ATI has published a new DirectX 10 demonstration staring Ruby of 270MB and a video of this demonstration (for the 1280x720 version download this .zip file and for the Windows Media 320 x 270, the video is available on line. This demonstration is of course designed to show the performances of the Radeon HD 2900XT. AMD's graphic division insists on the richness of the environment but also on the calculation power of the R600 for physics effects with a series of details (accumulation of snow, face details, fur around the neck…). HDR is also part of the game? Additionally to Windows Vista, this demonstration requires a Radeon HD with 512MB, a high end CPU and 1GB of RAM memory.

	Following a sudden 10% rise last month, DDR2 prices continue to go down. The price of one chip of DDR2-667 has reached $1.79 instead of $1.89 after the brief rise last month. DDR-400, stable last month but now also impacted by this new price reduction, has reached $2.74. Hard to tell when prices will be on the rise again. One thing is sure though, at these prices memory is very cheap.

	Seagate proudly announced this afternoon the release of platters with a storage capacity of 250GB, but we have obtained some information about the Spinpoint F1 that started to be listed by German shops about 10 days ago. The 1TB versions, HD102UJ and HD103UJ, respectively feature 16 and 32 MB of cache and 3 platters with a storage capacity of 333 GB! 320, 500 and 750 GB versions are also scheduled to be released. They will use respectively 1, 2 and 3 platters. Additionally to the lower thermal dissipation or noise level, Samsung's other advantage for having less platters is the reductions of productions costs… and this is also beneficial for end users! The price of the 750GB version in Germany is 160-180 € depending on the cache size and 230-250 € for the 1TB. For comparison, 200-210 € is what you have to spend for the Hitachi and Seagate 750 GB hard drives and 310€ for the Hitachi 1TB, who was the only one so far on this segment. The only problem is that the exact release date of the Samsung SpinPoint F1 isn't yet known.

	Seagate announced with a press release the shipment of new hard drives of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 line featuring platters of 250GB (180GB previously). This storage density will be the base of Seagate's future hard drive with a storage capacity of 1TB and 4 platters instead of 5 for the Hitachi 7K1000 (this is a good thing for the product temperature and noise level). Seagate hasn't communicated the release date of the 1TB version.