Price cuts are always a big pain for producers, when the competition gets ahead, but for us, the consumers, hearing that Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ASUS or some other big hardware manufacturer slashes prices is always good news. Today, once again, the time has come to hear about such an action related to AMD - I am not saying "from AMD", because they didn't say anything about the story yet, so here we go...


The rumor goes like this - AMD will cut its old processors' prices in early April, while introducing new models on the market. Basically, we're talking about the introduction of the Phenom models 9550, 9650 and 9750, clocked at 2.2GHz, 2.3GHz and 2.4GHz, all of them expected to have a better performance than the 9500 and 9600 models available now, because the B3 core stepping doesn't have any TLB-related problem.

Unoficially, it is said that AMD will cut the pricing on all existing products, starting with the low-cost AMD Sempron, and going as high as the AMD Phenom 9500, 9600 and 9600 Black Edition. The little problem in this entire story is that the sources talking about this have no idea about any accurate prices yet, but I guess we'll see them in less than a month, after all, and that if AMD doesn't come up with official news before that date, of course.

Only a day after Imation announced its upcoming SSD drives, another big company announced its formal entry into the SSDs market, and this time we're talking about a real giant - Intel!


In fact, Intel is already present on the solid state drives market, but its offer is limited to single chip SSDs for pocket devices, with capacities of 2GB and 4GB. Anyway, things are about to change in the coming months, with Intel's SSDs for notebooks...

The semiconductors giant confirmed its intention to come up with a line of SSDs for notebooks during Q2 2008. These drives will be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes, having capacities between 80GB and 160GB.

Unfortunately, no technical detailes have been made public yet, but during a recent meeting, Mooly Eden, Intel's Vice President and General Manager Mobile Platforms Group, said their SSDs will be 10 to 50 times faster than the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HDD with SATA-300 interface.

Since the above doesn't say much, I guess we'll have to wait for a later time to find some really useful details about Intel's future SSDs performance...

With the HD 3870 X2 nicely installed into the sweetest price/performance spot on the video card market, NVIDIA prepares to strike back, and the long-awaited NVIDIA 9800 GX2 card seems to be only a few days away now...


The GeForce 9800 GX2 will become the new dream for hardware enthusiasts addicted to games, following the path opened by the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2.

With two revised G92 GPUs manufactured using the 65nm process under its hood, the 9800 GX2 will have a default speed of 600MHz for each core, and 2GHz for the memory.

As expected, this new graphics monster will use a dual-slot cooling system, and will feature two DVI ports and a HDMI connector. If one is not enough, you can put two such cards together for a nice 4-Way SLI setup, but that would take your budget about $600 higher...

The interesting part is that the $599 price tag announced is lower than the average retail price of the current flagship product, the 8800 Ultra.

At last, you should know that the 9800 GX2 is expected to arrive on the 18th of March, followed by the single GPU 9800 GTX and 9800 GTS, by mid-April, probably.

I know, I know - Intel rules the desktop processors market. The bad part is that some system integrators don't even think about AMD, and so Intel's way to monopoly is slowly, but surely, assured. Anyway, the bad part is that Intel's prices are not quite low, as you will see...


The 45nm processors line-up for the coming months starts with the P8400 and goes up to the two Core 2 Extreme models, X9100 and QX9300.

Pricing starts at $209 for the P8400, a processor with a 1066MHz FSB, 3M cache, 25W TDP and a frequency of 2.26GHz, going up to $851 for the 3.06GHz X9100, with 6MB of cache and a TDP of 44W, both expected to become available in June.

At last, there's the QX9300, with a frequency of 2.53GHz, 12MB cache memory, 45W TDP, priced at $970 and expected to arrive in third quarter.

The solid state drives market is still smaller than the "traditional" hard discs one, but things will change in a few years, that's no guess, it's something obvious. Anyway, until that moment comes, we'll slowly see new producers joining the crowd of SSD manufacturers, and today the time has come for Imation...


Widely known for its optical and tape storage media, announced today a few SSDs that are going to be sold under their own brand name. Imation's SSDs are build using drives of the South Korean Mtron Company, a SSD pioneer. For now, Imation's available SSD models are the MOBI 3000 for end users, and the PRO 7000 series, mainly targeted at the enterprise and corporate market.

The Imation SSD MOBI 3000 offers maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, write speeds of up to 80MB per second, while the random access time is as low as 0.1ms, making it the fastest SSD available for the consumer market.

At last, the PRO 7000 series is even faster, with read speed of up to 120MB per second, write speeds as high as 90MB/s, and random access time even lower than 0.1ms. Just as a side note, this product's MTBF is greater than 1 million hours!

Obviously, these products don't come cheap yet, since the MSRP is $699.99 and $1,159.99 respectively for a 32GB model, made in 2.5 inch form-factor, while 16GB and 64GB versions will also arrive pretty soon.