Using inkjet technology for creating not just photographs and A4 prints, but physical objects is not a new idea, but the notion of printing computer memory in that way is certainly novel.
Japan’s Nissan Chemical Industries has developed a way to print memory from an inkjet device that uses nanoparticle-sized gold dust and polystyrene.
Click Here To Read The Full Article @ TechRadar
Inkjet-Printed Memory Made From Gold
Intel Core™ i7 965 Extreme Quad Review
Core i7 a well known name for most computer users these days, it is Intels latest processor that really seems to crush all opponents on the market right now. We are going to benchmark the 965 Quad Core today which is the most expensive Core i7 processor on the market that retails for around 1000$. Will it be worth the money and how well does it really perform? That is a few of the questions we are going to answer in todays review.
Click Here To Read The Full Article @ Rbmods
The Econav Makes Gas Guzzlers Take Greener Routes
If you’re a car owner who’s eco-conscious the Econav is a great way of assuaging your guilt. The idea behind it is that you’re purchasing a premium looking satnav, equipped with the usual features such as GPS, gear change indicators, speed indicators and traffic alerts, but you’re also getting their customised Econav technology built in.
And what does that mean exactly? Well the idea is that it will help save you money on fuel and cut your carbon emissions, and it does this by analyzing various route options and giving you an eco-related readout of the potential cost to yourself and the environment.
Click Here To Read The Full Article @ ShinyShiny
TV Technology 2009: Part Two Review
Yesterday we banged on at length about a trend towards building more stuff into TVs over 2009, I believe there’s also going to be a minor trend towards taking things out as well! In other words, there seems to be more and more interest from manufacturers in taking tuners and AV connections out of the TV screen and putting them instead into external tuner/switching boxes.
Pioneer has already done this with its KRP-500A and KRP-600A plasma screens, as has Philips with its recently reviewed Essence wall-hanging TV. To give you just a few other examples, Sony’s about to do the same thing with its 40ZX1 TV, too; Hitachi’s external tuner boxes for its Ultra-Thin TVs are due any moment; and JVC has a new external tuner box TV, the 42WX70, due to launch in March.
EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review
A few weeks back, we took an in-depth look at the dual-GPU powered NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. Just to recap a bit; the GeForce GTX 295 is NVIDIA’s current flagship graphics card that couples a pair of 55nm GT200 GPUs with 1792MB of frame buffer memory, culminating in what is ultimately the fastest, single graphics adapter on the market at this time. It appeared after about 5 months of work and fine tuning, NVIDIA was sick and tired of letting AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 lead the pack as the fastest single graphics card in the market.
In our launch article, we also gave you a glimpse of the EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus, but due to time constraints, we weren’t able to benchmark and fully evaluate the card. We have since, however, given the EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus a good once over, and are ready to shine the spotlight on it here. Although it is, at its core, a straight-up reference design, EVGA worked a bit of their mojo and tweaked the GTX 295 Plus’ clock speeds slightly to boost the card’s performance over stock models. Take a second to check out the specifications and bundle below, and then we’ll move on to the fun stuff and evaluate the card itself and its performance…
TV Technology 2009: Part One Review
Now that the dust has settled following both last year’s CEATEC show in Japan and the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we’re finally in a position to see the lay of the land when it comes to TV technology in 2009. And actually, contrary to the rather negative reporting given to CES in particular, I’m really quite excited by what’s in prospect. For while there might not be a whole lot of completely new, ‘blue sky’ stuff in the 2009 pipeline, I feel extremely confident that the quality of our viewing experiences is going to make a huge leap in the right direction.
Probably the single most important technological reason for this is the expected explosion in the number of LCD TVs with LED backlights. As regular readers will know, I’ve been predicting since the end of 2007 - when I saw the first LED TV, Samsung’s LE52F96 - that LED would eventually dominate the quality TV scene. And this has merely been reinforced by recent reviews of new LED models from Samsung, Philips and, especially, Sony.
X58 Showdown: ASUS Rampage II vs. MSI Eclipse
If the recent release of Intel’s X58 chipset has taught us anything, it’s that change can be good. In our first two forays with these new boards and Intel’s Core i7 processor, we’ve been firmly impressed by the performance gains seen over legacy Core 2 architectures, much less AMD’s recent advancements and new offerings. Now, with some time under our belts, we’re going to take a look at two new Intel X58 Express chipset based boards from ASUS and MSI that we’ve put through the test ringer. Focusing on the upper-tier of the PC market, both come fully stocked with additional components, fancy board designs, and all of the other benefits that the X58 provides, with higher-end prices to match.
First, we’ll start off with an overview of the Intel X58 Express chipset. As shown in the block diagram below, the major changes revolve around the CPU’s system and memory interfaces. Considering Intel’s relatively slower evolution over their past few chipset updates, it’s almost as if they sat back, looked at what needed changing, and then just went ahead and did them all in one fell swoop.
- Introduction
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - Specifications
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - Layout and Features
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - BIOS & Overclocking
- MSI Eclipse - Specifications
- MSI Eclipse - Layout and Features
- MSI Eclipse - BIOS & Overclocking
- Test Setup and SANDRA Results
- PCMark Vantage and 3DMark06
- Cinebench and POV-Ray Rendering
- Low-Res Gaming Framerates
- High-Res Gaming and SLI Testing
- LameMT MP3 Encoding and Power Consumption
- Performance Summary and Conclusion
Shuttle XPC Prima Series SP45H7 Review
There are occasions where ‘bigger is better’ doesn’t necessarily apply. One of these is the computer case. Sure, bigger allows for better cooling and more expandability and features, but it’s not exactly ideal for taking your PC to a LAN party or your parents’ place for a holiday. Quite aside from which, there is great appeal in having a very powerful system in a deceptively small case, similar to sticking NOS in a Ford Ka. Being largely responsible for making the small form factor (SFF) PC the success it is today, Shuttle has a tradition of producing some of the most desirable barebones SFFs around. Will the company succeed yet again with its SP45H7?
Part of the XPC Prima series, the SP45H7 is aimed at gamers and enthusiasts who are willing to settle for less than the top-end. As its name suggests, it’s based around Intel’s P45 chipset, and falls between Shuttle’s premium SX48P2 machines and its bottom-of-the-range SP35P2 Pro. The major factors to keep in mind are that it only supports mid-range graphics cards due to a 300W power supply but should be able to cope with most Core 2 processors and, unlike the DDR3-sporting SX48s, it uses more affordable DDR2 memory. Most importantly, for some, it’s of the smaller chassis type that Shuttle offer, measuring 32.5 x 20.8 x 18.9 cm.
Loewe Individual Compose 40 White 40in LCD TV Review
If regular readers with good memories are thinking that we’ve already reviewed Loewe’s Individual Compose 40, they’d be right. We checked it out towards the end of 2007. But premium German brand Loewe doesn’t function like traditional TV brands, bringing out totally new products every six months or so. Instead, it tends to continually upgrade various elements of its sets, adding enhanced functionality, new design twists and extra customisation options as and when they become available.
And yes, I did say customisation options back there. For one of the most defining points about Loewe is that it goes (miles) out of its way to deliver something truly close to a bespoke TV buying experience. This is especially true of the aptly named ‘Individual’ series the Compose 40 belongs to, for within this category you can choose from: a selection of colours for the main bezel, different colours for the inset panels down the TV’s sides, different stand or wall mount options, a good selection of audio options, and even the tuner type you want - Freesat being notable in its absence.
Zotac GeForce GTX 295 Video Card Review
GeForce GTX 295 is based on two GPUs running at the same clock specs as GeForce GTX 260, but having more processing cores (240 against 216 or 192, depending on the version). Zotac’s model (ZT-295E3MA-FSP) runs with the default clocks set by nVidia. Let’s see what kind performance you can expect from this beast.
Before talking the technical details from GeForce GTX 295, let’s take a look on Zotac’s product. As you can see on Figures 1 and 2, it is based on nVidia’s reference design, which uses a black rubber cover. What is new on this design compared to the previous one used by GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 is the fan, which is now opened on both sides.
Atomic Floyd HiDefDrum AcousticSteel Earphones Review
Being the cynic I am, on seeing Atomic Floyd’s packaging boast that its HiDefDrum AcousticSteel earphones are “the pinnacle of world class acoustics” I couldn’t help but feel a little driven to disagree. Such preconceptions may not be fair but, when innumerable emails a day (ones that aren’t offering to sell me illicit hallucinogens or resize various body parts) claim whatever product they’re touting to be the bees knees, cat’s pyjamas and dogs… proverbials, a little scepticism is par for the course.With the Atomic Floyd earphones, though, I was for once pleasantly surprised to have my preconceptions proved a misconception. Because, as it happens, the HiDefDrums aren’t rubbish at all - far from it in fact.
Notably the HiDefDrums are not canal-phones, despite the fact that in-ear models seems to be the design of choice these days. Instead the ‘phones twin driver arrangement consists of an inner nib which points into the canal handling mid and high end sounds and an outer bass port which, as the name suggests, deals with lower frequency audio.
Thecus N3200PRO Three Bay RAID 5 NAS Review
Network Attached Storage used to be a thing sought after by real propeller heads; the type of people who regularly read industry journals and whitepapers targeted at corporate Network Admins, and lust over enterprise-level computer hardware in an almost un-natural fashion. However in the past few years, NAS devices have started finding more mainstream uses. With the advent of the home media server, and people collecting hundreds of gigabytes of irreplaceable data, a NAS box with some form of redundancy starts to really make sense. That’s where a company like Thecus comes in.
The N3200PRO 3-bay NAS enclosure is an upgraded version of the original N3200 and a couple steps down from the N5200B Pro that we reviewed last year. It still retains many of the features that made its predecessor so popular, but ups the ante with faster hardware, better power usage and targeted to home users. That faster hardware comes in the form of an AMD Geode processor, which still drives the same 3 SATA drive bays. This provides for 3TB or more of total storage, giving you a pretty bucket to pour all your data into.
Tyan Thunder n6650EX Review
Tyan, a long-time supporter of Phoronix and a manufacturer of many leading workstation/server-oriented motherboards, recently sent out their Thunder n6650EX motherboard. This motherboard is a slight redesign of their earlier Thunder n6550EX product, but with out of the box support for AMD’s 45nm Opteron CPUs. The Thunder n6650EX is capable of handling four quad-core processors, up to 128GB of ECC Registered DDR2 system memory, dual PCI Express x16, and six Serial ATA 2.0 ports. In this article we are offering a preview of the Tyan Thunder n6650EX (S4992).
The Tyan Thunder n6650EX has four CPU sockets for use with AMD’s Socket F (1207) processors. The motherboard and its current BIOS are compliant with AMD CPUs up through the latest AMD 45nm Quad-Core Opterons in the 8300 series. This motherboard, however, is not compatible with the Opteron 2300 series. The Thunder n6650EX supports a 4.4GT/s HyperTransport interconnect link as well as AMD Dual Dynamic Power Management (DDPM).
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