IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 19/03/2010

CoolIT Systems ECO A.L.C. CPU cooler review

We're pretty big fans of CoolIT's original A.L.C. water cooling unit for CPUs here at Elite Bastards, but in more recent times the company has released a whole new range of water coolers to try and catch the eye of prospective buyers. We'll hopefully be taking a look at the original A.L.C.'s most obvious successor, the ECO, for ourselves in due course, but for now here's Tweak Town's take on this particular offering.

The specifications are a bit different this time around as I don’t have the typical height and weight of the cooler since this unit is comprised of many parts. The Fluid Heat Exchanger (FEH) is comprised of a copper base plate with micro-channels to aid in the waters transference of heat. Just above the block is the included CFF1 pump that runs off an amazingly low 1W of power draw. All of this is enclosed in a plastic cover with the CoolIT name and ECO moniker as well. CoolIT ships the ECO with the Intel LGA775/LGA1156/LGA1366 universal mounting attached, but also provides mounting for AMD AM2 and later CPU’s. This end of the unit had a 3-pin motherboard connection that should be plugged into the motherboard CPU header.

Read all of their findings (with pictures aplenty) over here.

View or post comments.

Read More ...

---

Microsoft readying Xbox 360 Slim?

Sony managed to find favour with console gamers with the release of the PlayStation 3 Slim - Can Microsoft do likewise and give their own console a shot in the arm with the release of an Xbox 360 Slim? Certain photographs and rumours currently doing the rounds suggest that this move might well be on the cards.

The mainboard only resembles the currently used motherboards for Xbox 360, however, its look is inline with what can possible be expected from the code-named Valhalla design. Earlier rumours revealed that Valhalla features a chip that combines central processing unit and graphics and memory controller hub, hence, is less expensive to make. At present Microsoft produces microprocessors for Xbox 360 at IBM, whereas the GMCH is manufactured at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Microsoft did not comment on the news-story and has never officially confirmed the Valhalla project.

X-Bit Labs carry the story.

View or post comments.

Read More ...

---

AMD Catalyst 10.3 preview driver available for download

We discussed it earlier today, but if you want to give it a go before it's released in its WHQL certified form then Catalyst 10.3 is now here for both desktop and notebook systems if you're running Windows Vista or 7.

ATI Catalyst Control Center - ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements

• Display Bezel Compensation
  • Easy-to-use wizard shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels
• Per-Display Color Adjust
  • Individual Color, Brightness and Contrast controls
• Multiple ATI Eyefinity Groups
  • Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays
• Improved Display Configuration switching
  • Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalystâ„¢ Control Center profile manager
• Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes

ATI Catalystâ„¢ support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses

• AMD has updated it's Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)

The driver is now available from the AMD Underground web site.

View or post comments.

Read More ...

---