AnandTech

 "Western Digital officially announced the 300GB based VelociRaptor a couple of weeks ago as the successor to the Raptor family.  We provided a preview of the drive and came away impressed with its performance although our review sample was suffering from early firmware problems and other maladies. 

Western Digital responded to our concerns quickly and provided us with a new drive. Western Digital still has not finalized the firmware for the retail market, but expects to very shortly. We will provide a full review of the drive including RAID and enterprise benchmark results once this occurs. The acoustic and thermal characteristics of the new drive did not differ from our previous results.  However, the performance differences noticed when testing the new drive is worth a quick update to our original article." 

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AnandTech

"After being blitzed by the NVIDIA marketing machine at CES 2008 about upcoming chipsets, we were excited about the technological possibilities NVIDA was planning to deliver a few weeks later. As it turns out, it was a few months later but as of today NVIDIA is officially introducing the nForce 780a SLI chipset and its family companions, the 750a SLI and 730a chipsets.

At first look, it appears NVIDIA has mastered the marketing checklist with features ranging from HyperTransport 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0 to the environmentally friendly Hybrid Power and performance enhancing Hybrid SLI capabilities. Of course, AMD has featured HT 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0 on their 790FX chipset since November and the 780G have had Hybrid CrossFire operating since March. However, AMD does not offer Hybrid power capabilities nor does the flagship 790FX offer integrated graphics capabilities. We will have to wait a few more months for the AMD 790GX to arrive for those two features."

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DailyTech

"Yahoo seemingly made its position absolutely clear -- it felt Microsoft's offer of $31 a share, a 62 percent premium on current prices at the time of the offer, was unfair and undervalued the company.  It argued that anything less than $37 a share, or roughly a 91 percent premium on the price at the time, would be unsatisfactory. In the end Microsoft dropped its offer, citing that Yahoo's expectations were unrealistic, while Yahoo tried desperately to reassure employees and shareholders that it had a plan to weather the tough times ahead.

However, it didn't take long for Yahoo to apparently start hoping that Microsoft would consider pursuing it again.  In a move like something out of a television drama, the company announced only 48 hours after Microsoft dropped its bid that it would be willing to negotiate for a sub $37 price and that it would be happy to reopen talks with Microsoft.

Chairman Roy Bostock indicated that Yahoo's stubbornness on the $37 dollar price was basically an effort to get a bit more money out of Microsoft and it really didn't hope to get that much.  He told the Wall Street Journal, "Listening to shareholders is very important but you'll get lots of points of view...we think a fair value for the company is $37. It was not a take-it-or-leave it statement."

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VR-Zone

"The initial experiment with a hybrid cooler apparently worked out fine so now Micro-Star International has unveiled a GeForce 9600 GT card equipped with a cooler based on the Hybrid Freezer technology. Painted in blasphemous red, the new G94 card features 64 Stream Processors, DirectX 10.0 support, a 256-bit memory interface and PCI-Express 2.0 readiness.

Featuring 512MB of GDDR3 memory and likely stock clocks, the new card has a cooling system that takes up two slots, is equipped with four 6mm thick copper heatpipes and has a fan that can be dead silent. The idea behind the cooler is to be both efficient and quiet so the fan will only work while the GPU's temperature is above 40 degrees Celsius, thus ensuring total silence while not gaming. Thile running the fan is slated to have a top noise output of 28dBA. Unfortunately, this new addition to MSI's 9600 family is not priced nor does it have a release date currently."

The Tech Report

"Through thick and thin, AMD executives have remained hopeful in their statements to the press and analysts regarding their company's future. In AMD's ongoing antitrust battle with Intel, however, the company has made the difficulty of the path ahead quite apparent. As InfoWorld reports, AMD's lawyers have filed a brief saying the company needs to double its market share in order to survive:

At the end of 2007, AMD had 13 percent of the processor market, "less than half of what it requires to operate long-term as a sustainable business," the brief said, explaining that Intel's alleged efforts to shut the company out of the processor business had largely succeeded.

"Measured on a revenue share basis, AMD made little progress growing its slice of the pie," it said.

AMD is presenting this information as evidence that Intel's alleged anti-competitive behavior has thwarted its growth—evidence that could potentially allow the chipmaker to demand substantial monetary damages from Intel. But paradoxically, InfoWorld says the brief's contents could backfire and "further spook corporate customers already wary of the company's financial troubles," reducing the company's market share in the process."

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The Tech Report

"Anyone who's been keeping a close ear to the rumor mill lately will know that Intel's next-generation 4-series desktop chipsets are expected to come out in June. However, DigiTimes has tapped its sources at motherboard manufacturers to obtain much more specific release information.

The site says Intel will launch new 4-series offerings at the Computex trade show, which will run from June 3 to June 7. Shipments of P45 and P43 motherboards will follow in the third week of the same month, so between June 15 and June 21. Only those two chipsets will see the light of day first, though: DigiTimes goes on to say G45 and G43 models with integrated graphics won't show up until two to three weeks later, giving Intel time to "correct issues with VC1 hardware decoding and to increase the graphics core frequency to 800MHz."

The same delay will apply to Q45 and Q43 chipsets for enterprise systems, which reportedly suffer from instabilities with current chips when Intel's Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O is enabled. A3 revisions of those two chipsets without that bug will start shipping "in the second week of July," DigiTimes adds."

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Fudzilla

"We've learned that ATI's new chip might end up 1.5 to 1.6 times faster than the current RV670 solution.

In the real world, this should mean that if one game gives 50FPS with RV670 that the new chip should be able to get you around 75FPS at the same settings. On average, the new chip will have to be at least 30 percent faster than the old one to make you even consider it but at least specification wise there is not anything that you might miss.

RV670 was a shrinked and better speced version of R600 with 512bit memory controller crippled to 256bit and it looks that R770 will get that memory upped to 512bit again. At least we know it will end up being fast but we still don’t know what's Nvidia’s real answer to this one."

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Hexus

"Intel's forthcoming P45 chipset, codenamed Eaglelake and successor to P35 chipset, Bearlake, is now just around the corner. We're expecting P45-based boards to be on display from all the big names at Computex later this month, but why wait 'till then? MSI has taken the opportunity to give us an exclusive look at its forthcoming DDR2-based board, the P45 Platinum.

Digitimes

"Intel will officially launch its 4-series chipsets at Computex 2008, while motherboard makers will start shipping products in the third week of June, according to sources at motherboard makers.

Initial 4-series chipset shipments will consist of the P45 and P43, for which the previously reported PCI Express compatibility bug has been fixed already. However, the G45 and G43 IGP versions will be delayed for another 2-3 weeks while Intel works to correct issues with VC1 hardware decoding and to increase the graphics core frequency to 800MHz.

Enterprise-based Q45 and Q43 chipsets are also to see a 2-3 weeks delay due to system instabilities found in the current B2 versions when VT-d is active. A3 versions of the chipsets are expected to start shipping in the second week of July.

Intel declined the opportunity to respond to this report saying it cannot comment on unannounced products."

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Hardwarezone

"The success of NVIDIA's graphics products in recent times have led to a large number of companies hawking NVIDIA products, slapping on their own logos and brands onto NVIDIA designed GPUs. In any case, it can be rather difficult for these board partners (especially if you're not one of the big Tier 1 brands) to stay competitive. One such relatively new brand is Zotac and while it is backed by a more established company, PC Partner, it is never easy building up a new brand from scratch.

So far, we have to say that Zotac seems to be doing reasonably well. One needs to be daring and innovative to grab the attention of enthusiasts and although Zotac's products aren't up to challenging the likes of ASUS and Gigabyte yet, the company has certainly done enough with its overclocked AMP! Edition to warrant a second glance. Here to continue the AMP! pedigree, we take a look at how Zotac amps up the GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB."

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