GA-P35-S3G - Old school P35 board

Gigabyte is gearing up to launch one of the most intriguing motherboards ever to see the light of day.
It's well known that the transition from PCI cards to PCIe x1 has been a very painful one, probably even more than what the ATA-SATA transition was.
So what is Gigabyte to do? They made a P35 motherboard with all the goodies, which Intel's P35 provides, but packed with five PCI Slots, while still managing to include a PCIe x1 at the same time.
Maybe too little, too late, but they maybe launching this new product due to demand from customers.
No one can complain about Gigabyte's range of boards, they have options for everyone's needs.

Samsung Pleomax PKB-4500 Review

I recently bought this keyboard after a long search to replace my badly built Genius KB-19e NB. Genius keyboards are to avoid at all cost, there are other brands, for the same price range, that build better keyboards, Genius are awful. (UPDATE: The KB-19e has loosened up the keys with time and it's working quite well now. It still has a poor key layout but the scissor keys are great. The rest of them are still very bad, you're better off with Logitech, for instance, although more expensive.)

This one sells for about 20eur here in Portugal, and I'm very pleased with it, at least for now, no defects have popped up. Time will tell if it can handle heavy usage or not.
The design is very sleek, yet very simple, so it should please most people aesthetically. The keys are soft like butter, haven't seen many keyboards lately that can stand up to it in this area. That also reflects in the noise the keyboard makes while you are typing, it is one of the most silent keyboards around.
The overall layout is very good, even being a compact keyboard, the only exception is the bad placement of the "Windows Key" and the "Menu Key". Most of the time I'm pressing the "Menu key" thinking I'm pressing the other one.
The layout of keys like "Page Up" and "Page Down" is a bit strange, but most keyboards nowadays don't follow the standard layout anymore, not to mention laptops, so after a bit of use it's not strange anymore.
Although this picture doesn't show it, the keyboard is pretty slim, not the slimmest around, but it still makes for some comfortable typing.

Looking at the package as a whole, I have to recommend this, it is one of the finest keyboards I have ever had the pleasure to use.
It's a humbling lesson to many manufacturers out there, including Logitech, whose cheap budget keyboards leave a lot to be desired. (original comments left here for reference, not valid anymore)
Please read the follow up to the review, a year of use later.

Samsung unveils GDDR5 at 6GHz

Samsung released more information about the upcoming memory standard for graphics cards, the GDDR5.
Samsung has managed to run these chips at 6GHz, more than twice of what currently is available with GDDR4 chips, while operating on 1.5 volts.
These should be very hot chips, as GDDR3 already uses only 1.8v. At these kind of clocks voltage lower than 1.5v would be welcome but 6GHz is an amazing clock speed for memory, providing 24GB/s per 32-bit connection or memory chip of 16Mb*32 density.
Boards with eight of these chips would provide an astonishing amount of 192GB/s with only 256bits signaling to the memory.
Samsung will disclose more information about GDDR5 in early 2008 and stated it is aiming for the chips to be used in 50% of the graphics cards by as early as 2010.

HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX - The fastest HD3850

His will release shortly what is, for now, the fastest production HD3850 card in the world. It features HIS's custom PCB and IceQ 3 cooling, for a cooler and more silent operation.
HIS has clocked the card to 735MHz for the core and 1960MHz for the 512MBs of RAM. This puts it very close to the performance of the HD3870 at a lower price point.
Final pricing and availability weren't disclosed yet.

Core 2 Duo "Wolfdale" on the 20th of January

Intel is planning to release the full line of 45nm CPUs, dual and quad cores, in the 20th of January, after only selling the very expensive QX9650 for a while now.
The cheapest "Wolfdale" E8200 will sell for $163 and clock at 2.66GHz, while the most expensive E8500 will run at 3.16GHz and sell for $266.

Intel lauching dual core Celeron

Intel will be introducing a new dual core Celeron E1200 running at 1.6GHz on a 800MHz FSB, socket 775 and with 512KB of shared L2 cache. A castrated Pentium Dual-Core in other words.
It will be priced at $54 in quantities, $20 cheaper then an E2140.
Though it will overclock well, price conscious consumers should buy a more feature packed, and probably faster, Athlon 64 X2 4000+. If a 1MB Conroe has trouble with the Athlon X2, this will be even worse.
The small price difference will offset itself in the usually less expensive AM2 board compared to LGA775.

8800GT 256MB cards start showing up for sale

Nvidia has finally got some 256MB 8800GTs on the market, or should we say XFX?
They are the first cards spotted for sale, and are using the custom black PCBs common with XFX and PNY cards and not green PCBs, common with cards bought from Nvidia and rebranded.
They are priced at 172eur for the stock version and 195eur for the XXX version, which is obviously higher clocked.
The problem with these 256MB cards is not the amount of RAM, which seems to be enough for all games if you don't use Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering, but the speed at which it is clocked. Instead of the 1800MHz you get on 512MB cards, the 256MB version works at only 1400MHz and 1600MHz for the XXX version. We can get them with almost 2GHz RAM in the XXX version of the 512MB card. That is quite a big loss in memory bandwidth, but at 172eur they will still give the HD3850 a run for it's money.

ECS Geforce 8800GT Dual Turbo

ECS is adding a new model to it's line of graphics cards, based on the 8800GT.
They already sell a reference 8800GT with 512MB but this one has a custom PCB in blue and uses an Accelero S1 for cooling. It manages to cut load temperatures from about 90ºC, with stock cooling, to a more reasonable 70ºC, 60ºC if the Turbo module is used.
No word yet on the amount of RAM the card has but it should be a premium 512MB card.
Seems like a better option to the passive card that Sparkle has released. The temperatures are much lower and the only downside is the loss of use of an expansion slot.

P5N-T Deluxe and P7N Diamond & Platinum - Asus and MSI 780i boards

Getting close to the launch of the new, or recycled, NVIDIA chipset, we finally have some final designs showing up.

From Asus we have the P5N-T Deluxe which supports the three PCIe x16 slots needed for Triple-SLI, 8-phase power circuitry to the CPU, heatpipe-cooling and an useful IDE port. It also packs a PCI slot, still very useful nowadays and two PCIe x1 slots. You must give up all of these if you plan on going Triple-SLI with stock cooling on the cards. Also of note is the use of only solid capacitors on the board.

The first one from MSI is the P7N Diamond is the top of the line mode and will sell for about 225eur. It features four PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, all x8 electrically, one PCI and two PCIe x1. They've thrown the Circu-Pipe cooling to the mix and an 8-phase power circuitry. To my surprise it also has two IDE ports, not very common in the current times, even less on top boards.
This board has it all covered and, if AMD allows it, it can even do QuadCrossFire. Looks like a great board, but I'm holding my breath till I see some reviews.


Finally we have the P7N Platinum, a cut down version of the P7N Diamond. It features only three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, enough for Triple-SLI, the same 2x IDE ports, Circu-Pipe cooling and got its power circuitry cut to only 4-phase. The rest is pretty much the same, as they're derived designs. Look for a lower price on this one, more or less 175eur.

HD3870X2, R680 to be released in January

AMD will be releasing the contender to "king of the hill" of the graphics card market in late January, though no official release date has been issued yet.
AMD has the hardware ready but it still needs to have the CrossfireX driver ready in time or it risks being trounced by reviewers, with good reason. Nvidia will be answering with it's D8E dual G92 card, around the same time, but it seems to be late in the development cycle.
AMD needs to pull this one off fast, if it wants to claim victory, even for a short while.
I'm confident it will all boil down to who has the better quad SLI/Crossfire and not the better hardware.
Nvidia has the lead in hardware specs and experience in this kind of driver work, so it should come out on top when the dust settles.

GPGPU guru recruited by AMD

Mike Houston, Folding@Home's GPGPU client developer has been recruited by AMD to work on architecture design. Houston is responsible for the support of ATI GPUs in the Folding@Home client and is a valuable addition to the green team.
AMD currently has much work to do on architecture design, Houston will probably be helping AMD with it's Fusion project and general purpose computing in future architectures of AMD's graphics division.
This is a similar move as the one Intel did a while back, when it hired Daniel Pohl for it's work on ray-traced modifications to Quake engines.

AMD Phenom X4 9600 Black Edition to lauch this quarter

AMD has announced it will release a Black Edition of it's new Phenom X4 9600 CPU.
Details are a bit unclear, but if it indeed does get released this quarter, it will only feature an unlocked multiplier and the B2 revision of the K10 core at 2.3GHz, which had problems at 2.4GHz+. Put that way, I see no use for a CPU sold for overclocking which can't be overclocked while assuring stability. Only B3 versions of this SKU appealing.

nForce 790i - More details

A few weeks after the launch of the nForce 780i nVidia will introduce the 790i to reign as the top performing chipset from Santa Clara.
Current information points to a DDR3 supporting chipset which can also handle 1600FSB CPUs without any kind of overclocking.
It will be the real chipset worthy of the 700 series designation and should also bring some additional performance improvements that didn't make it to the 680i, err... 780i.

Core 2 Duo "Wolfdale" E8400 Review

Expreview has a review on the yet to be launched Core 2 Duo E8400, codenamed Wolfdale and part of Intel's Penryn family of 45nm CPUs. Aside from the performance improvements we've witnessed already, when the first samples of QX9650 started showing up. What really makes me want to take my hat off to Intel is what they've managed to do in regards of heat output on these new CPUs.
Even overclocked it runs very cool, they managed to reduce power consumption by about 10%, but the CPU temperature has been reduced by as much as 30%, even when running the same clocks and voltage as the old E6850. Sure this ain't what they promised with the new 45nm process when they announced it a few years ago, but they're on the right path to end current leakage. It has plagued all recent CPU architectures and made Intel bury the Netburst architecture.