Network

CPU & Motherboard

- Gigabyte EX58-UD4P Intel X58 motherboard @ TechSpot
- DFI LanParty DK 790GX-M2RS Motherboard @ Madshrimps
- Gigabyte EX58-UD5 X58 Motherboard @ OC3D

Memory

- Corsair Dominator 1600MHz 6GB Triple-Channel Memory Kit @ Legit Reviews

Storage

- OCZ Throttle 16GB eSATA Flash Drive @ Xtreme CPU
- PromoLocker Custom VH USB Drive @ Virtual-Hideout
- Thecus N4100 Pro NAS @ OC Online
- Cavalry Pelican 2.5 in 32GB Solid State Drive @ Overclockers Club

Graphics cards

- HIS Radeon 4870 ICEQ4+ TURBO @ Guru3D
- MSI Radeon HD 4830 512MB OC Edition Graphics Card @ TweakTown
- WinFast PX9800 GTX+ Leadtek Limited @ OCIA

Enclosures & PSUs

- Thermaltake Spedo Advanced Chassis @ AnandTech
- Xigmatek NRP-PC501 500W @ JonnyGURU
- OCZ Fatal1ty Series 700W Power Supply @ ThinkComputers

Displays

- Viewsonic VX2260WM - 22" Full HD monitor @ bit-tech

Cooling and modding

- CoolIT Domino A.L.C. @ ProClockers
- NorthQ Siberian Tiger II Water Cooler @ DriverHeaven
- Koolance VID-487 GPU Water Block @ Bjorn3d

PCs

- Lenovo ThinkPad SL300 @ InsideHW
- Samsung NC10 Netbook @ Phoronix
- MSI Wind U100 Netbook @ HotHardware
- HP HDX16-1005EA 16in Blu-ray Notebook @ TrustedReviews
- ASUS Eee PC 1002HA @ Hardware Secrets

Photo and video cameras

- Nikon D90 digital SLR @ RegHardware

Sound

- Motorola H780 Bluetooth Headset @ TrustedReviews

Other

- Nova Killer 2 Mousepad @ OCModShop
- Hawking HWRN1A Hi-Gain Wireless-300N Router @ Rbmods
- Epson EH-DM2 LCD Projector @ TrustedReviews

Going for uber-portability, MSI has now presented the world its latest creation, the X-Slim 320 notebook. Weighting in just 1.3 kg and featuring a thickness of 1.98 cm, the new laptop has a 13.4-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and a rather friendly-ish and attractive design.

Spec wise, the X320 will come with an 1.6 GHz-clocked Atom Atom Z530 processor, up to 2GB of RAM, and include WiFi, Bluetooth and a 3.5G card, either a 4 or 8 cell battery, a multi-card reader and a price tag of about $800. The X-Slim 320 is being showcased at CES but is expected to hit the streets in the second quarter of this year.

While still keeping Adamo under wraps, Dell has decided on updating its Inspiron laptop line-up with a new model, the Inspiron 15. Boasting a 15.6-inch LCD screen, the laptop features a clean and sleek design and can be equipped with a Core 2 Duo CPU, up to 4GB of RAM, a maximum of 320GB in storage space, a Blu-Ray drive, plus a built-in webcam and face recognition software.

"Building on the Inspiron platform of mainstream solutions, Inspiron 15 expands laptop personalization through attractive design, an array of optional features and an affordable price," said Glen Robson, general manager of consumer notebooks. "By listening to customers we've created an ideal multi-purpose system with a range of choices that help them create a custom match for their specific needs and deeds."

Now available, in various configurations at Best Buy stores in the US, and PC World and Curry's in the UK, Dell's Inspiron 15 has a starting price tag of $600. The portable machine will go up on Dell.com later this month.

Number one LCD TV maker, Samsung, and stock tumbling Yahoo has now announced Internet@TV, a web-based service that will be supported by the former's HDTVs and enable people to interact and use TV widgets. Made possible thanks to the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Internet@TV will enhance the users' TV viewing experience with the addition of widgets that provide content, information and community features available on the interweb. Already including Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Finance and YouTube widgets, the line-up TV widgets that will be available for Samsung TVs will be easy to expand as developers will be able to build new apps by using the open-platform Widget Development Kit.

"As a leader in developing innovative technology platforms to provide indispensable Internet services to millions of users, Yahoo! is excited to be working with Samsung to enhance consumers' television viewing experience by bringing the best of the Web to their televisions," said Patrick Barry, vice president of Connected TV at Yahoo! "Through this partnership, we can combine the Internet benefits of user choice and personalization with Samsung’s leading product innovation and global reach to deliver a new experience to users around the world."

On display at CES 2009, Internet@TV-enabled Samsung flat-panel HDTVs will start to become available this spring, with 13 countries - US, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, set to get them this year.

Teaming up with Asus, PowerDVD developer CyberLink is set on providing two touchscreen-enabled applications - Eee Cinema and Eee Cam, for bundling with the Atom-powered Eee Top ET1602 All-in-One PC. The Eee Cinema is basically a touch-optimized version of CyberLink's PowerCinema that provides a quick and easy way to browse photos, videos and music, while the YouCam-based Eee Cam is a webcam application which enables users to add dynamic effects to live instant message conversations, via a touchscreen-friendly interface of course.

"CyberLink is very happy to provide touch-optimized digital media solutions on the Eee Top providing users a fun and intuitive way to browse, organize and enjoy their photos, videos and other media content on the touch screen PC," said Alice H. Chang, CEO of CyberLink. "We are excited to partner with Asus on such innovative product offering and will continue to work closely in developing and implementing touch technology for the enjoyment of people."

For more info about the Eee Top check out Asus' website.

Making official the info ran last week, Seagate has now started bragging with the fact its newest Barracuda series desktop hard drives which feature the highest density per platter ever - 500GB. Part of the fresh Barracuda 7200.12 family and coming in 500, 750GB and 1TB capacities, the record-braking 3.5-inch drives have a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, work at 7200 RPM, provide a sustained data rate of up to 160 MB/s and boast 16MB or 32MB of cache.

"Demand for more desktop PC storage capacity is far from letting up as computer users worldwide generate massive amounts of digital content every day," said Tom Major, Seagate vice president , Personal Compute Business. "Seagate is leading the industry with new storage solutions designed to store, share and manage all of that business- and user-generated content."

For starters, only the 500GB Barracuda 7200.12 has appeared in stores and can be found for just under 50 Euro.

Set on expanding the Wind brand just like Asus did with the 'Eee', Micro-Star International is going to unveil the Wind NetOn at its CES booth. Coming in at least four versions - the 22-inch AE2203 and the 19-inch AP1900, AE1901 and AP1902, Wind NetOn is an all-in-one PC that's set to look good in almost every living room.

Featuring a sleek and slim casing but also a low power consumption, the Wind NetOn models will be built around Intel platforms, with the AE1901 even being named "the world's first All-In-One model equipped with the dual-core Atom processor." MSI hasn't provided much additional info about the new all-in-one PCs so we'll just have to wait a little more for a full scoop.

According to a new report, Nvidia is planning to release the 55nm GT200b-powered GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 285 one week apart, with the former said to arrive this Thursday, on January 8th, and the latter on January 15th. Already previewed in Nvidia-approved articles, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 has 1792 MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1998 MHz, 480 Processing Cores @ 1242 MHz, a core clock of 576 MHz, a 2x448-bit memory interface and Quad SLI support.

As for the next single-GPU king, the GTX 285, it will have 1GB of GDDR3 memory set to 2484 MHz, 240 PCs @ 1476 MHz and a GPU clock of 648 MHz. Hopefully, you're pockets haven't been depleted this holiday season cause both the GTX 285 and 295 won't have very 'attractive' prices.

GeForce GTX 295


GeForce GTX 285

EMC-owned storage company Iomega has now introduced a fresh home network storage solution that will provide quick and easy storage, backup and streaming of music, movies, photos and other files and folders. Named Home Media Network Hard Drive, the new device is equipped with either a 500GB or 1TB SATA 3.0 Gbps hard drive, a 370 MHz Oxford 810SE processor and the EMC LifeLine Home Linux-based operating system.

"Iomega's new Home Media Network Hard Drive is a powerful network storage device that's so straightforward that even a novice can be backing up multiple computers and streaming media around their home in less than five minutes," said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega and the Consumer and Small Business Products Division of EMC. "The Home Media Network Drive does the serious work of backing up and protecting digital files, but it also does the fun things like streaming photos and videos to game consoles, digital picture frames and networked TVs, as well as automatically feeding music into iTunes(R) for easy playback - all for little more than the cost of a USB direct-attached desktop hard drive with comparable storage capacity."

Featuring one Gigabit Ethernet and one USB 2.0 port, Iomega's NAS has a burnished gun metal exterior and comes with the EMC Retrospect Express backup software. Set to start selling later this month, the 500GB and 1TB Home Media Network Hard Drive will cost $159.99 and $229.99 respectively.

Steve Jobs, infamous billionaire chief executive of Apple Corp. has now revealed that through 2008 he has been suffering from a "hormone imbalance", which has caused him to become somewhat unhealthy in recent months.

In a classic approach used by the company executive, Steve posted a letter to his 'community' on the Apple website. In the letter he details that he has, as suspected by reporters, been suffering from weight loss as well as other health issues throughout the second half of 2008 - a primary cause for his plans to pull out of last ever MacWorld expo. Many Apple fans had desperately hoped for a surprise appearance at the expo for a keynote, but this, unfortunately for them seems unlikely.

Other popular news websites such as Gizmodo and Cnet News have recently been reporting that Job's health has been declining terribly, which has had a gargantuan negative effect on Apple's share value. Investors have been quickly trading stocks in a panic that Job's would leave the company, however, Job's dispels such fears in his address, which makes point of letting fans, investors and readers know that he fully intends on remaining CEO through his recovery. Whilst this may be too late for those investors that jumped the gun and sold their shares, time will have to tell for Apple as a whole.

The letter from Steve Jobs to the Apple Comunity can be found here, and reads;

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I'm getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I've decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been "robbing" me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I've already begun treatment. But, just like I didn't lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple's CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple's CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I've said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

Steve

 A big update is nearly ready for dispatch for Crysis Warhead, along with the SDK tools for the game.In a statement on the MyCrysis site titled 'Crysis Monthly Update #8', news of the patch is de...

Today a record 45,186 players were recorded all playing EVE Online simultaneously.

According to a post by 'CCP Manifest' on the official EVE Online site, the 'tremendous serverside changes' to the infrastructure of the EVE Online servers has meant that more players have been able to play together simultaneously without problems with lag and these changes have helped the game to hit its highest number of online players ever.

He explained:

"It is truly a testament to our loyal fans that 5 years into EVE's existence we are still breaking records and more people are flying in New Eden than ever before"

Details on the game are available on the official EVE Online site. The game is available to buy through Steam, where gamers can also download a 21-day trial to check it out.

A few months ago the creators of the highly acclaimed World of Goo, 2D Boy, reported a piracy rate of 90% to the guys over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Now it would seem that developer of the Championship Manager series, Beautiful Game Studios, are having the same problems. They are claiming that the piracy level for the latest Championship Manager is at 90%, although they do not believe that adding DRM to future games will help matters.

Roy Meredith from BGS said about the piracy:

"That's not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies."

About the use of DRM to protect games from piracy, he commented:

"There's a real issue around DRM... I'd love to defeat pirates, but actually, with all this mess on Spore and Football Manager, which I haven't been able to play this year... I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it, but I've got other things to do with my life."

With developer THQ recently explaining that they are using Steam as DRM for their latest release Saints Row 2, maybe this is a direction which developers should be looking in.

 

Saints Row 2 has been released on Steam in the US and will be released tomorrow in Europe.Today (5th Jan 2009) the PC sequel to THQ's GTA clone was released in the States. Europeans have another day t...

Some six weeks after delivering its first Crucial-branded triple channel kits, Lexar has finally taken out the big guns and announced four Ballistix kits for Core i7 systems. Featuring Intel Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP) support, the DDR3-1333 and DDR3-1600 kits target enthusiasts and gamers and come in 3 and 6GB capacities.

"Ballistix memory is known for its extreme performance and our new three channel kits are an excellent fit for the new Core i7 platforms. By utilizing Intel's latest XMP specifications, we are delivering a product that will allow consumers to easily configure their memory for excellent performance," said Jeremy Mortenson, senior product marketing manager at Lexar Media. "Like all Ballistix memory, the new three channel Ballistix kits incorporate specially selected components that are 100% tested at the component and module level and are a desirable memory solution for achieving outstanding throughput and speed gains. Additionally, they carry a limited lifetime warranty and feature world-class service and support."

While Lexar says the kits are now shipping, they don't seem to be in stores or on their maker's website so you'll have to wait a little to get them.

Starting off the week irradiated, Mushkin has unveiled its first Radioactive memory offer, a 4GB kit which comes in a aluminum case and features modules with yellow, radioactive-themed heatspreaders. Boasting two 2GB sticks that can work at 1066 MHz with 5-5-5-15 timings and 1.5V of power, the new kit is set to reach stores very soon.

As you'd expect, the Radioactive dual channel bundle will be offered with a lifetime warranty.

Verbatim has now announced the latest addition to its Store 'N' Go flash drive line-up, an 8GB Store 'N' Go Retractable model. Compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X, the new drive has a retractable USB connector and a write-protect feature that will make sure accidents don't lead to any data loss.

Weighting in about 14 grams and backed by a lifetime warranty, the 8GB Store 'N' Go Retractable flash drive will start hitting the stores in late January and cost about $60.

You might remember that some weeks ago we featured a comparative review (here) of WinRAR Archiver and 7-Zip File Manager, with 7-Zip coming up on top in a round of meticulous benchmarking. Well, now we have an update that further improves the performance of the application, and extends compatibility across almost all computer platforms.

As you know, 7-Zip is one of the most effective file archiver applications, with an impressive compression ratio and superb resource efficiency. The best part about the software is that it is open source - most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license.

7-Zip now fully boasts the following features;
- High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
- Supported formats:
-Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
-Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
- In ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
- Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
- Self-extracting capability for 7z format
- Integration with Windows Shell
- Powerful File Manager
- Powerful command line version
- Plugin for FAR Manager
- Localizations for 69 languages


7-Zip 'File Manager' application windows

Website: 7-Zip
Download: 7-Zip 4.64

NEC has now announced the second coming of the LCD2690WUXi aka the MultiSync LCD2690WUXi², a new 26-inch LCD that has Specifications for Web Offset Publications (SWOP) certification and features a wide color gamut - 97.8% coverage of AdobeRGB. Seen below, the new monitor is aimed at graphic arts, desktop publishing, photography and other color-critical environments and has a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, an 8ms response time, a 1000:1 contrast ratio and a maximum brightness of 320 cd/m².

"The MultiSync LCD2690WUXi² follows in the footsteps of its companions in the highly successful MultiSync 90 Series," said Stan Swiderski, Product Manager for NEC Display Solutions. "With its multitude of leading-edge capabilities, groundbreaking design and vast number of innovative technologies, the LCD2690WUXi² allows high-end graphics users to achieve the ultimate in color performance."

Offering VGA and DVI connectivity, the LCD2690WUXi² also boasts auto luminance control thanks to the X-Light Pro backlight/sensor ColorComp technology to compensates for slight variations in luminance and color uniformity, and support for internal programmable 12-bit lookup tables (LUTs) for calibration. The MultiSync LCD2690WUXi² is now shipping and has a recommended price tag of $1,199. The monitor is paired up with a 4-year warranty.

Lexar Media has just announced that it is planning to update its storage product offer with a series of Full-HD memory cards. Set to serve the storage needs of those owning HD-capable camcorders, the upcoming 4, 8 and 16GB Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) Full-HD and 4, 8GB Memory Stick PRO Duo Full-HD Video memory cards are to be backed by a five-year warranty and come in jewel cases with writable labels.

"As more consumers embrace digital video recording as part of their lifestyles, it is critical they have easy and reliable ways to record and store their memories and important events," said Manisha Sharma, director of product marketing, Lexar Media. "Whether they are capturing sporting events, dance recitals, school plays, or their babies' first steps, consumers require memory cards designed to meet the requirements of 1080 HD video. The Lexar Full-HD video memory cards provide the extended recording times they need and the reliability they have come to expect from Lexar Media."

Yet unpriced, the five new memory cards are expected to arrive in early March.