This Just In: New SSDs from Patriot, OCZ & OWC
I had a lot of stuff come in this morning. First the iPad 3G, then Zotac's next-generation ION box and a bunch of NDA'd CPUs. A little earlier in the week however I got a delivery of a few new SSDs that I've been diligently working on. While the point of This Just In was to catalog parts as they come in so you could see what I'm working on, one particular SSD was too interesting to not start testing right away.
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This Just In: Zotac's ZBOX HD-ID11 Next Gen ION
That's Zotac's HD-ID11-U, a nettop based on the dual-core Atom D510 and NVIDIA's 16 core next-gen ION with 512MB DDR3 frame buffer. The system shipped entirely barebones so we'll be suiting it up and running whatever preliminary tests we can on it over the weekend. As I mentioned earlier, drivers aren't final so don't expect a full rundown anytime soon.
The system sports 6 USB ports, HDMI & DVI out, eSATA, Ethernet, optical audio out, headphone/mic jacks and a SD card reader. Internally you've got one 2.5" bay for a SATA HDD (or SSD) and a single SO-DIMM slot for DDR2.
If you want a closer look at the system head over to our pics in the Gallery.
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This Just In: Apple iPad 3G, Same Speed as iPhone 3GS over 3G?
Today the first iPad 3Gs will go on sale starting at 5PM at Apple Retail Stores and Best Buy. Those who preordered at the time of announcement should be receiving their shipments via Fedex before then. The device itself hasn't changed except for a black strip at the top where the 3G antenna is located and there's now a removable micro SIM tray along the left side.
Activation is handled entirely within the iPad OS itself and AT&T offers two domestic dataplans: $14.99 for up to 250MB of data transfers per month, and $29.99 for unlimited. If you'd like to add international data roaming the options are as follows:
| iPad 3G Data Plans | ||||||
| 30 Day Billing Cost | ||||||
| 250MB (Domestic) | $14.99 | |||||
| Unlimited (Domestic) | $29.99 | |||||
| 20MB (International) | $24.99 | |||||
| 50MB (International) | $59.99 | |||||
| 100MB (International) | $119.99 | |||||
| 200MB (International) | $199.99 | |||||
Sigh. I long for the day when we'll get reasonable wireless internet pricing.
The most interesting thing I've run into thus far is the fact that while operating on the 3G network we appear to be network bound rather than CPU bound. I timed simultaneous web page loads on both the iPhone 3GS and iPad 3G to get an idea of 3G performance on the devices. Each test was repeated at least 3 times and as many as 7 times to ensure repeatability. Outliers were thrown out and averages are reported below:
| iPad 3G vs. iPhone 3GS - Cellular Network Performance | ||||||
| Apple iPad 3G | Apple iPhone 3GS | |||||
| Load www.anandtech.com | 28.3 seconds | 21.3 seconds | ||||
| Load www.digg.com | 12.9 seconds | 12.0 seconds | ||||
| Load www.engadget.com | 27.6 seconds | 26.1 seconds | ||||
| Load www.arstechnica.com | 19.0 seconds | 20.7 seconds | ||||
| Load www.techreport.com | 11.2 seconds | 10.9 seconds | ||||
The iPhone 3GS is actually slightly faster over 3G. I suspect this is an OS/browser optimization issue because loading up AnandTech would occassionally come up lightning fast on the iPhone, presumably because it's loading almost entirely out of cache while I could never get the iPad 3G to do the same. If we look at the rest of the tests the race is far closer with the iPhone 3GS usually getting the slight edge over the iPad 3G. The opposite is true in one of the benchmarks. At the end of the day it seems that the A4 does nothing for web page loading performance over 3G. It's only over WiFi that you'll see a big performance gain over the iPhone 3GS (or perhaps on web pages with few images/ads).
More pics of the iPad 3G in our Gallery.
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Sapphire announces the passive HD 5550 Ultimate
Today, Sapphire have announced the latest in their lineup of ATI 5xxx series graphics cards - the passively cooled HD 5550, dubbed the 'Ultimate'.
The party piece of this hardware comes in the form of the wrap around heatsink - the passive design and the low power usage (10W in 2D or idle mode) is destined to appeal to HTPC and quiet systems enthusiasts who yearn for DirectX 11.
Using a Sapphire-custom PCB and AMD's 40nm Redwood GPU, you will see 320 shaders clocked at 550Mhz, with a 1GB DDR2 memory at 800Mhz connected via a 128-bit interface. Seems odd that they're using DDR2 and not GDDR3, given the increased heat dissipation mechanics of GDDR3 and the cost between them is negligible.
In terms of battling against the multimedia, the card offers DVI, HDMI and and VGA outputs while conforming to the HDMI 1.3a standard for full support on Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. ATI's on-board Unified Video Decoder will provide hardware decoding of all Hi-Def media.
Pricing so far has not been announced, but expect it to be in the region of £70/$90.
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