The web has been alive with rumors of an upcoming update to AMD’s 7-series chipsets that will somehow unlock the true overclocking potential of its Phenom processors. The rumor goes something like this: an updated South Bridge (SB750) will improve communication with Phenom, removing a previous bottleneck and improving the maximum overclock possible. We can’t begin to explain the many issues with the various rumors, but we have to allow that somewhere buried deep in these rumors there is a morsel of truth.

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While solid state drives (SSDs) promise massive performance increases along with boosted reliability compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), not a lot of customers adopt them now since actual benefits are not obvious. According to chief exec of SanDisk, the worldā€™s largest maker of flash-based products, Windows Vista is to blame for that as it is not optimized for SSDs.

ā€œAs soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Windows Vista is not optimized for Flash memory solid state disk,ā€¯ said Eli Harari, chief executive officer of SanDisk, during a conference call with financial analysts.

Even though SanDisk is the worldā€™s largest producer of flash-based products, it is considerably behind its competitors with SSDs: the company recently unveiled solid state drives for low-end computers, however, the firm still does not have SSDs for high-performance systems due to the lack of appropriate controllers that demonstrate proper speed in Windows Vista environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Munich, Germany, July 22, 2008 ā€“ Aeneon by Qimonda, the channel and retail brand of
Qimonda, announced its new DDR3 SO-DIMMs (Small Outline Dual Inline Memory
Modules) which provide power saving and high performance to the industryā€™s first DDR3
notebooks based on the IntelĀ® CentrinoĀ® 2 processor technology.
Aeneon is among the first retail memory brands to offer 1GB and 2GB DDR3-1066 SODIMMs
to the market. The modules use low-power 1Gbit DDR3 components and
feature competitive latencies of 7-7-7-21 at standard DDR3 voltage of 1.5V ā€“ ideal for
mobile computing. The DDR3 SO-DIMMs will be made available worldwide in single
retail package from August 2008.
ā€œWe are pleased to offer the DDR3 memory technology to the retail market enabling a
wider group of users to experience the new Intel Centrino 2 technology,ā€¯ said Dr
Carsten Gatzke, Vice President of Qimondaā€™s Channel and Retail Business Unit. ā€œDDR3
will be the key memory architecture for several years. With this introduction, Aeneon
shows its commitment to provide a broad portfolio of advanced memory products to the
retail.ā€¯
These new DDR3 modules, together with the high density DDR2-800 SO-DIMMs are
part of Aeneonā€™s portfolio of retail DRAM solutions tailored for the new Intel Centrino 2
platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Koolance has just launched two cooling blocks for AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphics cards: VID-485 (design for Radeon HD 4850) and VID-487 (design for Radeon HD 4870). Both blocks are made of nickel-plated copper, their dimensions are 6.25″ x 5.75″ x 0.62″ (15.9 cm x 14.6 cm x 1.6 cm), weight 1.5 pounds (680g), they have an acrylic lid allowing coolant visibility under the logo and are priced at US$ 92.99.