Seasonic X Series 760W Power Supply Review
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Antec Announces Six Hundred V2 Mid-Tower Gaming Chassis
Antec today announced a new edition to its lineup of gaming PC enclosures, the Six Hundred V2, an upgraded version of the original Six Hundred chassis. The Six Hundred V2 is positioned as a mid-range case in terms of size and price and is intended for gamers and enthusiasts looking for good performance in a clean design.
The Six Hundred V2 has several new features including a front-loading 2.5" hot swap hard drive caddy designed to be compatible with today's solid state drives. Other features include a CPU cutout on the motherboard tray to make installation of aftermarket CPU coolers easier and improved cable management features to keep your case neat and tidy. A top window panel adds what Antec calls "moonroof" visibility.
“The Six Hundred V2 is a pure, simple gaming case at its finest,” said Scott Richards, senior vice president of Antec. “With this case, we’re broadening our line of gaming cases to address the space between the products for value-minded and high-performance gamers, respectively. As a mid-range case, the Six Hundred V2 is designed for consumers who appreciate lean, gaming-focused engineering, and still expect innovative performance features of Antec gaming cases.”Other standard features include a bottom-mounted PSU, seven expansion slots and 11 drive bays (six internal 3.5” HDD bays, three external 5.25” HDD bays, one internal bottom-mounted 2.5" SSD drive and the built-in hot swap 2.5” SATA HDD caddy) and three front USB 2.0 and Audio (AC’97 and HDA compatible) I/O ports.
Antec has announced immediate availability with a MSRP of $109.95US.
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NVIDIA GeForce 266.58 & AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix Drivers Released
It is time for new drivers for your video cards as both NVIDIA and AMD have new drivers ready for your card of choice. On the NVIDIA side you have the GeForce/ION 266.58 drivers while AMD has the Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix drivers. The NVIDIA drivers add in support for the GeForce GTX 580 and 570 video cards but will work on any NVIDIA card from the 6 series on up. There are performance improvements for 400 and 500 series cards compared to the previous drivers, with games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Just Cause 2 being among the ones tested for an increase. StarCraft II is getting ambient occlusion support which means the shadows will be getting an improved visual look. 3D Vision is also getting an improvement, with a changed installation and a larger selection of games and programs supporting it. There are new SLI profiles, including ones for the upcoming MMO Rift: Planes of Telara, as well as a whole host of other features you'll just have to find out by looking at the release notes.
On the AMD side, the Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix drivers bring improvement to the HD 6900 and 6800 series of video cards. Both series get a performance increase in 3DMark Vantage, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, and even Unigine gets an OpenGL improvement. The 6800 series even gets performance increases in Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033, and Batman: Arkham Asylum, to name a few. The Catalyst Control Center is getting a new prototype option for improved tessellation controls which allows users to adjust the settings to their liking. There is an "AMD Optimized" setting for it, but currently nothing has been profiled for that so you will need to adjust it by yourself. A long term goal for the "AMD Optimized" setting is to set the tessellation level to something that will work the best for your card while not impacting visual quality, something that will surely appease many people if AMD can come through on it. However, it seems AMD's Driver Team hit a snag and have delayed the 11.1a Hotfix driver until the middle of next week. The reason for the delay is a few last minute tweaks were added, and possibly get WHQL certification, so nothing bad happened to it. You can download a release candidate version of the driver now, but the updated one should be out by the 25th or 26th.
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AMD HD 6750/6770 Video Cards on Company Web Site
Back in September 2010 there was a bit of buzz generated over the leak of supposed secifications for the AMD Radeon HD 6770/6750 graphics cards. Now we can offer a bit more information from none other a source than AMD itself as it has both cards posted on the AMD Radeon HD 6000-series section of its web site.
For the HD 6770 we have:
- 76.8 GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
- Up to 1.36 TFLOPs compute power
- TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
- 800 Stream Processors
- 40 Texture Units
- 64 Z/Stencil ROP Units
- 16 Color ROP Units
- 73.6 GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
- Up to 1.008 TFLOPs compute power
- TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
- 720 Stream Processors
- 36 Texture Units
- 64 Z/Stencil ROP Units
- 16 Color ROP Units
As these cards aren't due out until sometime next month, we'll just have to wait for the full specification list as well as pricing information.
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Lancool Unveils First Knight Series
Lancool has officially introduced the PC-K63, PC-K59 and PC-K57 in its new First Knight series of mid-tower cases. Each model is constructed out of SECC steel and sports an all-black exterior. Standard features include anti-vibration and tool-less installations of components, as well as two pre-drilled holes for watercooling tubes.
Both the PC-K63 and PC-K59 dimensions clock in at (W) 215mm x (H) 530mm x (D) 530mm while the PC-K57 comes in at (W) 210mm x (H) 472mm x (D) 505mm. The PC-K63 comes with two 140mm front LED fans, two 140mm top fans, and a single 120mm LED rear fan, the PC-K59 comes with two 140mm front fans and a single 120mm rear fan, and then the PC-K57 comes with one 140mm front fan and a single 120mm rear fan.
The Lancool PC-K63, PC-K59, and PC-K57 will be introduced in early March, and will cost $128, $97 and $78, respectively.
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Silverstone Launches Fortress FT03 Case
Silverstone has just announced its newest case, the Fortress FT03. Unlike the past versions, the FT01 and FT02, the FT03 is a rather unique mini tower case that measures 235 x 487 x 284mm. It is capable of fitting micro-ATX, mini-DTX, and mini-ITX motherboards inside its aluminum-steel frame. There are three 3.5" bays, one 2.5" bay, and one 5.25" slot-loading drive bay. There are anti-vibration washers on each drive bay so noise should not be an issue. There are four expansion slots on the rear while the front I/O panel has two USB 3.0 ports and audio in/out. There are two bottom 120mm fans and one top 120mm fan to help keep the system cool. Internally, it can fit a graphics card up to 350mm in length and a CPU cooler up to 167mm in height, so it seems to be pretty spacious inside.
The Silverstone Fortress FT03 is available in black or silver for $169.99 and should be available now.
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Berkeley Students Win the 2010 StarCraft AI Competition
The original StarCraft was released in 1998 and since then has been one of the most popular games around. Anyone who has played the multiplayer aspect knows that there is a great deal of strategy required and each match presents a unique challenge. A team from UC Berkeley created the Berkeley Overmind, an AI system, to enter into the 2010 StarCraft AI competition. Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have found that StarCraft presents an excellent environment to teach and practice a variety of AI concepts. The system was developed and tested against some excellent StarCraft players, and was able to win in some cases. Check out the process the team used to get to the final iteration, and subsequently win the 2010 StarCraft AI competition. There was a host of challenges and interesting solutions discovered by the researchers. Anyone who played StarCraft or is interested in AI will enjoy this story.
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AMD Announces New Fusion-Based Embedded G-Series Platform
AMD's Fusion platform is certainly picking up steam and now a new item has been added to the list of announced products. The AMD Embedded G-Series platform is the latest product to feature a Fusion part and these are being tailored for set-top boxes, in-car computers, and even small form factor PCs. The whole motherboard looks to be just a bit bigger than an optical drive and features a Bobcat APU. The board can have support for two sticks of DDR3 while the Bobcat APU, available in single or dual core, will have speeds up to 1.6GHz. Fujitsu, Compulab, and Haier are some of the companies interested in the Embedded G-Series and the uses for a low-power yet graphically intense product could be unlimited.
Fujitsu is planning on releasing two Mini-ATX motherboards while Kontron is planning to have three SFF systems ready for the platform. These products and more are expected to launch shortly, though no exact date was given.
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PNY Introduces High-Density 4GB Memory Modules
PNY today introduced two new 4GB high-density memory modules, perfect for computer upgrades. First up is the desktop DIMM module, running at 1333MHz. This module has a CAS latency of 9 and operates at 1.5V (± 0.2V). Next is the SODIMM module for laptops, which is a bit slower than it's desktop counterpart at 1066MHz. The laptop module has a CAS latency of 7 and also runs at 1.5V (± 0.2V). It is worth noting that the desktop module features a compact, gold-coloured heatsink where as the laptop module is made of bare PCB and memory chips, with no additional protection. The 4GB PNY DIMM DDR3 4GB 1333MHz and SODIMM DDR3 4GB 1066MHz memory modules will be available soon, priced at approximately $81 and $75 respectively.
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Nintendo 3DS Official U.S. Release Date On March 27
Nintendo has announced the official U.S. Nintendo 3DS release date for March 27. Previous details and news articles relating to the Nintendo 3DS can be found here and here. It will come pre-loaded with 3DS Camera, Face Raiders, Sleep Mode with a pedometer and Activity Log, 3DS Sound, and an Internet Browser and eShop that will be available after a system update. Online Friend Codes will also be specific to each 3DS system rather than a game. The official price has been confirmed at $249.99 USD in either Cosmo Black or Aqua Blue color schemes, and Nintendo has updated its list of over 30 games that will be available during the launch window (from March 27th until early June).
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