After a bunch of delays, NVIDIA's 9800 GX2 finally arrived, but it seems new delays hit other models from the series, and that's good news for AMD/ATI, since the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is still the "bang for the buck" king, and the most interesting part about the recent releases from NVIDIA is that the 9600 GT managed to deliver a better performance for a lower price than the G92-based 8800GT, so... we got a really interesting situation here, as we will see right away.


Currently, NVIDIA doesn't have any DirectX 10 entry-level card, and most of its recent products cover the upper part of the market, while AMD came up with a very strong onboard GPU, as well as probably the best entry-level gaming solution for the budget-conscious user, the ability to set up a Hybrid Crossfire configuration.

One of these days, I was checking out some reviews of various cards based on the NVIDIA 9600 GT design, and I was amazed to see that NVIDIA managed to kill one of their own products, the 8800 GT, by releasing a cheaper and better card. Now, they also have announced a delay...

According to official sources, it seems the GeForce 9800 GTX will be released on the 1st of April, instead of March 25th. Let's trust NVIDIA and suppose this is a mere coincidence (April Fools' Day...), and the $349 9800 GTX will arrive on that date. Other than that, rumors say that NVIDIA has to cut prices for the brand new 9800 GX2 to face the HD 3870 X2 threat, so the future looks simply great for gamers on a budget, but not only them (3-way SLI, anyone?)...

Do you remember the Matrix trilogy? I am sure you do, so I won't make this story longer than it should be, because it's not about the Matrix trilogy, and not even about The Animatrix anime or The Matrix Online MMORPG. In the Matrix movies, humans were used by machines as batteries, and that's exactly what I had in mind when I found out about the new chip designed by a team of researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments...


The new chip we're talking about is supposed to need 10 times less energy than the current generation, and since its power requirements are so low, it could be recharged by the human body!

The MIT researchers claim that pacemakers or health monitors using this new chip could be powered by the human body heat or motion, without ever needing to recharge any batteries.

How did they do it? Basically, it's all about making the chip operate at a very low voltage. While the current generation of processors needs about 1 volt, this new design works with only 0.3 volts!

Unfortunately, this chip is currently at the proof of concept stage, but Anantha Chandrakasan from MIT says we may see it available "in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas," which doesn't seem that long, after all.

While medical applications of the chip may go into areas that seem to be yet Science-Fiction, such as wireless body sensor networks, the US military will probably see this chip in action before the rest of us, since the research was partially funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...so I must ask you a question: do you think we're getting closer to "The Matrix", or not?

Do you feel your laptop is not strong enough to keep up with everyday's applications? Don't worry, because the multicore madness is slowly moving into the mobile realm too. Obviously, I am not talking about the dual core mobile processors, because there are plenty of them available. The interesting part is that, according to latest news, we may see quad cores on laptops becoming available pretty soon...


Obviously, this time it seems Intel is leading the way once more, and the first mobile processor with no less than four cores is expected to be Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300, based on the Penryn architecture and having 12MB of L2 cache, using a 1066MHz FSB and with a TDP of only about 45W. Another pretty obvious fact is that this CPU will be manufactured using the 45nm technology, but that's about everything about it.

Since this CPU will probably be a part of the upcoming Montevina platform, renamed as Centrino 2, I am sure there will be a lot to say about it in the coming months, so be sure to stay close to us - bookmark the site, subscribe to our news by email, do what you have to do, because we'll do our best to keep you informed!

Despite the fact today another week of work comes to an end for a lot of people, for computer hardware stores, this is a big day. Two different series of products, coming from two companies that have been fighting each other for decades, have just begun shipping. The companies are Intel and AMD, as you probably figured out already, and the products...we'll see right away!

Despite the fact I am an AMD fan and I don't have any reason to hide it, I will start with Intel's part of the story. Some of the big mainboard manufacturers have just started shipping their products using the Intel X48 chipset, despite the fact this chipset wasn't officially revealed by Intel yet!

We're talking about ASUS and Gigabyte, and while retail stores all over the world may start selling them by the end of the month, Taiwanese and Japanese ones may have these products available earlier, even by the end of the week.

This new platform features dual-channel DDR3 1333MHz support (producers may also choose to support DDR3 1600MHz memory, although Intel decided not to offer support for it), a 1600MHz processor system bus, PCI Express 2.0 with multi-GPU capability, and excellent overclocking abilities. This should be it for now, but I am sure we'll find out more as these boards will start arriving in various hardware reviewers' computers...

Next topic - AMD's hot products. While not quite that hot, but expected by a lot of people, the triple-core AMD Phenom-8000 series are already on their way to the large computer manufacturers!

While these new processors won't take the performance crown from Intel, they are some nice additions to AMD's current product portofolio. These are the Phenom 8450 and 8650 models, running at 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, with 1.5MB L2 cache, and 2MB L3 cache, but AMD didn't confirm these specifications yet.

These being said, let's wait until Dell and HP update their web pages with new systems using these new processors from AMD, but since not even AMD's online price list doesn't have these models included yet, I guess we'll have to wait at least a few weeks until that happens...

After Imation and Intel announced their first solid state drives for notebooks, OCZ comes into the spotlight by announcing its next-gen drives, and if "next-gen" is not enough, then let me say they claim these new drives to be twice as fast as their predecessors! Now, that's pretty interesting, don't you think?


For this second-generation SSDs, OCZ moved from SATA-I to SATA-II, to accomodate the transfer speeds of these new drives of 120 MB/s read and 100MB/s write speed. OCZ's previous SSDs were only available in one model - a 64GB SATA drive, priced at $1200, while the new ones will be available in 32GB and 64GB, and the same 2.5-inch form factor.

Pricing looks pretty good already, and rumors say they should go down 50% in the next 9 months, but for now, OCZ's second-generation SSDs are priced at $499 - the 32GB one, and $1099 - the 64GB model.