Details about Intel's ''Sandy Bridge'' surface

The 32nm quad core chip, successor to Nehalem.

Surprisingly, CanardPC claims that the chip has already taped out in June. News had already surfaced that "Clarkdale", a 32nm chip, would be released sooner than expected. A tape out so early is very unexpected for an architecture that's still at least one year and a half away, which, if true, may mean that Intel will do some reshuffling of it's roadmap.

Like "Clarkdale", "Sandy Bridge" is going to feature an integrated graphics core but this time an on-die one. The release of this new architecture is expected sometime in late 2010, after the 32nm "Nehalem" based "Westmere" core - family of which "Clarkdale" is part - is released, in 2010.

Another of "Sandy Bridge" major features is the support for Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which increases the width of vector instructions from 128bits to 256bits, among other new instructions.

Asus M4A77TD - 2 oz copper PCB

Asus embraces 2 oz copper PCBs after Gigabyte's lead.

The "new" 2 oz copper PCB feature translates into a thicker PCB, which allows for better cooling, especially when watercooling is employed, when compared to regular PCBs:


The motherboard also supports 8 + 1 phases for power supply, ensuring further that a lower temperature is achieved even during overclocking - it will also handle 140W CPUs just fine.
Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) is supported, to enhance overclocking, courtesy of the SB710 southbridge. Northbridge duties are handled by the AMD 770 chipset, which is more than fine for most people and it also supports x16/x4 CrossFire - a rather unusual feature on AMD 770 baed motherboards.
There's alsa a GbE controller that sits on the PCIe bus and the board throws away the aging floppy connecter, while providing one IDE channel.

Thermaltake ISGC V320 VGA cooler

An interesting new VGA cooler from TT.

I own a Thermalrigh HR-03 GT and while it's a good cooler, there's one huge design flaw in it: it doesn't handle high speed, high thermal output RAM very well. This is mainly because of the two chips that are below the heatpipes:


The sinks itself also have little dissipation area, whereas the others will be just fine. This is worse if you place the cooler on the back, instead of the front of the PCB, since no fan will be blowing towards the RAM chips:

This is not my favorite setup but I can't mount it other way. My HD 4830 hates it and I have to switch to watercooling soon or something will get fried.

While Thermaltake's RAM sinks aren't the best, they're quite enough and you will have two fans blowing over the card.

There's enough space to handle probably even larger RAM heatsinks but it seems you will lose more than one adjacent slot with this cooler. Making up for it is a decent design that promises good cooling performance.

ISGC V320 @ Expreview

Thermaltake PW880i watercooling kit

Thermaltake another shot at watercooling solutions.

The cooling system trades elegance for compatibility, as the system should fit most cases with the use of the shroud that fits on the back of the case's exhaust fan.

We will always have DIY kits, I rather go for that myself, although Thermaltake has been improving it's WC product's performance it's still far from what the likes of Swiftech and Alphacool can deliver.


More @ Expreview

Zalman CNPS 9900 NT

A nickel plated version of Zalman's top cooler.

The cooler uses the same 120mm PWM fan as the copper based twin and the recommended retail price is $75 or 65eur.

There are no reviews yet but the nickel plating will decrease it's cooling ability slightly. It provides protection from oxidation, something that will plague the copper twin - it will look uglier and will start to perform worse as oxidation builds up. Convenient cleaning with proper cleaning solutions is recommended from time to time on copper, whereas here is not essential. I once put a CNPS-7700 on cleaning liquid and it practically cleaned itself - the copper oxidation started boiling and cleaned dust with it - and resulted in a 10ºC drop in load temperature.


Source: Case and Cooling FR

Phenom II TWKR @ 6.6GHz

LegitReviews had a bench session with the overclocking friendly CPU and achieved an interesting clock with LN2.

AMD says the processor is good for 100-200MHz more than the Phenom II X4 955 with air/water cooling. LegitReviews achieved 4GHz on it while the X4 955 would get stuck at 3.9GHz, with the voltage used being around the same 1.45v. Nothing extraordinary IMHO but still good for some free publicity.

Now... where's my sample? I surely like to take it to the extreme!

LG Full LED LCD TVs

LG releases an LCD with 3360 LEDs.

The new screens are available in 55" sizes, have a dynamic contrast of 5,000,000:1 through the use of local LED dimming and also feature support for 240Hz screen refresh. There's also support for content streaming via an uncompressed wireless data technology.

Local LED dimming is a major feature from new television screens due mainly to the high dynamic contrast ratio that becomes available with this technology. Proper implementation will be necessary for it to become a must in LCD TVs, as most dynamic contrast implementations in LCD TVs still leave a lot to wish for. The technology is very promising but has been having a tough time to reach mass production since it was announced a couple of years ago. Coupled with S-IPS panels, that are used on quality LCD TVs, both technologies deliver a very interesting image quality that most people assumed was years away only to come on OLED based screens.

Prices are steep, as is all new technology, at around $5,500.

Via VR-Zone

Where's the Zii?

Zii, a recap with 6 months passed.

Upon the press release of Zii marketing stuff, I speculated that the chip might be some kind of souped up FPGA, a programmable hardware processor of some sort. This could mean the chip would be able to have dedicated, re-programmable hardware for everything from H.264 or VC-1 video acceleration to other kinds of applications like sound processors. Video acceleration is mostly out of the ball game for the desktop space since even integrated graphics started bringing dedicated hardware inside.

Creative, or should I say Zii Labs, continues to be very secretive about what is inside the said chip, leading me to the conclusion that the device may indeed be some kind of FPGA for which it would be hard to find a purpose than doesn't fit FPGAs already. Most of them are used in rapid hardware design prototyping, industrial applications and some have even directly programmed scientific computational codes for use in high performance computing. No one has been able to find a consumer application for it, aside from things like Gigabyte's iRAM - expensive, limited production parts.

Creative has been contacted for comment but have yet to issue any statement about the hardware innards of the ZMS-05 chip - not even a hint of what's so wonderful about the device - providing only marketing information of little or no use. Also, not even one consumer device has been announced that has the ZMS-05 chip inside - much less a 1 peta FLOP cluster, as touted before.