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AMD

Submission + - AMD Releases Three New Low-Cost CPUs

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: With its new Fusion APUs coming out in about a month, you wouldn't think AMD would still be tweaking its processor lineup. But it released three new processors today—the Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition, the Phenom II X2 565 Black Edition, and the Athlon II X3 455—to balance out its price-performance offerings. The Black Edition CPUs with their unlocked multipliers are probably the most interesting, particularly the Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition which has six cores, runs at 3.3 GHz, and costs only $265. As the name implies, the 1100T represents only a minute increase in clock speed over the 1090T. It even has the same amount of L2 and L3 cache (3MB and 6MB, respectively), is based on the same 45nm production process, and is designed for the currently standard AM3 socket. Given that 1090T got the downward nudge in price to $235, however, the 1100T offers slightly better performance for less money.
Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia Releases GTX 580 with First Full Fermi GPU (pcmag.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: It's taken months longer than Nvidia probably would have liked, but the company has finally released its first video card using the full GF100 GPU. The GeForce GTX 580 builds upon the technologies used in the GTX 480 (which came out in March), but adds the 16th streaming multiprocessor for a total of 512 CUDA cores, 16 polymorph engines, and so on. This gives the card excellent video capabilities, especially in tessellation-heavy DirectX 11 games. It compares very favorably with AMD's highest-end offerings though this all could change in the next couple of months when AMD releases its new Cayman performance cards.
Media

Submission + - Build a $500 Linux Media Center PC (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Does anyone still build media center PCs anymore? People don't seem to talk about them much these days, but this ExtremeTech story makes it sound like there are still good reasons to have them around. It discusses how to build one for just $500, using Ubuntu and MythTV. Have you ever tried building one of these? Is it worth the time and trouble, even if it doesn't do HD?
Media

Submission + - Build a $500 Linux Media Center PC (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Media center PCs have been around for almost a decade, and you don't hear people talk about them much anymore--probably because the functionality has become so ubiquitous elsewhere. But ExtremeTech has a story on how to build a Linux media center PC for about $500 (using Ubuntu 10.04 and MythTV, of course) that suggests there may be reasons to still care about these systems.
Software

Submission + - Civilization V: A First Look (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Sid Meier released the original, dangerously addictive Civilization in 1991, and it and its sequels and spin-offs have been captivating PC gamers ever since. ExtremeTech has a hands-on look at Civilization V, which adds lots of new graphical elements, changes the map grid from diamonds to hexagons, and simplifies a lot of the elaborate game-play aspects of Civ IV. You already know it uses Steam, but some of the changes might also steam longtime Civ lovers. It'll be interesting to see how it's received by both regular Civ players and wargame aficionados (at whom many of the changes seem aimed).
Graphics

Submission + - OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: The Khronos Group has announced full details for the OpenGL 4.1 specification. Among the new features of the spec, which comes just five months after the release of the 4.0 specification, is full support for OpenGL ES, which simplifies porting between mobile and desktop platforms. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, this new spec has on the graphics industry--more compatibility could change the way many embedded systems are designed. There are lots of other changes and additions in the spec, as well.
Hardware

Submission + - Build a $200 Linux PC (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Computers are getting cheaper to buy every year, but there are still sometimes advantages to building them yourself. ExtremeTech has a story about how they sought out the parts for a $200 computer that (of course) runs Linux as a way of breaking the budget barrier. They even test it against a commercially available eMachines nettop to see how it compares in terms of performance. This probably isn't something everyone will want to do, but it's an interesting example of something you can do on the cheap if you put your mind to it.
Data Storage

Submission + - The Best Way to Use SSDs (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Most people by now know that SSDs are a lot faster than traditional spinning hard drives. But it's harder to figure out the best way to use SSDs if you want to add one to the system you already have without going broke to do it. (The 1TB hard drive is immediately out, for example.) ExtremeTech has a story looking at the best way to choose which drives to buy and the best things to do with them once you have them, comparing startup and file load times across several different models as well as with hard drives and RAIDs.
Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia takes 3D to multiple monitors (extremetech.com)

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: A lot is happening in 3D in 2010, but on the PC front, Nvidia is staying at the head of the pack with its new 3D Vision Surround platform. It's like AMD's Eyefinity technology, but with 3D added. It looks great, but you'll need at least two Nvidia graphics cards and three expensive monitors to take advantage of it. Is true 3D gaming really worth thousands of dollars to you? Nvidia is betting that it is.
The Internet

Six Major 3G and 4G Networks Tested Nationwide 115

Posted by timothy from the actually-tested-locally dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently tested six 3G and 4G networks to determine which ones were the fastest (and slowest) in 18 different US cities. They focused on data, not calls, and used their own testing script and methodology, which combined various kinds of uploads and downloads. Using laptops, more than a dozen people ran more than 10,000 tests; they found AT&T is both the fastest national 3G network, and the least consistent. Sprint's 3G system was the slowest of the 'big four' carriers, but the most consistent. When the test results were broken down by regions, AT&T led on speed in the Southeast, Central, and West, but T-Mobile took the crown in the Northeast region. Sprint's 4G network was fast where it was available, but it was surprisingly slower than 3G in some cities. The fastest AT&T download seen, at 5.05 megabits/sec, was right behind Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA. The fastest connection in any of the tests was a blazing 9.11 megabits down on Sprint 4G in the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta, GA. The slowest city, on average, was Raleigh, with average 3G downloads of 880kbits/sec."
Patents

Submission + - Are Trade Secrets and Trademarks the Future? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: The Internet's perfect copying machine makes the ideas behind copyright — now in its 301st year — largely irrelevant today: once a copy is online somewhere, it's impossible to take it down everywhere. Could the arrival of low-cost, high-quality desktop 3D printers do the same for patents, by enabling anyone to download and print off analogue objects? With copyright and patents nullified, what might manufacturing companies turn to in order to fight back against these perfect counterfeit versions? How about trade secrets and trademarks?
Music

Submission + - Do You Still Use a Sound Card?

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: After reading yesterday's Slashdot story about the ages of PC music as rendered through The Secret of Monkey Island , I started wondering about this recent piece on ExtremeTech about whether people still use sound cards. Some of the driver problems they experienced at the start of the Windows Vista days turned me off to them, and it's been a while since I had one installed on my home machine. But back in the Monkey Island and King's Quest days, you had to have one. Sure, the audio is better from integrated solutions today, but is it--and the processing cycles a card saves--really worth it? Is there any point to buying a sound card with today's technology (and if so, which one), or is integrated audio really good enough for pretty much everyone?
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Steam for Mac: Hot, Hot, Hot (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by WesternActor
WesternActor writes: Now that Steam for Mac has been released, how is it? Pretty darn good, it turns out--if really a lot like the Windows version, and with a software selection that still desperately needs to grow. But this could be the start of something huge for Mac users, and finally wipe away the one big reason PC owners so often claim their systems are better.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Shows Off Future Product Tech

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Microsoft opened a portion of its fifth TechFair to Silicon Valley residents, demonstrating more than 15 displays which included everything from real-time translation to mobile-to-mobile networking to improved image stitching. Top two which really stood out were the translating telephone which actually used no "telephone" at all; it was a test to discover how well Microsoft's speech algorithms could interpret speech, translate it, and then speak the translation using text-to-speech algorithms. And then the Manual Deskterity, a new paradigm for a user interface; a right-handed user's left hand, for example, can be used for gross manipulations of objects, with the right can be used for fine manipulation, such as with a pen. It sounds a bit simplistic, at least at this stage. Since one of the charters of Microsoft Research is that the work eventually be moved to product teams, there's a good chance that the prototypes will eventually be made available to the public at large.

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