IT-Code-News: IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 25/08/2012

Two New Z77 mITX Announced
Over the past couple of days, two new Z77 mini-ITX motherboards have been seen on the radar. The first is Gigabyte's Z77N-WiFi model, to be released alongside the H77N-WiFi equivalent.

Gigabyte have migrated the Z77 chipset to the top of the board, as seen by the chipset heatsink and the SATA/mPCIe slot. The power delivery is devoid of cooling - judging by the mounting on the board this is how it will ship. Oddly enough for a mITX we get dual gigabit Ethernet, both Realtek, combined with a Realtek ALC892 audio chip. The placement of the USB 3.0 header is a little odd being towards the rear, as well as the SATA ports. The main criticism may come due to the socket area, where should users wish to pair this board with a beefy GPU, the CPU will be limited in air cooler size. Looks like All-In-One coolers may be preferential here. Estimates state that this board will cost around $140 at release.
The other mini-ITX to enter the market comes from MSI in the form of the MSI Z77IA-E53. We snapped this motherboard back at Computex, but now it comes to full release.

In a similar layout to the Gigabyte, we get the Chipset up top, along with the SATA ports and USB 3.0 header. With the MSI we get a free mSATA port and WiFi/Bluetooth at the rear. Chipset heatsinks also make an appearance, as well as a full 8-pin CPU power connector. Though similarly to the Gigabyte, the CPU socket is near the PCIe slot. No word on release or pricing as of yet.
These two motherboards will join the three Z77 mini-ITX already on the market from Zotac, ASRock and ASUS. Not to mention that EVGA will also join the mini-ITX party soon with their own board hopefully arriving next month. Out of these six, I have two in for review and hope to get as many of the others as possible. Would you prefer them reviewed one-by-one or all at the same time? What are you looking for in a mini-ITX motherboard? Let us know in the comments.

Gallery: Two New Z77 mITX Announced

Choosing the Best 120mm Radiator Fan: Testing Eight Fans with Corsair's H80
As an enthusiast it can be difficult to just "set it and forget it," to assemble a system and decree "this is as good as it's going to get." There's an inherent need to tweak and continue to tweak, to eke every last ounce of performance (within reason) out of our systems. Over the past few years, liquid cooling has become less the province of the extreme enthusiast and more accessible to the average user thanks to closed loop coolers manufactured by Asetek and CoolIT and brought to market by companies like Thermaltake, Antec, and Corsair.

The pump and radiator are only part of the equation, though; part of what makes even a decent closed loop cooling system tick is having a good fan configuration. Reading specs on the fan boxes helps a little, and visiting forums can certainly help, too, but we wanted something a little more definitive. After a couple of weeks of testing, we have results to share.

Qualcomm Announces upcoming LG Smartphone with APQ8064 and MDM9615 Inside
We've been talking about how the next upcoming smartphone platform from Qualcomm will be the combination of a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad core APQ8064 alongside an MDM9x15 baseband for LTE for some time now. Xiaomi was first to announce their APQ8064 based smartphone, the Mi-Two. Today, Qualcomm has reached out with some news about an upcoming LG smartphone with just that combination inside, and issued the following statement:

Qualcomm will supply the latest Snapdragon™ S4 Pro platform to LG, enabling LG’s new quad-core smartphone, which is currently in production with anticipated commercial availability in Korea in September and global rollout to follow. This smartphone will be the newest commercial and global device to offer a quad core CPU Snapdragon S4 processor along with 3G/LTE multi-mode capabilities, delivering a superior mobile experience for voice, web browsing, games, user interfaces and other graphics applications.

That combination can mean only one thing - APQ8064 alongside MDM9x15, and though we don't play in the rumor space, we've seen an LG phone with those specifications pop up a few time in benchmarks and other leaks online. The race is on to see whether LG or Xiaomi will be first to ship an APQ8064 based phone, and it's looking like September will be a busy month.
Update: I've just received confirmation that this upcoming LG phone does indeed use APQ8064 and MDM9615, so that combination is confirmed.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 25/08/2012

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