Microsoft rebuts talk at DiskCon that current Vista drivers must be improved for hybrid drives to work better.
Microsoft on Sept. 21 denied claims by hard drive industry executives and analysts that the world’s largest software company isn’t providing optimized drivers for the new hybrid drives about to come into the market.
Click for more on Microsoft: Vista Supports Hybrid Storage Drives »
Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.
The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second.” This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use.”
Seagate plans to add solid-state drives based on flash memory chips to its lineup of storage products sometime in 2008, which will introduce the drives across a range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, offering various storage capacities.
SSDs, as solid-state drives are also known, use flash memory instead of magnetic disks to store information. Flash is a type of non-volatile memory, which means the chips retain stored information when power is off. Other memory types, such as DRAM, lose data when the power goes off.
Click for more on Seagate to offer solid-state drives in 2008 »
JMicro controller found in 965P/P35(and maybe future X38) causes a lot problems with IDE optical drives, is there anyway to fix it?
Intel moves a big step since the release of 965P chipset, the new ICH8(R) southbridge, partnered with the it, is the first chipset to completely drop support of EIDE devices. While one could argue that the removal of PATA support is a needed step forward in technology, we firmly believe that Intel should have waited until the next generation ICH for this change. The Optical Drive market is still about 80% PATA based. While this development might spur the optical drive suppliers into offering additional SATA drives in the near future, it does not address the requirements of the current PATA installed base. Most motherboards using ICH8/ICH9 also add an additional chipset for PATA support, and the JMB361/JMB363 from JMicro are the most popular among them.
Click for more on HowTo: Fix the JMicro IDE Issue in Intel MBs »
Not everyone’s a gamer. When you see ATI or Nvidia release chips for cards that will cost upwards of $600, quite a few people simply shake their heads and wonder what the hell those companies are thinking. Aren’t there any next-gen cards for non-gaming PCs? You know, computers that are mainly used for Web surfing, email, and shopping online; or for business, finances, spreadsheets, and monitoring stock tickers?
Meanwhile, Windows Vista is making its best attempt to steamroll across the country, though the actual need for it is questionable at best. But some of us are early adopters, and we want the latest. Not all of us who fall into that category, however, want to pay an ungodly sum of money for a graphics card that will handle Window Vista’s frosty-cool Aero interface.
Extremetech.com tested 8 DX-10 cards and here is the quick specification:
| ATI HD 2400 Pro |
ATI HD 2600 Pro | ATI HD 2600 XT |
ATI HD 2900 XT |
Nvidia 8500 GT |
Nvidia 8600 GT |
Nvidia 8600 GTS |
Nvidia 8800 GTX |
|
| Memory | 256 DDR2 | 256 DDR2 | 512 GDDR3 | 512 GDDR3 | 256MB DDR2 (512 avail) | 256MB DDR2 (512 avail) | 256MB GDDR3 | 768 GDDR3 |
| Memory Interface | 64-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 512-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 384-bit |
| Stream Units | 40 | 120 | 120 | 320 | 16 | 32 | 32 | 128 |
| Die process | 80nm | 65nm | 65nm | 65nm | 80nm | 80nm | 80nm | 90nm |
| Core clock (MHz) | 525 | 650 | 800 | 740 | 450 | 540 | 675 | 575 |
| Shader clock (MHz) | N/A | 600 | 600 | 740 | 900 | 1180 | 1450 | 1350 |
| Memory clock (MHz) | 400 | 500 | 1000 | 1650 | 800 | 700 | 2000 | 1800 |
| Price | $70 | $100 | $130 | $400 | $80 | $150 | $200 | $580 |
3DMark06 Test
Vista Experience Index
And the conclusion:
Source: ExtremeTech.com
