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Submission + - New WD Black2 Dual Drive Combines Full SSD and HDD in Same 2.5-in Package (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Hybrid drives are not new to the computing world as the benefits of a hard drive with a large(-ish) NAND cache are well known. But desktop users will likely agree that having a full capacity SSD as a primary drive with a secondary, spindle based hard drive for mass storage is the most popular solution. For many notebook users that simply isn't an option as space is limited in most laptop chassis but today's brand new Dual Drive, the Black2 from Western Digital, mixes things up. In a single 2.5-in hard drive form factor, WD has packed a 120GB SSD in addition to a 1TB hard drive that share a single SATA connection and that can be installed in systems with a single drive bay. This isn't a hybrid, Windows sees two different partitions. There are some interesting software quirks and the SSD performance is middle of the road based on PC Perspective's testing, but the Black2 performs well enough in both SSD and HDD testing to get their full recommendation.

Submission + - NVIDIA Brings Own Tablet to Market, Tegra Note 7 (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: What do you do when you can't find many partners willing to put the work into your product that you think it deserves? Well if you are NVIDIA, you build your own and sell it. The first product that is part of NVIDIA's Tegra Note platform is being released, a 7-in form factor stock Android tablet called the Tegra Note 7. Based on the Tegra 4 SoC with its 4+1 Cortex-A15 CPU and 72-core GPU design, the Note 7 is among the fastest small tablets on the market and also includes features like DirectStylus support, front facing speakers and a $199 price tag. It does lag behind the Nexus 7 in battery life and screen resolution, but otherwise in PC Perspective's testing the Tegra Note 7 is able to compete in a crowded market quite strongly.

Submission + - NVIDIA Releases Full GK110 GPU, GTX 780 Ti for $699 (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: The battle over the discrete graphics card space continues to stay heated. AMD started releasing its new set of graphics cards, culminated with the R9 290X Hawaii flagship just before Halloween. That left a large performance and pricing gap between the $499 GeForce GTX 780 and the $999 GTX TITAN (that was clearly overpriced for gaming). Today's release of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti starts with a $699 price tag and offers performance that is 10-15% higher than the AMD 290X at 2560x1440 and 4K resolutions. This also marks the first consumer part to enable the entire GK110 Kepler GPU which now includes 2,880 cores (25% more than the original GTX 780) running at an 875 MHz base clock, 240 texture units, 48 ROPs and 3GB of GDDR5 running at 7.0 Gbps.

Submission + - Limo Company Hack Exposes Juicy Targets, 850k Credit Card Numbers (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: A compromise at a U.S. company that brokers reservations for limousine and Town Car services nationwide has exposed the personal and financial information on more than 850,000 well-heeled customers, including Fortune 500 CEOs, lawmakers, and A-list celebrities. Krebsonsecurity.com writes about the break-in, which involved the theft of information on celebrities like Tom Hanks and LeBron James, as well as lawmakers such as the chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The story also examines the potential value of this database for spies, drawing a connection between recent personalized malware attacks against Kevin Mandia, the CEO of incident response firm Mandiant. In an interview last month with Foreign Policy magazine, Mandia described receiving spear phishing attacks that spoofed receipts for recent limo rides; according to Krebs, the info for Mandia and two other Mandiant employees was in the stolen limo company database.

Submission + - India launches spacecraft to Mars (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by neo12
neo12 writes: India has successfully launched a spacecraft to the Red Planet — with the aim of becoming the fourth space agency to reach Mars.

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290 Shows Outstanding Performance for $399, Rivals $549 290X (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD keeps releasing new GPUs, this time in the form of the Radeon R9 290, dropping the 'X' from last month's R9 290X. Based on the same Hawaii GPU that includes 6.2 billion transistors, a 512-bit memory bus and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, the R9 290 drops 256 shader processors (to hit 2,560) and 16 texture units compared to the 290X. However, due to a higher maximum fan speed, the R9 290 will likely run at higher out-of-box, sustained clock speeds than the R9 290X at default settings. As a result, the R9 290 is not only beating the $499 GeForce GTX 780 but rivals the R9 290X at $549. Considering the R9 290 will have an MSRP of just $399 starting today, that is going to sound awfully impressive to enthusiasts.

Submission + - AMD R9 290X "up to 1GHz" tests like 727 MHz (base), 850-880 MHz (boost).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: The recently released AMD Radeon R9 290X has an advertised shader clock rate of "up to 1GHz". The card brought formerly $1000-level performance down to a $550 price point. Its benchmarks tend to fluctuate wildly, however, based on the card's ability to maintain an intended maximum temperature of 95C. By analyzing across a variety of fan speeds, AMD's default settings are characteristic of a 727 MHz base clock with an average boost to 850-880 MHz. At these defaults, the card will not maintain 1GHz for more than a couple of minutes (or less).

Submission + - AMD R9 290X "up to 1GHz" tests like 727 MHz (base), 850-880 MHz (boost).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: The recently released AMD Radeon R9 290X has an advertised shader clock rate of "up to 1GHz". The card brought formerly $1000-level performance down to a $550 price point. Its benchmarks tend to fluctuate wildly, however, based on the card's ability to maintain an intended maximum temperature of 95C. By analyzing across a variety of fan speeds, AMD's default settings are characteristic of a 727 MHz base clock with an average boost to 850-880 MHz. At these defaults, the card will not maintain 1GHz for more than a couple of minutes (or less).

Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Part Of North America Out Of Its Release Date.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - AMD Radeon R9 290X Fixes Pacing with New CrossFire

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD is releasing its fastest single GPU graphics card today, the $549 R9 290X based on a new, 6.2 billion transistor GPU called Hawaii. The brand new part has 2,816 stream processors and has a peak theoretical performance of 5.6 TFLOPS. PC Perspective has done a full round of testing on the card to see where it stacks up and it does in fact beat the GeForce GTX 780, a card that costs $100 more. In fact, it also compares well to the $999 GTX TITAN flagship. Maybe more interesting is the completely redesigned CrossFire integration that no longer uses a bridge and fixes the CrossFire + Eyefinity/4K pacing issues that have plagued AMD for some time. As it turns out, with this new hardware, 4K tiled display CrossFire appears to be corrected.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - Next Gen Graphics and Process Migration: 20 nm and Beyond (pcper.com)

Submitted by JoshMST
JoshMST writes: So why are we in the middle of GPU-renaming hell? AMD may be releasing a new 28 nm Hawaii chip in the next few days, it is still based on the same 28 nm process that the original HD 7970 debuted on nearly two years ago. Quick and easy (relative terms) process node transitions look to be a thing of the past with 20 nm lines applicable to large ASICs not being opened until mid-2014. This covers the issues that we have seen, that are present, and that which will be showing up in the years to come. It is amazing how far that industry has come in the past 18 years, but the challenges ahead are greater than ever.

Submission + - NVIDIA's G-Sync Is VSync Designed for LCDs (not CRTs).

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: A monitor redraws itself top to bottom because of how the electron guns in CRT monitors used to operate. VSync was created to align the completed frames, computed by a videocard, to the start of each monitor draw; without it, midway through a monitor's draw process, a break (horizontal tear) would be visible on screen between the two time-slices of animation.

Pixels on LCD monitors do not need to wait for above lines of pixels to be drawn, but they do. G-Sync is a technology from NVIDIA to make monitor refresh rates variable. The monitor will time its draws to whenever the GPU is finished rendering. A scene which requires 40ms to draw will have a smooth "framerate" of 25FPS instead of trying to fit in some fraction of 60 FPS.

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