Seagate: 1 billion hard drives delivered The nForce 740a: very affordable SLI AMD: another VP quits AMD launches the Phenom X3 8x50s Gigabyte in the Extreme

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Seagate: 1 billion hard drives delivered   Posted on 23/04/2008 at 19:27 by Nicolas

	Seagate, the largest hard drive manufacturer, announced being the first to have delivered more than a billion units for a total capacity of roughly 79 million terabytes after 29 years of presence on this market. According to the firm’s estimations, the next billion should be attained in the next five years! We should add that Seagate managed to get its hands on two large defunct manufacturers; there was Maxtor and Quantum’s hard drive division which it had previously acquired. The ST506, the first hard drive Seagate launched in 1979, had a capacity of 5 MB and cost $1500 at the time. Currently, the Californian company offers the Barracuda which attains the terabyte. We will just have to wait and see if SSDs will manage to entirely replace are good ole’ hard drives one day.

The nForce 740a: very affordable SLI   Posted on 23/04/2008 at 19:05 by Nicolas

	According to VR-Zone, Nvidia should soon launch an inexpensive nForce 740a SLI at the end of the month. Destined for AMD CPUs, it will wedged between the nForce 730a and 750a; however, contrary to the latter, it will not manage a VGA output. Two PCI-E 2.0 x16 ports will be found on motherboards but they should be configured in x8 when two graphic cards are installed. There will also be 2 PCI-E 1.0 lanes, 12 USB 2.0 ports, 6 SATA-II and a Gigabit Ethernet connector.

AMD: another VP quits   Posted on 23/04/2008 at 18:08 by Nicolas

	After Dave Orton, former CEO of ATI, Henri Richard, vice-president in charge of sales and marketing, Vijay Sharma, director of product marketing, Victor Peng, vice-president of Silicon Engineering and Phil Hester, CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and vice-president, just to name a few, it’s now Stephen DiFranco, vice-president in charge of retail sales and marketing, who is leaving the company. Dirk Meyer, the current president and COO of AMD recently made it clear that his company was resolving "executive" type problems and that more talented and experience personal would be recruited. He notably mentioned as an example the new CIO (Chief Information Officer), Ahmed Mahmoud, a veteran from Dell.

AMD launches the Phenom X3 8x50s   Posted on 23/04/2008 at 13:38 by Nicolas

	Today, AMD has announced the availability of the first Phenom X3 8x50s. You may recall, this is the Phenom triple core with B3 stepping of the Barcelona core. Three models are available: the 8750 (2.4 GHz) at $195, the 8650 (2.3 GHz) at $165 and the 8450 (2.1 GHz) for $145. All three have 3 x 512 KB of L2 cache and 2 MB of L3 shared between the activated cores. In terms of performances, we give you a good idea in our first test of the Phenom because we also benched an X4 with a deactivated core. One important detail is that the two Phenom X3 8x00s launched last month still use B2 stepping which suffers from the TLB bug. Therefore, it’s best to look before you buy!

Gigabyte in the Extreme   Posted on 23/04/2008 at 01:05 by Nicolas

	TweakTown has put online photos of the Gigabyte’s EP45 Extreme, a motherboard based on Intel’s P45 and which should be launched in early June. The least we can say is that chipset cooling and power sources are up to par. There are three PCI-E x16 ports but two are configured in x8 when using CrossFire and the third is cabled in x4. The rest is very classic: 3 PCI ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, an IDE connector, six SATA-II (therefore without an additional controller), dual Gigabit Ethernet, HD audio in 7.1, FireWire and Dual Bios. We will just have to see in practice if overclocking performances are enough to justify the price which should be high.