We use computers on a daily basis, at home, at work or while traveling to access the Internet, play computer games, watch movies and so much more. Yet, most of the times if not ever, we never give a second thought to just what our computer is made off. You know it contains hardware components but what exactly they are, how are they called or what is their function within our personal computer are usually questions without answers or with vague ones. I'm going to be talking bellow above about the hardware components for a personal computer that are essential to it:

1. The PC Monitor is the device on which you visualize movies, games, and programs like word editors and Internet browsers. Older models featured a Cathode Ray Tube (hence the name CRT) with controls housed in a plastic case. Their diagonal ranged from 13 to 21 inches. Today LCD monitors have flooded the market, providing wide screen image display and smaller weight compared to their older counterparts, the CRT computer monitors. Most monitors feature controls used to adjust contrast and brightness while others have options to move the image left, right, up or down. CRT monitors also have a degauss option which can be used when the image isn't displayed correctly.

When it comes to picture quality we basically speak of resolution and refresh rate. Resolution is measured in pixels and is connected with how well our monitor displays images. Refresh rate refers to how often your image quality gets refresh. The recommended quality is usually 60 Hz, but since there are so many types of monitors it is best to consult the monitor's manual for the right value. Bear in mind that using a different value other the one recommended in your manual can damage your monitor.

2. The motherboard is the board that contains the CPU, the memory, BIOS, CMOS, Video devices, sound devices, storage devices, chipsets, etc. together with the connectors and logic circuits that tie all parts of your PC together. Together with the wiring in your computer it resembles to the network of veins in your body.

3. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is considered by some to be a computer inside another computer. This isn't to far from the truth since the processor manages the huge number of instructions given to him by the other computer hardware components similar to how the computer manages the instructions you give it by using external input devices like the keyboard and mouse.

4. The "hard drive" is a storage device with one or more metal disks (called platters), arranged on a spindle, one above the other; with a read/write head (often on an arm that can be moved to a specific point on the recording surfaces. This read/write machine can probably be called the first true 'robot'. Hard drive units are sealed hermetically to keep out dust. Even the smallest particle of dust can damage the platters so it's recommended you don't open them. The most recent hard drives can have up to 1.5 Terra Bytes.

5. The video card is an essential part of any computer. It provides your computer to play video files, computer games and other things. Without a video card to convert the binary code from the CPU and transmit in a graphic way to your monitor you wouldn't be able to watch anything. In some cases the video card can be integrated on the motherboard.

6. The sound card is very much like the video card, with the small difference that instead of converting CPU binary code and send it to your monitor it uses a different type of conversion allowing you to hear sounds in your computer speakers.

7. Over the years the CD-ROM drive and the DVD-ROM have proven to be essential to a personal computer. Information transfer had at its heart this hardware component. In recent years, with the development of the Internet, flash drives and portable hard drives, CD and DVD-ROMs have started to register a slow decline from the information transfer market. They will still be around for some years to come since they are the backbone of the music and movies commercialization.

8. As a last entry to the list of computer hardware components I'll add a duo of hardware parts, namely the keyboard and the mouse without which you couldn't control you computer. That is until technologies similar to the touch screen will appear on the market, but this will undoubtedly take some time.

AMD introduced a couple of months ago the Cinema 2.0 program which will allow game developers and film producers to include photorealistic characters and objects in their works without the need of render farms. Analysts said that photorealism in CGI would be attained in about 5 years, but AMD/ATI has now teamed up with Image Metrics and claim that they are able to render photorealistic characters and environments and integrate them seamlessly into games and movies. First, take a look at what happened at the AMD conference in New York a week ago.





Now, let’s take a closer look at that Emily clip.

As you can read from the clip itself, Emily was produced using a new modeling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated. The Emily you see in the clip is practically the digitized version of actress Emily O’Brien. According to TimesOnline, this is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.

The team at Image Metrics has also taken care of the facial animations in Grand Theft Auto computer game. The basic aim of the company is to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical, but without using motion capture devices. So that’s how they came with the Light Stage superscanner you can see in the first two clips.

OK, we have the technology to make photorealistic characters in upcoming videogames, but what kind of supercomputer do we need to actually play at smooth frame-rates? AMD claims we only need a decent quad-core CPU coupled with their latest Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards, which can process up to 2.4 TFLOPS.

I reckon we won’t get to see characters as detailed as these before DX11 gets introduced later next year. They will double the processing power, anyway, but AMD representatives say that the line between what is real and what is computer generated will still remain visible up until 2020.

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...

Once upon a time, when talking about high-end sound cards, the only answer one would get was "Creative". Obviously, other producers, like Yamaha, were also producing sound cards for professionals, but Creative always had the largest part of the market, and managed to bring together decent prices and excellent quality. Now, they are facing a serious challenge from Asus, as they just announced new products to arrive in the Xonar family...


In short, the story goes like this - Asus plans to introduce soundcards that can both input and output HDMI, as well as a card with no less than 3 HDMI ports.

One of the first cards to arrive in the near future is the Xonar DX, basically a Xonar D2X cut in half. This card is designed to fit into home entertainment center PCs using the PCIE X1 interface, and it doesn't have the aluminum EM shielding that was practically the D2 and D2X's trademark. Leaving the above aside, Asus will provide gold-plated brackets, as well as a full set of features, including the 4-pin floppy power connector.

A product currently between the hammer and the anvil is the Xonar AV1, a card developed to be the foundation for future Xonar-based products, with capabilities well ahead most consumer and prosumer-level card currently on the market. The Xonar AV1 will come together with a HDAV-DB1 daughterboard, having more than 10 different inferfaces, including two external and one internal HDMI port.

These being said, I am not getting into any additional details for now, because I am sure we'll hear a lot about these products in the future, but one thing is certain: as Sony feels threatened by the Eee PC, Creative may soon feel Asus' breath down its neck...

 

Your video-games look wonderful if you have a powerful video card, but there is nothing that beats the "realistic feel" offered by a professional soundcard. And we have chosen to present the X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series from Creative. Like other sound cards from the X-Fi, it has the revolutionary X-Fi powerful audio processor, which delivers blazing-fast frame rates in games with hardware accelerated Direct X, while the X-Fi CMSS-3D module delivers incredible surround sound over stereo headphones for gaming, movies and music. Why is this X-Fi such a powerful audio processor? The chip offloads audio processing from the CPU, accelerating Direct X, OpenAL and EAX 5.0 games and providing realistic cinematic audio without impacting frame rates, with 64MB of X-RAM for fast loading of high-quality sounds. Also, the gamers need to know that this card was especially designed to bring out the best in terms of high quality and accuracy in the sounds from the game Unreal Tournament 3. Darragh O'Toole, Senior Brand Manager for Audio with Creative said: "The difference between gaming with motherboard audio and Sound Blaster X-Fi is stellar; X-Fi technologies put you right at the heart of the game" (...) "Unreal Tournament 3 deserves to be played on the best hardware to guarantee that the game sounds as good as the developers intended. Our partnership ensures that our existing customers know how great the game is and that new gamers know how much better their systems can sound with Sound Blaster X-Fi", he added. The developers of Unreal Tournament 3 worked closely with Creative to ensure that their game sounds as good as it looks when experienced using a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card. The highly anticipated game offers support for advanced audio standards including EAX and OpenAL which can be enjoyed equally in Windows XP and Vista when the user has Sound Blaster X-Fi installed. So the fun is guaranteed in UT3, but the Creative sound card can bring out the best in music too, 24 bit and 192kHz quality level, along with the software media applications that come bundled or can be downloaded from the creative website. Unlike many people have said, this card (along with others from the X-Fi series) is supported under Windows Vista 32bit and 64bit. The price is quite acceptable too: $165.