Saturday, March 27, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Overclockers Club) 27/03/2010


Overclockers Club
Samsung N130 Netbook Review

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AMD First to Support OpenGL 4.0

At the beginning of the month, the Khronos group announced the OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3 specifications. ATI has now implemented it into its latest preview drivers, making them the first to adopt the new specifications. OpenGL 3.3 is compatible with its GPU lineup from the Radeon HD 2000 series all the way up to the current generation 5000 series, while OpenGL 4.0 will only be supported by the 5000 series. The new OpenGL 4.0 specification also features some OpenCL attributes, which brings game developers onto a whole new level as well as featuring its own version of tessellation. All that's left is NVIDIA to implement the new OpenGL specifications into their drivers.

Read in-depth about OpenGL 4.0.


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Remembering Verran Contest Has Begun

As we all know, Verran was an excellent and valued person of the community. He helped members a great deal, and provided a mass amount of information to everyone that participated at all on the forums. To honor this along with his recent passing which has saddened the staff along with regular forum posters and lurkers, there has been a contest started to show the community really how much Ryan has done here at Overclockers Club. Many prizes are being given away that have been provided by a multitude of different companies, along with two full system builds.

There are rules and guidelines to the contest however, and only certain members can enter. All information concerning this great remembrance for Ryan Bredin can be found at the contest page on the forums.


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PowerColor Adds Two Cards to Its Go! Green Series

PowerColor has added two new cards to its Go! Green series of graphics cards - the Go! Green HD5670 and Go! Green HD5570. These two cards take advantage of Go! Green features such as near silent operation and low power consumption. Those low power requirements translate into no external power connections. The ultra-efficient passive cooling solution on each board makes use of ultra-thin cooling fins fully covering the GPU and memory, enabling the copper heatpipes to cool the card sufficiently without the need for a noisy fan. PowerColor didn't reveal pricing or availability on the new cards.


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T-Mobile Releases HSPA+

On Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that it will unleash the fastest Internet in the country. T-Mobile has decided that it will upgrade its existing 3G service to a new High-Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+) clocked at 3.5G. T-Mobile launched its network in Philadelphia last fall and the service is now commercially available in New York, New Jersey and suburban Washington D.C. T-Mobile plans to bring HSPA+ to Los Angeles soon. T-Mobile also confirmed that 3.5G will be backwards compatible with its existing 3G network.


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Pwn2Own Claims Several Victims

The Pwn2Own contest, a gathering of hackers and security professionals, has once again descended on Vancouver. Several web browsers had vulnerabilities exposed, with only Google Chrome coming out unscathed. An iPhone hack allowed a team to run their code on the device, giving them access to the SMS system. With that, they were able to see all text messages, even those that had been deleted. Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8 all fell victim to the hackers, though sandbox mode in Windows 7 protected the OS from the latter two. Users shouldn't be worried about their systems being compromised as the hackers aren't allowed to disclose the hacks until the vendor has had a chance to fix the vulnerabilities.


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Cheapest Google Android Phone to be Released by Kyocera

Two days ago, Kyocera announced its first Android handset – the Zio M6000 Smartphone. It will be launched next quarter and features CDMA2000. It features a spacious 3.5" WVGA display along with a 3.2 Megapixel camera able to record at 30 fps. It is powered by a Qualcomm MSM7227 600MHz processor. It will come with the standard WiFi and Bluetooth and will be run by Android 1.6, but should be upgradable to Android 2.1. So, what makes this phone stand out so much? Well the astonishingly low price of between $169 and $216! All that's needed now is a GSM version and Kyocera will definitely have a winner on its hands.


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Ubisoft Apologizes, Offers Free Games

If you were one of the many people affected by Ubisoft's new draconian DRM measure, you may be able to get a free game. Ubisoft has apologized to the players affected by the downtime of its verification servers for owners of Assassin's Creed 2 and is offering a choice of four free games. The games offered are Prince of Persia, Endwar, H.A.W.X. and Heroes Over Europe - all of which are free of the DRM verification requirement.

The server downtime for the DRM verification made it impossible for purchasers of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 to play the game and Ubisoft is actually doing something to hopefully appease the disgruntled owners. It is a pretty nice apology, but is it enough for any of you who could not play the brand new game you spent good money on?

There is a small caveat, however. It seems that Special Edition owners get the choice of games while the regular edition owners get to download the extra content only available in the SE.


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New 750GB and 1TB 2.5-inch HDDs from Toshiba

Squishing 1TB of data into a 2.5-inch form factor HDD isn't anything new, as we saw Western Digital become the first to achieve that feat back in July last year. Two of the drives Toshiba announced yesterday fall into the same category as those WD drives, being aimed squarely for use as external drives or in high end gaming laptops or workstations. That is because the 750GB and 1TB parts in the MKxx59GSM series (yes, that's hardly a memorable model name) come in the 12.5mm format that won't fit into most standard laptops. Those drives feature three platters, 8MB of cache and spin at 5,400RPM. The other 750GB drive Toshiba announced is the MK7559GSXP, which does manage to squeeze into the standard 9.5mm form factor and can therefore be used in most laptops. That currently makes it the biggest drive available for such applications, achieving this by using a two platter design that gives it an impressive areal density, which should lead to improved performance. The drive also spins at 5,400RPM and comes with 8MB of cache.

The 12.5mm 750GB and 1TB drives are due to ship to manufacturers in the second quarter of this year (with samples currently available), while the 9.5mm 750GB MK7559GSXP is due to ship in the third quarter. When any of these will hit retail as bare drives and what they will cost isn't known.


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YouTube and Wikipedia Temporarily Crash

Today, Wikipedia and YouTube were found to be down for some time, limiting user access to both sites. The main problem concerning Wikipedia was an overheating issue at one of the European data centers, in which the servers automatically shut themselves down to prevent damage to large amounts of hardware. Usually when this happens, which is not often at all, a backup system in Florida takes over the entire server load, but this also failed today, and shut down the site globally. Wikipedia is now back up though, and should be able to be accessed worldwide. YouTube on the other hand was down for a few hours, but Google has not stated exactly why or how this outage occurred. Embedded videos still worked as well as individual video pages, but the overall issue has been resolved fully now and the video site should be able to be completely accessed.


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LG Shows Off LED-lit 3D HDTV

It is not quite the sets that were shown off at CES this year, but LG has shown off a new TV that is only 22.3mm thin. The TV is the LX9500 and it is set in a bezel that is only 16mm, so not only is the TV extremely thin but there is also minimal bezel to detract from the picture. The TV is LED-lit and has a 1080p resolution, plus a refresh rate of 400 hertz which is more than enough for the active shutter glasses to display your 3D content. The LX9500 also boasts a 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, which is nice, but no word on the static contrast ratio has been announced which is what really matters. The TV is available in a 47 inch model and a soon to be released 55 inch model.

The price of the TV will be just a hair over $4,100 when it launches in Korea for the 47 inch model, but no word on the cost of the 55 inch model has been announced at this time.


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