64-Tech: Feb 18, 2009

MWC 2009: Samsung Valencia Has TouchWiz, Sans Touch

Samsung has said here at Mobile World Congress that their theme for the show is touch, and that they’re aggressively promoting their TouchWiz overlay for Windows Mobile. (For more on TouchWiz, check out our review of Verizon Wireless’s Samsung Omnia.)
So I was surprised to go to Microsoft’s booth and find the Samsung Valencia, a TouchWiz smartphone - without touch! This non-touch-screen phone uses a variant of TouchWiz that includes a menu/widget bar in the left hand column, but you navigate through it using the phone’s cursor pad. Other touch-like features include photo speed dial and what appeared to be support for Internet-based widgets.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ Gearlog

MWC 2009: Live MediaFLO TV on an iPhone

You’re looking at live, broadcast TV playing on an Apple iPhone. I’ve actually seen two iPhone TV apps here at Mobile World Congress. This one uses the box in the foreground to connect to Qualcomm’s MediaFLO service, which then beams the signal via Wi-Fi to an app on the iPhone. TV looked sharp, clear and smooth - broadcast quality. A Qualcomm rep I spoke to said that Qualcomm doesn’t intend to sell this device themselves; instead, they’re going to try to find a retail partner to bring it to market. Considering that AT&T, the iPhone’s carrier, also works with MediaFLO, it looks like this may actually come to pass.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ Gearlog

Lab Update - DDR2 Vs DDR3 Performance With The AMD AM3 Processors Review

Talk about a labor of love. Our planned ” quick update” on DDR2 versus DDR3 performance with the new AM3 processors has turned into a week of headaches, anxiety, and frustration for the most part. That said, it has actually been enjoyable for the most part as I have been off playing memory detective. Trying to find optimal and stable settings on our AM3 boards has been like playing a good game of hide and seek. Of course this hide and seek game has our AM3 platform hiding in New York and I started seeking for it and the answers to our problems in Alaska.
After several misfires with early boards, processors, and BIOS releases we are on the right track now. New retail boards and processors just arrived along with a slew of BIOS releases this past weekend with more to come tonight. I think we are at the point of starting the “official” benchmark process now and hopefully we will have our first results up this week.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ AnandTech

Arctic Cooling Announces the Accelero Xtreme 4870X2

Outstanding cooling comes from outstanding components. The Accelero XTREME 4870X2 is equipped with three 92mm PWM fans running from 1,000 to 2,000 RPM, generating 81 CFM airflow which allows the fans to remove the heat from the two GPUs efficiently. The eight-heatpipe design also improves heat dissipation and achieves 320 Watts cooling capacity.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ TechPowerUp

Radeon Hd 4770 Sets Sights On Geforce Gts 240

ATI, as part of its initial plans with the 40 nm manufacturing technology is preparing the RV740 graphics processor, the company’s next mid-range workhorse graphics processor. The new manufacturing process lets AMD respect the price-constraints of that market segment, and accordingly price its SKUs. VR-Zone sourced a few more details about the GPU.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ TechPowerUp

Panasonic’s 103-Inch Plasma Repurposed As Multitouch Air Hockey Table

With VIZIO and Pioneer jumping out of the plasma game, we can totally foresee sales of Panasonic’s 103-inch PDP skyrocketing. All kidding aside, a startup arcade would be ludicrous to not shove one of these into the center of the action. What you’re looking at above is a mutltitouch air hockey table, made possible by Panny’s ginormous plasma and a U-Touch overlay from uicentric.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ Engadget

Slidamat Platinum R Review

In the world of mouse mats, no matter what the specifications given, it’s all down to the materials used that determines the comfort levels, the sensitivity and the functionality of it. Once in a while a new material is used for mouse mats that promises to bring something new to the table. A manufacturer of conveyor belts, TechBelt has now come up with a mat of their own. It’s slippery and slidey, it’s called the Slidamat; let’s check it out.
Techbelt is a division of Technical Engineering Services Ltd that specializes in manufacturing and converting PTFE & Silicone high temperature fabrics and belts.
Techbelt PTFE coated fabrics are available in a wide range of grades and thickness. We supply PTFE tapes, materials and conveyor belts to a diverse and extensive customer base in and around Europe and specialise in providing non standard technical solutions tailored to meet our customer’s needs.

Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB Hard Drive Review

As hard drive sizes continue to balloon, we are constantly bombarded with the one and singular question that guides our choice when it comes to the storage in our systems: Do we want a hard drive that has incredibly fast performance, or incredibly cavernous storage space? Though you can almost get that with the many 640GB 2-platter models that dot the landscape, true performance comes with drives like the VelociRaptor or any of the solid state drives out there. Western Digital is hoping to break that trend with their “Black Edition” Caviar hard drives.
This latest drive represents a split in Western Digital’s line of hard drives. Rather than having a “one drive fits all” product line for standard hard drives, they’ve split it into three separate channels. You already know about the “Green” drives, which we used in our review of the Thecus N3200PRO NAS enclosure and are designed for cool, quiet and eco-friendliness. The next in the chain is the “Blue” series, which is made to offer the best performance and reliability for everyday computing. Finally we come to the “Black” drives, which are claimed to be the crème de la crème of performance desktop drives.

Samsung’s 7gb/s Gddr5 In 50nm Mass Production, Targets 40nm Gpus

Could this mean mainstream GDDR5?
Korean DRAM giant Samsung has been making a lot of technology announcements recently. It touted its high density 4Gb DDR3 chips last month, and showed off its advanced 40nm process for producing 2Gb DDR3 that it plans to introduce by the end of the year.
One area of sales that it hasn’t been as successful as it would like has been in the GDDR5 market, designed for use in high-end video cards. Most graphics cards have been using Qimonda’s GDDR5 chips, which are both faster and cheaper than GDDR4 memory.
However, Qimonda’s insolvency presents a unique market opportunity for Samsung to take the lead. It has put its latest 7Gb/s GDDR5 design into mass production on its recently introduced 50nm-class process, which it has been using to produce more cost effective DDR3 DRAM.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ Daily Tech

XFX Geforce Gts 250 Pictured, Looks Familiar

Come March 3, and NVIDIA will have officially renamed the GeForce 9800 GTX+ to GeForce GTS 250. NVIDIA partners will have announced new SKUs based on the GPU throughout March. XFX on its part, seems to have made its GTS 250 accelerator ready, and it looks familiar. Chinese website IT168 caught an early glimpse of the accelerator.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ TechPowerUp

Phenom II X4 Reaches 6665MHZ, Just Short Of 3Dmark Record

Prior to the release of AMD’s latest 45nm Phenom processors, the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker made some demonstrations of its latest generation Phenom CPUs. The company wanted to demo the overclocking capabilities of its new Phenom processors and the performance they can achieve by implementing support for DDR3 memory modules. In one of the demonstrations, where a Phenom II X4 940 processor model was used to break the 6.5GHz core speed, the CPU was benchmarked using Futermark’s 3DMark 05, where it scored 45474 points.
Back then, the Phenom II X4 was claimed to have set a new 3DMark record, a claim that was somewhat debatable, as a higher score was achieved (apparently prior to the overclocking event at CES) using an overclocked version of a Core i7 processor. However, the insatiable thirst for higher levels of clock frequencies seems to be driving AMD’s fans towards setting new standards, using the company’s latest 45nm Phenom processors.

Click Here To Read The Full Article @ SoftPedia

BFG GeForce GTX 295 H20 Review

Every now and then we go a little crazy here in the Guru3D trenches. Sometimes a product arrives that shines and makes your face smile. Even before you try the product, the unboxing itself is an experience of it’s own. See, we here at Guru3D serve a rather unique crowd, the men and women that crave the need for the best hardware. We love to play games, we love to pimp our PCs, and we adore high-end hardware. If you recognize some of that, you are a guru …
So every now and then, within that baseline of enthusiast hardware and gaming, we see a product that is just cool. And often, such products make no sense when we talk about the matter of money… no Sir. It’s the dark side of the hardware industry, the extravagant… the excessive gear.
And as such we today land at the offices of BFG, Built For Gamers… a year or two maybe three ago they signed an exclusive deal with Danger Den, the guys who make some awesome water-cooling blocks for CPUs and GPUs.

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