Fujitsu: 250GB in 2''1/2 and 9.5mm thick NVIDIA ForceWare 158.42 Lost Planet demo: beware of benchmarks Radeon HD 2900 XT watercooled

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Fujitsu: 250GB in 2''1/2 and 9.5mm thick   Posted on 15/05/2007 at 23:21 by Nicolas - source: Fujitsu

	Today, Fujitsu has unveiled a new series of hard drive for laptops named MHY2 BH to be released this quarter. Spinning at 5400 Rpm, this series of 2"1/2 hard drives has a storage capacity of 250 GB despite a thickness of 9.5mm only. This let us believe that they only include two platters. Fujitsu already sells a 2"1/2 hard drive with a storage capacity of 300 GB but it is 12.5 mm thick (this isn't standard for laptops). For now, only Samsung announced a similar density with the HM250JI that features two platters but only uses three sides. The other specifications of the MHY2 BH released are the SATA 1.5 Gbits /s interface, 8MB cache, read/write access time of 12 and 14 ms, average power consumption of 1.9 Watts during these operations and 24dBA noise level in standby. The designer of these products is apparently pretty confident and is planning on selling 10 million units in the fiscal year 2007 ending March 31, 2008.

NVIDIA ForceWare 158.42   Posted on 15/05/2007 at 22:49 by Nicolas

	The ForceWare 158.42 beta that we used in our benchmarks with Call of Juarez because of its optimizations for this DirectX 10 demo are now officially available for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista. Beside this optimization, the usual issues corrected and the performance improvements for 3D applications, we noted that the inf installation file does only mention the GeForce 8800. The GeForce 8600 but also the GeForce 6 and 7, mentioned several times in the webpage of these drivers, aren't compatible with this new version. In the same page, we noted that NVIDIA announces the support of DirectX 10 for configurations equipped with GeForce 8800 in SLI and says two lines below that this support will only be activated in a future version of the drivers. If this last point gives rise to a smile, we are surprised to see that a company who has made of unified drivers its strategy now publishes drivers that do not even officially take in account the entire DirectX 10 line and GPUs compatible with DirectX 9, even if the last one was released a few days ago.

Lost Planet demo: beware of benchmarks   Posted on 15/05/2007 at 21:28 by Nicolas

	Nvidia announced to have published on nZone the of first demonstration of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition even if in practice the download link doesn't seem to be available yet. This is one of the first DirectX 10 game and it will be available from June 26. This is of course of game "The Way It’s Meant To Be Played". The game director, Jun Takeuchi, declared that "Lost Planet: Extreme Condition takes full advantage of NVIDIA GPUs to transport gamers into our snowy world. It seems that AMD hasn't been able to access the game and optimize drivers unlike its competitor. In short, it is important to keep our distances with the first benchmarks published for this game. The latter reports that the GeForce 8s are much faster but this situation could change rapidly. Update at 11h28, the link is now activated and a DirectX 9 version of the Demo is also available.

Radeon HD 2900 XT watercooled   Posted on 15/05/2007 at 15:38 by Marc

	Sapphire is the first manufacturer to announce a modified Radeon HD 2900 XT compared to the original design. This TOXIC model features a water-cooling heat device, announced logically as being more efficient than the original one. This system using a box requiring two 5"1/4 bays and a 120mm fan is in fact the Thermaltake Bigwater 760i. Sapphire indicates that it can cool down a second TOXIC card if there is a CrossFire configuration but also the CPU. We noted though that at CeBIT Thermaltake said that to cool down the CPU, it was imperative to add a second radiator. It is important to point out that this water-cooling system isn't the most efficient. The fact that the heat dissipated isn't directly extracted from the tower is problematic. Sapphire announced that the core clock could be improved by at least 15% compared to the 750 MHz du HD 2900 XT. The TOXIC version will be available in a couple of weeks at an unknown price.