MODDING: blogs

Don’t you just love garage sales? Nokia is having one, selling off its N93 (original and best design) stock at silly prices. It’s the golf edition, too, which means it comes with an extra miniSD card that you can wipe and use. At £100 inc VAT it’s the bargain of the century. Just don’t mention firmware updates…

According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that itll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we dont even have a release timeframe at the moment.

The trial for Advanced Micro Devices' five-year-old antitrust suit alleging that competitor Intel unfairly manipulated the chip market has been delayed until February 2010. The trial was previously scheduled for April 2009, AMD spokeswoman Hollis Krym, said Friday.

AMD is accusing Intel of using illegal subsidies in order to coerce 38 companies in North America, Asia, and Europe to use its products, in some cases threatening retribution if those companies used or sold AMD products. It alleges that Intel pushed major customers, such as Dell, Sony, Gateway and Hitachi, into making exclusive deals in return for cash, discriminatory pricing or marketing subsidies.

VIA Technologies held a launch party on June 5 in Taiwan to officially announce its new VIA Nano processor (Isaiah) and a new standard for small form factor motherboards, Mini-ITX 2.0. Nvidia's general manager of MCP business, Drew Henry, appeared at the show lending weight to previous reports the two companies will be teaming up on a new CPU-chipset platform in the near future. It seems highly likely that a VIA/NVIDIA deal has been struck and that is good news for both of them and bad for Intel as the Atom is getting some competition. It only makes sense for Both VIA and NVIDIA as Intel and AMD are the dominant forces in the industry.

Although VIA made it clear it was not announcing any cooperation with Nvidia or related products at the event, sources at PC vendors have revealed that Nvidia's first VIA CPU-based chipsets will be launched in the first quarter of 2009. The MCP79 chipset will support VIA's Nano processors and a bus speed up to 1333MHz. The built-in graphics core will support DirectX 10, the sources contend. Both VIA and Nvidia declined to comment any further regarding their cooperation, but industry watchers believe the appearance of Henry at the launch, and comments he made about VIA's Nano CPUs, point to a clear indication of the relationship between the two companies.

AMD has informed their partners that the new launch date for Radeon HD 4800 (RV770) series is now 25th June therefore Radeon HD 4850 (RV770PRO) and Radeon HD 4870 (RV770XT) will launch together. AMD has also finalized the core clocks of the 4850 and 4870 cards and they will be clocked at 625MHz and 750MHz respectively. Radeon HD 4870 with GDDR5 is expected to perform 1.3x better than the Radeon HD 4850 with GDDR3.

Here are some close-up shots of a stripped down GeForce GTX 280 card for you
guys to enjoy over the weekend. The markings on the IHS is labeled as
G200-300-A2 and has a total of 16 Hynix 0.8ns GDDR3 memory chips.

E90 owner Attila Katona has a problem. Since upgrading to the E90, he’s found that most native S60 games don’t make good use of the device’s huge screen. With that in mind, here’s a record of his mission to seek out games, from any source, that do use the E90’s display more effectively.

ThermoLab recently introduced the Micro and Nano Silencer PCT (Power Clamping Technology) CPU coolers aimed at those of want to lower noise levels. 'Power Clamping Technology' is a new technology developed by ThermoLab that helps the heat sink cooling fins make better contact with the heat pipes. Does the technology work? Read on as we look at the ThermoLab Micro Silencer PCT and Nano Silencer PCT on a system running an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor!