For most people, the DVD optical media is enough. We had the floppy drives, then the CD, now we have the DVD, as well as the Blu-Ray or HD DVD, and while the latest was officially declared "dead," THX stepped ahead and started to dig Blu-Ray's hole before this data storage medium/technology reached its maturity. Why? Let's see...


First, let's point out this is only the personal opinion of a chief scientis at THX, and not an official position, but I can't find anything wrong with its way of thinking. Here's what Laurie Fincham said in an interview with Home Cinema Choice Magazine, when asked about HD DVD's death..."Personally, I think it’s too late for Blu-ray. I think consumers will only become interested in replacing DVD when HD movies becomes available on flash memory. Do we really need another spinning format?"

Indeed, flash memory is getting cheaper with each day, so if you can carry some memory cards in wallet with your favorite movies, instead of some large discs...why not? Even more, your huge movie collection may not have to fill an entire room in the future, which is also a good thing, in my opinion.

"By the time Blu-ray really finds a mass market, we will have 128GB cards. I would guess that getting studios to supply movies on media cards, or offer downloads, will be a lot easier than getting them to sign up to support a disc format," concluded Fincham.

To be honest, I have no plans to move on to Blu-Ray in the next 2 years, and if everything continues to move as it does now, we'll probably replace optical media with flash storage. That's good for me, in fact it's simply great. What about you?

Present day graphics cards are slowly moving from 512 MB towards a more generous 1GB total of video RAM. It’s the way things evolve, but not everyone thinks the say way. We see a bunch of GPU integrators that already offer 1GB graphics cards at a decent price. Take EVGA’s 8800GT 1GB edition, for example; it’s got one of the best price/performance ratios on the market. However, if you somehow feel that 1GB is not enough and you need more to match your system RAM, you'll be glad to know that Jetway is preparing 2GB versions of its 8800GT and 9600GT models. In order to accommodate the increased RAM capacity, both cards use a dual slot cooler that adds a series of minor design modifications to Nvidia's reference coolers.

Unfortunately, no GPU integrator, not even Jetway, is able to provide GDDR4 memories for the latest G9X GPUs. They might be following some strict directions from NVIDIA, presumably. Thus, Jetway’s new cards are using GDDR3 memory clocked at 1,800MHz and the 8800GT has its GPU clocked at 600MHz, while the 9600GT is clocked at 650MHz. If you compare the specs with a=other cards you’ll notice that there’s nothing special about clocks and features, save for those 2GB of RAM, which in 99 percent of the cases will be useless if you’re using these cards for games solely.

If you’re looking to buy one of these, you might want to wait a bit more as there is no info on price and availability for now.

Today, I have two ASUS-related news in the same package, and while the first one should be very interesting for all gamers out there, the second is bad for ASUS, but pretty useful for those planning to buy one of their high-end sound cards revealed recently, if Creative's claims prove to be true. OK, so these being the topics, let's take'em down one by one, shall we?


First, it seems that the new Xonar DX PCI Express 7.1 audio card doesn't really offer full support for Creative Technology’s Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) 5.0. In fact, Creative claims these cards don't have any support for EAX 5.0!

"With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards," said Phil O’Shaughnessy, Creative labs' vice president of corporate communications.

Hummm... while the above may not look good at all, let's move to better things - what about a video card with 3 GPUs from ASUS? Now, that's more like it!

The upcoming Asus EAH3850 Trinity card will feature no less than three MXM modules with ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics processors onboard, for a total of 960 unified shader processors, 48 texture units and 48 render back ends. No other details about the card are known yet, such as clock and memory frequencies, and ASUS hasn't decided yet if this interesting experiment should become a commercial product or remain in the concept stage. Why?

Unfortunately, the technological solution chosen may rise the price of this new card above $500, while its performance may not be much higher than a HD 3870 X2 card, currently priced around $450.

While ASUS officials didn't comment on this story yet, it would be interesting to see such a product on the market, but only if its performance will match the price, because otherwise, they may end up with a new Voodoo 5 6000 in their sleeve...

Started way back in 1928, as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, Motorola got its current name in 1947, but this term was used as a trademark since the 1930s. "Motorola" appeared when Paul Galvin and Joseph Galvin, the founders of the company, started to manufacture car radios. Since then, the company had a very long and interesting history, but it seems today they reached a turning point, because the in Schaumburg, Illinois - based company decided to split into two completely independent entities...


Lately, it seems Motorola's mobile phones sales didn't go as well as expected, so the company will be split into an individual company that's going to focus on handsets and supporting technologies for end-users, while the other one will work in the business and public services fields.

Greg Brown, Motorola's president and CEO, said "Our decision to separate our Mobile Devices and Broadband & Mobility Solutions businesses follows a review process undertaken by our management team and Board of Directors, together with independent advisors. Creating two industry-leading companies will provide improved flexibility, more tailored capital structures, and increased management focus – as well as more targeted investment opportunities for our shareholders."

Anyway, it seems this is not going to happen right away, because Motorola expects this separation to take place in 2009, because there are a lot of documents and agreements to be signed and approved until everything is over.

I’m not too sure launching the HD3780X2 and G92X2 cards was an inspired move on AMD/ATI’s and NVIDIA’s behalf. I mean the next-gen R700 and G100 GPUs will be released some time in the second half of 2008 and all the GPU makers can think of is how to get people buy relatively expensive stuff in shorter and shorter periods of time.

It’s clear that AMD/ATI is going for the dual or even multi-GPU platform and NVIDIA will certainly adopt something similar for their G100 GPUs. But sometimes, some GPU integrator like Asus comes along and shatters the balance between performance and price. Asus might be on AMD/ATI’s side when we take a look at their latest video card – the tri-GPU EAH3850 Trinity.

If NVIDIA has its Tri-SLI concept, why not help AMD/ATI counter that with a tri-GPU card, just for the sake of equality? CrossFireX would bring new multi-GPU setups and NVIDIA will go even further with G92X2 in Tri-SLI mode, but I did not expect anyone to actually use more than two cores with a single card.

Maybe ASUS wants to prove its ingenuity, demonstrating that it can go beyondAMD/ATI’s concepts. So here we have the EAH3850 Trinity - a three RV670 core video card monstrosity cooled by a heatpipe construction and a water block. The card is still just a concept and it hasn't been decided when or if it's going to be released, but Asus claims it works big time. A guess benchmarks will soon emerge and reveal the true potential of this setup.

The design of the card is quite unique, ASUS choosing to use a kind of modular design where two cores are located on the back and one on the front, each on their own daughter card. The cores are directly cooled by heatsinks and heatpipes that transfers the heat away from the cores to the heatsink located in the rear of the card, which in turn is cooled by a water block.

You also get a totoal of four DVI ports which can be used with up to four monitors, when CrossFire is deactivated. The big water cooling unit fits into two empty 5.25" slots. Really looking forward to learn about the actual retail price of this monster.