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Asus P5WD2 Socket 775 motherboard

Thursday, December 8th, 2005 | Motherboard Reviews, Reviews | No Comments

The P5WD2 socket 775 motherboard is the second in line to its slightly higher featured Premium version. This model offere nearly all of the same features, but lacking a few of them. It still offers all the best featues and is a good pick if you want to save that little bit of money.

In terms of performance, this board compares almost identically to its bigger brother, the Premium. It’s features are nearly the same except for a few notable differences.

Here is a listing of the main features…

• Socket 775
• Supports up to 4GB of memory
• PCI-e 16x, 4x and 1x slots and 1 PCI slot
• SATA controller with RAID 0, 1 and 5 support
• USB 2.0 and network

In a nutshell, the differences are, no extra network port, missing pair of SATA headers from an extra chip, no firewire and no wireless support.

These features are good things to have, but for many people they may be overkill. One network port if fine for most uses and if you need more than 1 you probably have an add-in card to do the job. The better SATA solution has been left in. The missing firewire could be bad for those that use it for video. Wireless would have to be bought seperately. And considering that the WiFi on the Premium model is not that good, it’s no loss.

Besides these notable ommissions you get a top of the range board for less than the top of the range board. Provided you can do without those parts, you are in for a good deal for your next Intel based system.

Pros

• Fully featured
• Priced well
• Good audio

Cons

• No firewire

Asustek Notebook with Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 GPU

Thursday, December 8th, 2005 | News | No Comments

Asustek have released a budget model with the latest GeForce Go 7300 graphics processing unit. This move will offer users of the product a more powerful graphics solution, allowing better 3D and video capabilities.

Source: Digitimes

Massive growth expected for multi-core processor market

Thursday, December 8th, 2005 | News | No Comments

The multi-core processor market is set to grow rapidly int the next decade. The amount of multi-core processors will spread into all markets where processors are currently used. The benefits of the multi-core systems will help boost their market share.

Although both Intel and AMD now have dual core processor offerings AMD’s are perceived to be in the lead due to the fact that they were the first to release a dual-core processor computer.

Although dual-core computer processors are now the latest thing, processors with more cores are expected in the future and this is just the start of a trend that should continue.

Source: Digitimes

ATI 90nm Mobility Radeon X1600 launched

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 | News | No Comments

ATI announced that the new Mobility Radeon X1600 based on a 90nm production process is now available. Asustek announced the introduction of this GPU in its A7G notebook later this month.

Other notebook manufacturers have followed suite introducing the GPU in their own notebooks too. Mass shipping should start in the middle of this month.

ATIs intention is to migrate all of its notebook chips to PCIe by the end of the year, phasing out the older AGP8x.

Source: Digitimes

Palm might launch Linux-based smartphones

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 | News | No Comments

Palm is likely to introduce the Linux operating system to its line of smartphones. It will continue using its own Palm OS as well though.

This move comes after their acquisition of a developer of Linux handset software.

Source: Digitimes

Plastic Logic 10 inch plastic display

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 | News | No Comments

Plastic Logic, who develop plastic electronics revealed their super-cool plastic display.

It’s a printed active matrix backplane driving an electronic paper frontplane from US-based E Ink.

The 10 inch display has 4 level grayscale and up to 600×800 resolution.

This material makes it easy for use in some applications like mobile devices where really thin glass is not the best option, it also consumes very little energy. It’s also far more resistant to breaking than glass.

Another bonus is that touch sensitivity can be built into it too.

Source: Digitimes

Intel to stop taking royalty fees on entry-level chipsets

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 | News | No Comments

According to reports, Intel will stop taking charges on chipsets from SiS that support its entry-level CPUs.

There is usually a charge of $1.50 for each chip, which it will drop, in order to maintain dominance in the entry-level market.

This seems to be in reaction to the increased dominance of non-Intel systems and a slide in shipment of Intel platform PCs.

Source: Digitimes