Nvidia has finally revealed the official specs for the GTX 280 and GTX 260 GPUs at its famous editors' day. Te specs are pretty close to what rumors were announcing previously this month. Let’s take a look at the real deal.

GTX 280 has the core clocked at 602MHz, while its 1GB of GDDR3 is complemented by a 512-bit memory interface and clocked at 1,107MHz. As a high-end GPU, GTX 280 integrates 240 stream processors and 32 ROPs with Shader units running at 1,296MHz. A graphics card equipped with this GPU has an estimated TDP of 236 Watts, and the recommended price is around $600+ at launch.

The more affordable GTX 260 is clocked at 576MHz , and if we compare it with the GTX 280 clock, we see it’s not a big difference after all.. However, the GTX 260 will have its GDDR RAM working with an awkward 448-bit memory interface, incorporating 896MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 896MHz. It will also include only 192 stream processors and 28 ROPs with Shader units clocked at 999MHz. The TDP factor is estimated at 182 Watts and the launch price tag should be $449.

ATI might still have a chance with their RV770Pro chips. They won’t be able to compete with Nvidia’s models performance-wise, but they sure have the upper ground with reduced TDP factors and more affordable prices. The performance war is set to start sometime in August when ATI’s dual-GPU cards are expected to launch.

Summer is almost here, and if you're not living in a cold area, or you're not using conditioned air, your computer may have to be prepared for another hot season, especially if you're overclocking your CPU. Since installing air conditioning equipment may not be that good for your health, grabbing the beauty below and installing it in your computer is a much better idea, in my opinion!


Coming from Arctic Cooling, the Freezer XTREME is a cooler measuring 130 (L) x 100 (W) x 131 (H) mm, that features no less than 102 aluminum fins, four double-sided copper heatpipes, and a 120mm fan placed in the middle of this great twin tower design. The fan spins between 800 and 1500RPM, so you won't have to pump up the music's volume when the CPU is at full load. Depending on the fan's speed, the air flow can go between 35.7 to 60.7 m3/h.

With a weight of 608 grams, the Freezer XTREME is compatible with virtually all LGA 775, Socket 939, AM2 and AM2+ processors, since Arctic Cooling claims that 160 Watts is the cooling capacity available, but no processor for these sockets was able to reach that far yet.

At last, you should know that this new cooler arrives with preapplied MX-2 thermal compound, being backed up by a lifetime warranty(I guess that doesn't cover the fan too...), but it's not yet available. Expected to arrive in July, the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme CPU cooler will be priced around $40, so there's plenty of time to set aside those money...just be sure not to fry your CPU until then!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the fact that Nvidia is planning to annihilate the CPU market. It’s not clear why they intend to do this, but it looks like the Santa Clara company got Intel and AMD figured out and the green guys scheme a nasty takeover in small steps. Why small steps? Because their first targets are handhelds and notebooks.

According to Engadget, Nvidia readies the Tegra APX 2500 for handhelds , while the future notebooks will meet the CSX 600/650 CPU.

Tegra APX 2500 is an ARM11 based system-on-a-chip. Presumably, Nvidia wants to obliterate Intel’s Atom with this one. The system-on-a-chip measures 144mm, and can easily manage 720p encoding/decoding tasks at 14MBps, thanks to a 500+ MHz clock. Although it supports most of the current-gen features in GeForce GPUs, the Tegra APX 2500 will actually perform like a shrunk-down GeForce 6600. Still, the GPU part will be able to deal with AA and AF settings and will support the latest OpenGL ES 2.0.

CSX 600 and 650 are a bit more complex. However, as these aren’t x86-based chips, they can only run Windows CE, so if you plan to play around with XP-only programs and games, you might have to wait for the next-gen. The chip itself has 256K of L2 cache and can be die stacked to keep the footprint small. The CSX chips run at 700-800MHz and are said to support 1080p at 24FPS. Atom can do all these plus it doesn’t have the FPS limit. Now I wonder if Nvidia has some other aces in its sleeve, because with these two chips Nvidia has pretty much nothing on Intel.

Nvidia is supposed to showcase these two at Computex this year and maybe we’ll hear some info on price and availability in the weeks to come.

J&W is a relatively new mobo maker from Hong Kong. They mostly specialize in AMD-based products and their latest mini-ITX 780G motherboard seems to be receive much attention from hardware specialists.

Although it measures 170mm x 170mm, the mobo packs some high-end features. It supports all Athlon 64, Athlon X2 and Sempron CPUs and even some lower-spec Phenoms (it’s limited to 95W CPUs). J&W ensures us everything will run as it should since they managed to pack all solid capacitors on this small board.

The embedded graphics are present thanks to the Radeon HD 3200 implementation provided by Radeon 780G Northbridge. The GPU has 128 MB of side port memory integrated on the board, so it should be a decent enough solution for multimedia use at least. The mobo also integrates Gb LAN, Realtek ALC 885 7.1 + 2 channel HD audio codec and it comes paired with the SB700 Southbridge.

You’d think this little thing wouldn’t be able to support many connectors, but check this out: it even has an HDMI port, along with the usual DVI and VGA, plus six USBs, eSATA, SPDIF both coaxial and optical and 7.1 analogue sound out. If those 6 USB ports don’t satisfy your needs, go ahead and use the provided header card with an additional 4 USBs. Add four SATA ports and a single PCIe 16X graphic port, and you almost have a mid-range full-ITX mobo. The bad news is that the mini-ITX factor only allows for SO-DIMM memory modules but that shouldn’t be much of a problem since you can still add up to 4GB RAM.

It seems that the Honk Kong manufacturer will first deliver these mobos to UK and then, hopefully, worldwide. Estimated price starts around 90 pounds.

Nvidia started out as a small joint-venture company in 1993. Their first graphics card came in 1995 and from then on it it consolidated its position on the graphics market as the only real competitor for the acclaimed 3DFX. Unfortunately, in 2000, Nvidia managed to acquire 3DFX entirely and from that moment, the Santa Clara company chose the path of the monopole. Since 2000, Nvidia practically monopolized the handheld graphics sector, they’ve tried to bring down ATI, they acquired Ageia with its PhysX processor, plus they are now planning the total annihilation of CPUs. In order to bring CPUs down, NVIDIA is proud to announce that it acquired yet another company, Rayscale, specializing in ray-tracing technology.

Ryscale is a start-up based out of University of Utah and they managed to impress Nvidia with their advanced ray-tracing Lightnow application. Lightnow provides interactive feedback with physically-based ray-trace models, as well as high quality batch rendering. Although it’s not yet a set of processor instructions, Lightnow somehow reminds us of 3Dnow!, a set of multimedia instruction that was first implemented in AMD’s K6 and K7 CPUs

If we are to listen to Intel and 3D graphics specialists, it looks like ray-tracing is the only way that computer graphics can and will go in the future. Rayscale’s Lightnow is very proficient at ray-tracing and global illumination providing the most demanding and most realistic light. This is what Hollywood uses and it will surely come to games in the next years. For the moment, as Intel has demonstrated several months ago, the current and the next-gen hardware will still be fairly weak to do real time ray tracing at 24 FPS or more.

For more info on Rayscale’s technologies visit their official page.