.

Read the 14 page hands-on review.

More memory with GIGABYTE GeForce 9600GT TurboForce 1GB

If your looking for a graphics card with a lot more memory then the GIGABYTE GeForce 9600GT TurboForce 1GB could be just the card, but how much more performance do you get for the extra memory. It’s hard not to be impressed with the cooler and its design, unfortunately the extra 512MB really does very little for performance and Tweak Town find this out in their 17 page hands-on review.

In their final thoughts they said, “While we did pretty consistently see the 1GB model beating out the 512MB one, the gains are so minimal that ultimately in-game you wouldn’t notice the difference between the two. Even extremely intensive games like Crysis at 1920 x 1200 show no real performance increase.

With that said though, we understand that some people simply can’t comprehend that 512MB is going to offer the same performance as 1GB, and since some people are so set on the idea, GIGABYTE like most other companies have to offer the option to prevent those buyers from going to another brand.

There is no way we would recommend a 1GB card 9600GT over a 512MB model to anyone, but the fact of the matter is if you’re looking for a completely silent 1GB 9600GT then the GIGABYTE card is a good choice thanks to the cooling technology in place.

While it’s not a card we would use, some people are going to love having the option of an overclocked 9600GT with 1GB of RAM that is completely silent. Fortunately, the hefty overclock that GIGABYTE has given the card makes it a worthwhile option over stock clocked 9600GTs along with showing just how effective their cooling package is.

We would have loved to have seen a full version game in the package along with a DVI to HDMI adapter, making the card an excellent choice for HTPC enthusiasts who want something that can do a bit of gaming while being completely silent. Hopefully GIGABYTE make note of this and think about it in future releases”.

Read the 17 page review.

Your Apple iPod Touch and Expressivo 1.4 with e-Book

The free collection of e-books - supplied with the version of Expressivo which speaks American English with the voice of Jennifer - includes 50 of the most popular literary works of the world made available as part of the Project Gutenberg. Users of Expressivo have free access to a collection of books including Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Additionally at www.expressivo.com you can download, free of charge, other e-books and then play them on your computer or save them as MP3 files and then play them e.g. on an iPod. Such an MP3 book can be a perfect, eye-friendly entertainment during long holiday travels.

The new Expressivo also comes with an enhanced feature of converting text files into sound. With Expressivo 1.4 you can convert any text file into an MP3 file even 50 percent faster than with the previous version of the application.

Apart from the voices embedded in the software you can also add any other text-to-speech reader to Expressivo and enjoy the voices it generates in other languages. Up to now Expressivo could read only texts written in the Latin alphabet. This has changed in the 1.4 version as the application has been adapted to the international character encoding system, UNICODE. Now after adding the appropriate text-to-speech reader to the application, Expressivo can read texts written in any language of the world, including Arabic, Russian, Japanese or Chinese.

Expressivo 1.4’s other new attractive features include the new clock-reminder compatible with the Google Calendar! Clock-reminder will also read out the events planned in the calendar of your email application (e.g. MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird).

Expressivo is a computer application for anyone which can read any text with a human voice. It may also be used to facilitate learning of foreign languages or to read out film subtitles. Expressivo allows you also to listen to books, RSS feeds, Web pages, e-mails – not only via a computer but also via a portable MP3 player, such as iPod or iPhone. With Expressivo you can also easily create audiobooks. The affordable price makes it possible for virtually anyone to enjoy the text-to-speech technology with Expressivo. To find out more about Expressivo visit expressivo.com.

E-Power Thunder EP-650-TD1 affordable but capable 3-in-1 PSU

For those of you who have been building their own computer systems for a while now, well now that there is a huge influx of power supply units on the market. Choosing the perfect one is a huge task in itself, but E-Power might just have the answer for you. The E-Power Thunder EP-650-TD13-in-1 PSU, is very affordable but still capable of doing the job.

The guys over at Tweaktown have been putting the PSU through its paces, and have come up with a few surprises. Here are their final thoughts on the E-Power Thunder EP-650-TD1 3-in-1 PSU are “For those in the market for a mid-level power supply, there are a lot of choices. With the features and performance of this Thunder 650, it fares well when placed against the competition. While it certainly isn’t the most powerful product on the market, it has ample power for a vast majority of systems currently in use and still offers enough connectors and amperage to allow for future upgrades. This power supply is priced at about $130US and falls squarely in the middle of the price point for similar models with basically the same features. Add to this the external cable that allows you to power and charge devices using either USB or SATA connectivity and the value goes up a notch. It will certainly handle the load and is well worth taking a look at for your own upgrading needs.

The unit is not modular, but with the sturdy construction of the wiring harness and the inclusion of mesh wrap from end to end, this isn’t a big issue. Cable management is still reasonably easy to handle and is made even easier with the included Velcro straps. It also has a lot of appeal to the eye with the chrome finish and the blue LED lighting included with the fan. Overall it is a worthy contender.”

Very Fast BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GTX OCX 512MB

This is the very fast BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GTX OCX 512MB graphics card and its BFG’s first OCX card with a 9800 GTX core. This card is really the whole package with a good overclock, lifetime warranty and 24/7 tech support for the US. Tweak Town have given this card a hands-on review and in their final thoughts they said “I’ve been quite a fan of the 9800 GTX from the word go, this simply due to the plain fact that it’s brought good performance at a reasonable price. While the BFG Tech OCX is one of the more expensive 9800 GTX cards on the market, the lifetime warranty and healthy out-of-the-box overclock make it quite an attractive purchase.

While the 9800 GTX at the higher resolution is for the most part slower than the more expensive 9800 GX2, it still offers excellent performance. If you have an SLI motherboard as well, we would be optioning for a pair of 9800 GTX cards versus a single 9800 GX2 as the GX2 really is nothing more than a pair of 8800 GTs in SLI.

If you’re on an Intel based chipset where SLI isn’t an option, we’re also probably still leaning towards the GTX due to the plain fact that on a whole it offers a whole lot better performance to price ratio.

With all this said though, who knows where the 9800 series of cards are going to be in a few weeks once the new GT 200 based cards are on the market. Will NVIDIA drop the price of these cards or will we simply see them discontinued? – My bet is that the 9800 GTX is probably still going to fill a price gap that won’t be seen with the GT 200 line-up of cards come launch day.

Either way, it’s hard not to be impressed with the offering that BFG has her. If you’re in the market for a graphics card that you expect to keep for years to come, or you’re just finding that when it comes time to sell it, the fact it has a lifetime warranty is more attractive, then you can’t go wrong with the BFG Tech 9800 GTX”.

Read the 17 page hands-on review.

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard: optimized for multi-core processors

Ok so we know that WWDC 2008 keynote was a big deal yesterday and all the world was waiting to hear about the new 3G Apple iPhone, but there was also a few other important things being spoken about. One of the things that Mac users was wanting to learn about was details of the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard, one of the best things that this new operating system has to offer is being optimized for multi-core processors. Before we all get too exited, you have to remember that there is still a wait of at least a year before Snow Leopard is released, so you will just have to keep reading all the rumours about how great the new OS will be.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard will not be a huge change over the Leopard; it is more of an evolution rather than a revolution. The new software will not have loads of new features, Apple have focused more on improving the performance from the predecessor. Apple have said that OS X introduced over a thousand new features and the new Snow Leopard OS will offer a thousand more, over a period of time. Snow Leopard will be an OS which will be able to unleash the power of a more powerful system, like multi-core Macs. The new Snow Leopard OS will raise the software limit on its system memory, so in theory it will raise to something like 16TB of RAM. QuickTime X will also be introduced; this will offer optimized support for modern audio and video formats, the result is an extremely efficient media playback.

Source – Press Release

Hands-on with the Inno3D GeForce 9600GT iChill Hurricane graphics card

This is the Inno3D GeForce 9600GT iChill Hurricane graphics card and it’s a good cooler with a nice package, excellent performance and just generally a great card. The Inno3D GeForce 9600GT ticks all the right boxes. Tweak Town have given this graphics card a full hands-on review and covered the results over 17 pages, in their final thoughts they said “I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the iChill series from Inno3D; they’ve always offered coolers that we don’t really see on other cards. The 9600GT we have today is no different, but we do have to wonder about this whole build-it-yourself process. While the experience was kind of cool and a bit fun, it’s not something that we would want to get used too.

The design behind the cooler is also very good in that you can have it run silently while still keeping the overclocked speeds, making it an excellent choice for people who want a silent 9600GT that comes overclocked out of the box.

On the topic of the overclock, the speeds that Inno3D offer out of the box, while not being the fastest we’ve seen to date, are definitely above the standard overclock that we get from a lot of companies.

There isn’t an iChill product we haven’t been impressed with, and we can’t see that changing any time soon. We’ve got some good, fast cards on the market from them that have unique coolers that help them stand out from the pack.

Availability on the card is good and the price isn’t something we would complain about. There’s no reason to be wary of installing the cooler, as it’s an absolute breeze with no tools needed. So if you’re looking for a 9600GT that’s a little different, this could be one that’s worth buying”.

Read the 17 page review.

Phanfare’s iPhone camera application lets you store photos in the cloud with a single click

As you know, the iPhone 2.0 has just launched, and companies big and small are announcing unprecedented new mobile applications to coincide with it. Phanfare unveils an application today that will allow users to snap photos and share/distribute them widely on the internet simply by using their phone. This is an interesting example of some of the clever and useful new applications cropping up with the announcement. See the press release below for more details.

Metuchen, NJ (June 9, 2008) – Photo and video sharing service Phanfare (www.phanfare.com) today announced that it has developed a camera application for the new iPhone store that allows users to share iPhone photos on the web with a single click. The photos are moved wirelessly to the internet where they are immediately visible to friends and family and archivally stored.

Taking the Personal Computer Out of the Loop - The Phanfare camera application turns the iPhone into a connected digital camera that takes the PC out of the loop for uploading and sharing. Users enjoy the convenience and portability of the iPhone with all the benefits of cloud-based storage and sharing. After you take a picture, you can instantly add a caption, add the photo to an existing album or create a new album without ever leaving the application. For a demonstration of the Phanfare iPhone camera application, visit the blog.

“For consumers, digital photography was a huge step forward over film, but uploading digital photos to a computer is just too complicated,” said Andrew Erlichson, Phanfare’s CEO and cofounder.“The Phanfare iPhone app gets the computer out of the uploading loop and makes digital photography fun and convenient—all with a single click.”

Phanfare’s iPhone app is fully integrated with the Phanfare photo and video sharing service, offering downloadable Mac and PC organizers, state of the art web management and unlimited archival storage. Phanfare users can view their photos and videos on Phanfare’s ad-free online albums and full-screen slideshows, on other websites, such as Facebook, and on their home computer using the Phanfare screensaver or even on their living room tv, using the Phanfare media server. Phanfare also provides a fully compatible iPhone viewing experience that allows browsing photos from any iPhone.
Phanfare offers 1GB of online storage free to each member. Free members can create online albums that combine photos and videos in an elegant presentation with no ads.. Unlimited storage can be purchased for $54.95/year.

Apple MobileMe at WWDC 2008: direct replacement for .Mac

Today Apple MobileMe was announced at WWDC 2008, this will be a direct replacement for the .Mac service and after a slow start to this years conference, things started to really heat up with not only MobileMe but also the 3G iPhone left the rumor world and became fact.

MobileMe will completely sync your iPhone and PC or Mac wirelessly via Me.com, this will give you a lot more control over your gallery apps, calendar, contacts and mail. The new MobileMe will also work well with the iDisk feature so you can send stuff to friends and family using your remotely accessible hard drive.

When Apple launched the Macbook Air they knew they wanted to help you store information in other places and access it wirelessly, this is one reason they left out an optical drive in the Mac Air. Now these new services like MobileMe and other products from Apple are aiming to all work together to give the user more freedom.

Apple’s MobileMe will feature 20GB of online storage, MobileMe iDisk for online document access, MobileMe Gallery for photo sharing, Web applications at me.com, Push email, push calendar and push contacts. It will cost you $99 per year and will be available from mid July.

Motorola’s New 3G WAN MC75 Worldwide Enterprise Digital Assistant

When your job is around conditions that normally break most devices, you need something extra special and you will also need the features to make-work on the job easier. This is Motorola’s MC75 Worldwide Enterprise Digital Assistant; it will give you all you need in a rugged handheld computer. Read the press release below for full details.

HOLTSVILLE, N.Y. – 09 June, 2008 The Enterprise Mobility business from Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) today announced the MC75, the latest addition to its portfolio of Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDA), developed for mobile enterprises that require connectivity around the world. The MC75 EDA will help organizations increase worker productivity and efficiency, reduce operational costs and errors, and enhance customer service by delivering simultaneous voice, data, GPS navigation, and camera-based document capture.

“At U-Haul, we aim to deliver the convenience that our customers demand, at the low cost that they expect,” said Sam Shoen, chief of staff, U-Haul International, Inc. “With the MC75, Motorola has brought a product to market that will continue to transform the way our organization serves the public and will positively affect almost every retail and logistical aspect of our operations. A technology investment at this level could not have been considered without Motorola’s reputation standing behind it.”

The MC75 combines high-speed access to voice and data with support for 3G networks based on the HSDPA and CDMA-EVDO (Rev A) standards for wireless communication. Equipped with 802.11a/b/g, a crisp color VGA display and a 2 megapixel digital auto-focus color camera, the new rugged EDA delivers the industry’s first mobile computer compatible with multiple 3G WAN network standards that captures high quality pictures, documents and signatures, as well as 1D and 2D bar codes. This unprecedented combination of real-time local and wide-area wireless communications coupled with advanced data capture capabilities enables businesses to improve workforce automation, reduce data errors, and enable productivity wherever work needs to get done.

“Building off the success of the MC70 EDA, Motorola’s best-selling rugged mobile computer for field mobility solutions, the new MC75 EDA is a testament to our continued ability to anticipate the ever-changing needs of today’s fast-growing global mobile workforce with features like GPS and 3G operability,” said Bob Chen, vice president and general manager of Mobile Computing, Motorola Enterprise Mobility business.” The MC75 provides ultimate performance in a size-optimized rugged form factor and illustrates Motorola’s commitment to deliver the latest integrated technology to drive compelling solutions that enable enterprise customers to gain a competitive edge.”

The MC75 will enable global organizations with mobile workforces to standardize operations on a single mobile device, which will reduce support requirements, cost and complexity associated with multiple devices on numerous networks. Uniquely designed and offering a product lifecycle that extends well beyond that of a traditional consumer smartphone or PDA, the MC75 offers wireless connectivity, functionality, and manageability through Motorola’s Mobility Services Platform on a single handheld device. This reduction in capital and operational costs, combined with increased workforce productivity, will deliver maximum value to any organization’s investment.

“Now that the standardization and widespread availability of 3G are nearing completion, enabling mobile workers to access or transmit critical information from field environments faster than ever before, organizations are leveraging mobile and wireless solutions as a key strategic investment and source of competitive differentiation,” said VDC analyst David Krebs. “Products like Motorola’s MC75 with its embedded 3G technologies represent one of the critical solutions needed to deliver rich mobile enterprise applications and functionality to field employees in a rugged form factor.”

The MC75 is based on Intel’s XScale PXA270 624 MHz processor and Microsoft® Windows® Mobile 6.0 operating system to provide increased interoperability with existing enterprise infrastructure, enhanced security features, a flexible development platform and improved mobile messaging.

To help customers maintain peak performance, Motorola Enterprise Mobility Services offers Service from the Start with Comprehensive Coverage for the MC75. From the first day of the hardware purchase, customers can be assured that no matter what is damaged — from broken displays and keypads to any internal and external components — the repair is covered. This enhanced level of coverage significantly reduces unforeseen repair expenses, while providing investment protection and service peace of mind.

The MC75 is expected to be available globally in the third quarter of 2008 through Motorola sales, as well as Motorola PartnerSelect members.

For more details about the MC75, please visit motorola.com/mc75.

Mac Fusion with Intel Core 2 Duo at WWDC 08

The photo above shows Mac Fusion that is for new developers who are on a budget and want to port their existing programs to the Mac. Mac Fusion features an Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processor that starts at 2.1GHz and has an 800MHz front-side with 3MB of shared L2 cache. This device looks similar to the Apple Mac Mini and is rumored to be at WWDC 08, if this becomes reality, it will be nice to see a new Mac this year and not just products and services built around the 3G iPhone.

The aim of Mac Fusion is to make building applications for the Mac more easier than ever before and to give the developer the ability to run alternate operating systems, such as Boot Camp, Linux and Microsoft Windows, while keeping the stability of Mac OS X.

While some people will see the above photo as a fake, it may not be fake as it does fall in line with other information we have heard previously from Apple Insider. If real, we should see Mac Fusion confirmed later today at WWDC 2008.

If you do take a closer look at the photo you may see a few things that lead us in only one way when it comes to this photo being real. These include Apps being capitalized in the tag line, Xcode 3.5 is listed in the bottom right, while Xcode is currently version 3, The three logos clearly have a border, Apple does not use the Windows logo and The ad copy is found wanting.

What do you make of this photo for a new product called Mac Fusion?

Source: Read