Sunnyvale (CA) - OCZ is promoting its innovative OCZ NIA brain interface gaming controllers in unique way: gamers using the headset in nearly 45 LAN parties in Europe and North America will have a chance to win thousands of dollars in prizes. The inaugural tournaments will be held at this weekā€™s QuakeCon (Dallas, TX), Digital Storm (Vancouver, BC) and CmaxX Enlarged in Germany.

The prizes are substantial with everything ranging from OCZ Gaming memory to a combo prize of $2000 in cash, OCZ DIY Gaming Notebook and OCZ Memory.

Ok so what do you have to do to win? After reading the contestā€™s fine print, it appears that youā€™ll be doing some free PR work for OCZ. Gamers must place in the top three of the sponsored LAN events and they must supply their own NIA device (which you can conveniently buy through resellers). The players must provide evidence of their gaming wins (states, videos, pictures) and he/she must use the NIA device in at least 50% of the games. Furthermore OCZ can use the information for their own advertizing campaigns, so expect the company to tout stuff in the future like, ā€œOur NIA gets you more killsā€¯ or ā€œI Killed Fatal1y with my NIA!”

OCZ claims the NIA device can cut reaction times by 50%, something that could obviously help out competitive gamers.

More than 15 LAN parties in North America and 25 in Europe were chosen for this unique challenge, but the list is still being updated. If you would like to learn more about this concept in whole, visit this page.

The results of this contest will be used to gather feedback and see how to enhance the device. One thing is certain, though: if OCZ NIA is able to reduce the natural lag of our body, pro-gamers could start adopting OCZ NIA in larger volumes.

Chicago (IL) - It time for a new round of Apple rumors. Apple is widely expected to refresh its iPod lineup in August. There is your usual set of rumors out there with some interesting thoughts on likely changes and upgrades. Sources seem to agree that the upgrades will more evolutionary than evolutionary, which, if the sources are correct, may be surprising as Appleā€™s iPod sales growth shows signs of a slowdown and the company could need a new blockbuster media player rather sooner than later.

Apple’s long-standing commanding lead in music player space is all but given, especially now that competitors seem to launch new efforts to tackle its lead. Despite Dell’s withdrawal from the MP3 player market in 2006, the company is apparently planning a comeback with a new player slated for a September release. Apple Insider reported that Apple recently sent an advisory bulletin to a selected group of resellers, telling them to load up with iPods and certain Macs, a sign of upcoming shortages in the distribution channel ahead of a product.

With new iPods apparently just around the corner, we wonder whether Apple can deliver enough new features to woo consumers and keep competitors at distance. Read the rest of this entry »

Los Angeles (CA) - With first beta of the 2.1 firmware for the iPhone/iPod touch now seeded to developers, speculations about new features are gathering steam. Of course, most of us won’t settle for anything less than the missing features expected in 2.0 in the first place. We all know that Apple’s priority list doesn’t always match that of its users, but it’s high time for Cupertino-folks to address basics that portray iPhone as a toy compared to rest of the industry.

Ah man, don’t you just wish that next iPhone firmware update brings end-user features sadly missing from 2.0? True, the current firmware was huge step ahead over 1.1.4 as it added important enterprise capabilities such as Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for push email, contact and calendar, Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to corporate networks and the ability to remotely wipe handset if it’s stolen (think Blackberryā€™s ā€˜nukeā€™ function). We understand that the enterprise is top priority for Apple, but the focus on business users left regular iPhone users short on new stuff. With the exception of the App Store that became the killer feature, we got a GPS-enhanced Maps application, support for MobileMe cloud services, contact searching, bulk move and messages delete, saving photos, parental controls and embedded YouTube videos. That’s it, more or less. It just doesn’t cut it for most of us. Read the rest of this entry »

Universal Serial Bus 3.0 is just around the cornet, but it does not mean that its brother IEEE 1394 standard (also known as FireWire and iLink) has ceased its development. In fact, this month the 1394 trade association said that it had ratified the 1394-2008 specification, which significantly improves bandwidth of the interconnect.

The 1394-2008 high performance serial bus standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards dating back to the original 1394-1995 version, and including 1394a, 1394b, 1394c, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 version with 1.6Gb/s bandwidth) and for S3200 version, which provides 3.2Gb/s speed.

ā€œThe consolidated 1394-2008 specification effectively allows one single document to serve all. It provides one consistent document that provides everything a designer or developer needs in order to work with 1394 in any application. We assembled an experienced team of experts from consumer electronics, computer, and semiconductor companies who have worked diligently to complete this task on time,ā€¯ said said Les Baxter, 1394 Trade Association leader and director of Baxter Enterprises, who supervised the process. Read the rest of this entry »

Advanced Micro Devices plans to sell its consumer electronics TV business unit it got with the acquisition of ATI Technologies back in 2006 to Broadcom, an analyst said. Earlier this year AMD wrote down $880 million from its goodwill and intangible assets due to lowering revenues of its ā€œnon-coreā€¯ businesses.

ā€œBroadcom is a likely buyer for some of ATI’s products. We believe that Broadcom is a likely candidate to acquire AMDā€™s consumer TV business for about $250-$375 million as it has a comfort level and history with integrating former ATI products and management,ā€¯ said analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research in a note to customers, reports EETimes web-site.

After the management of AMD took over ATI Technologiesā€™ businesses, revenues of the consumer electronics units, which includes chips used inside digital TV-sets as well as chips for mobile phones, dropped nearly 40% year-over-year. Recently AMD implied that it may sell off its ā€œnon-coreā€¯ businesses.

ā€œThe business includes DTV chips that are sold into major name brand digital TVs. We believe Sony and Samsung as well has HiSense (China) are all ATI customers. We also view the handset-based product line as available for sale, however, we are unable to identify a potential buyer given the limited customer base,ā€¯ said Mr. Friedman.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Lenovo, one of the worldā€™s largest makers of personal computers that is mostly known for its ThinkPad-branded business user-oriented premium-class laptops, is considering to enter the market of low-cost netbooks later this year, a representative for the company in Taiwan said on Wednesday.

Ken Wong, general manager of Lenovo Taiwan, said in an interview with DigiTimes web-site that the company was considering launching a netbook product designed with consideration for both consumer and enterprise markets. However, he did not reveal any details.

According to unofficial information, Lenovo will release its netbook by the end of September. It is quite a surprise that the company mostly known for high-end ThinkPad laptops for business users and IdeaPad notebooks for consumers has decided to enter the market of relatively low-cost machines, such as Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last year Foxconn announced their presence in the performance sector with the P35-based Mars motherboard. Like most boards using the P35 chipset, the Mars matured into an outstanding product. In fact, it turned out to be frighteningly close in capabilities to our favorite DFI P35 UT product. On the back of this excellent release, Foxconn has been inspired with the confidence to develop a performance range of motherboards with specific objectives in mind. Given the size of the company and its in-house manufacturing capabilities, the progression into releasing a line of performance-oriented motherboards seems to be perfectly logical.

With over 200,000 employees worldwide, a proven distribution network, and an already established reputation in multiple product lines, one would be lead to believe that competitive volumes of high-end brand motherboard sales will be another notch of success for Foxconn. The mere presence of Foxconn in the performance computer sector at the very least should drive the other big players towards higher levels of innovation - and who knows, perhaps pricing will benefit too. Contrary to that last statement on the subject of pricing, the Black Ops motherboard we’re reviewing here today will help relieve you of that irritating bulge in your wallet by setting you back a mere $350 or so. Read the rest of this entry »

We receive a lot of interesting products in the labs for review over the course of a year. We do not always review all of these products, although we will at least make mention of them in our blogs or forums from this point forward. In the meantime, there are those products that sometimes deserve more than a mention for a variety of reasons. Today we have one of those products and it comes from Vigor Gaming.

Vigor Gaming is best known for custom gaming systems that provide a high degree of customer satisfaction along with a fairly reasonable price to performance ratio depending on the configuration layout. What most users might not know is that Vigor Gaming offers several component choices for separate purchase. Of these, the iSURF II Hard Drive Cooling System caught our attention when it arrived.

Not so much for the fact that it is a hard drive cooler, more so for the fact that it had a certain industrial art edge to it and it felt like a very solid piece of hardware. While the design was the most interesting aspect of the product, we wondered out loud if it really worked. As it turns out, it does work as we will see shortly.

In the meantime, let’s take a quick look at the product design.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spire has launched SilverBlaze (SP251S2), a VGA cooler compatible with several nVidia graphics cards including GeForce 6800/7000/7800/7900/8000/8800/9000/GTX200 series. This cooler has one 80-mm fan can spin at 2,000 rpm making a noise level of 26.0 dBA. Information about price and availability wasnā€™t disclose.

For more picture Read the rest of this entry »

Gigabyte has officially unveiled EP45-Extreme motherboard series targeted to overclocking enthusiasts. Two boards were launched within this new series: GA-EP45T-EXTREME e GA-EP45-EXTREME. The only difference between them is that the former supports only DDR3 up to 1,900 MHz, while the latter supports only DDR2 up to 1,600 MHz. Both boards are based on Intel P45 chipset (with Intel ICH10R south bridge), support FSB up to 1,600 MHz, two PCI Express x16 slots (one of them running a x8), one PCI Express x4 slot, one PCI Express x1 slot, three PCI slots, six SATA-300 ports, one IDE port, one floppy disk port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and they support up to 12 USB 2.0 and three Firewire (IEEE1394a) ports.

On the audio section a Realtek ALC889A codec is used. It features a 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio, 7.1+2 channels (translation: besides the 8-channel surround sound, it features an extra stereo channel, usually used for audio streaming) and DTS Connect compatibility (i.e. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD audio compatibility).

Motherboards from EP45-Extreme series also have a myriad of overclocking options and a copper heat-pipe used for liquid and traditional cooling.