Don’t think for a second that our portly appearance and lazy demeanor means that we’re not hardcore. When we do stumble outside, it’s with one of these Oregon Scientific ATC5K rugged helmet cams attached to our heads, now that they’re available in Australia, and if that doesn’t make us hardcore, we don’t know what does… More »
Behold, every custom PC fanboy’s wet dream: The Reactor. It’s a sleek, black aluminium case with tons of hard drives (both swappable and integrated), an ultra-powerful processing chip, and three top-of-the-line video cards all begging to be overclocked thanks to the company’s special oil submersed cooling system. That’s right, the GPUs, CPU, power supplies, custom motherboard and three SSD drives are all completely dipped in oil. And it’s only around $US4000.
With the inclusion of two 512 MB GeForce Go 8800GTX graphics cards, the Black-Hawk XR5 will be the first laptop to feature such graphical power. Along with a 17-inch screen, Core 2 Quad processor and EV-DO support, Black-Hawk clearly is not messing around, and intend for the XR5 to be a Desktop replacement.
However, our friends over at Maximum PC say the XR5 images shown are renders (vapor alert!), and with so much horsepower in this thing, it will probably run hot, making it not lap-friendly. No price has been announced as of yet, but if all goes to plan the Black-Hawk XR5 will reach consumers in December, hopefully with a good cooling system. [PC Microworks via ubergizmo via Sci Fi] More »
AMD has just announced their Spider platform, which they claim is the best PC gaming platform out there. Spider combines AMD Phenom quad-core processors, up to four ATI Radeon HD 3800 cards and the AMD 7-Series chipset, with CrossFireX, HyperTransport 3.0, AMD OverDrive, AMD AutoXpress and Nonobtanium-Enhanced Flux Capacitors to provide massive acceleration for high definition 3D graphics. The experts, however, disagree: while strong, especially in the graphics department, the Phenoms are falling short on the frequency front compared to equivalent Intel processors. More »
AMD’s launching “the world’s first Stream GPU with double-precision floating point technology,” the FireStream 9170, and the AMD FireStream SDK for Stream processors. Running a cool $2000, the 55nm chip pulls less than 150 watts of juice while pumping out 500 GFLOPS of computing power.
Also packed onboard is 2GB of GDDR3 memory, which, combo’d with asynchronous direct memory access, “ensures data can flow freely without interrupting the stream processor or CPU.” This parallel-processing piece of badassness will hit the market in the Q1 2008. More »
