Currently, memory speeds are going higher and higher with each day, and while it isn't such a big thing to see DDR2 memory rated somewhere around 1000MHz, most DDR3 modules produced so far were rated as "DDR3-1333", and sometimes "DDR3-1625" or "DDR3-1800"(of course, nothing stopped various producers coming up with their own speed ratings, less common). I said "so far" because, one of these days, Team Group released a new product that broke the 2GHz barrier!

Team Group's memory modules rated DDR3-2133 are a part of their older Team Xtreem series, and they are currently providing the highest bandwidth available in memory modules that can be found on the market. Apart from the 2133-rated ones, Team Group also offers DDR3-1700 and DDR3-1600 modules.

All these DDR3 memories available under the Team Xtreem flag use custom heat spreaders to keep them cooler, increase reliability, and overclocking possibilities, as well as to make them more attractive to our eyes. For now, probably not many of us would consider buying 2GHz DDR3 memory, because the performance of this kind of memory doesn't fully justify its price yet, but it's good to know where we stand and where we're headed...

At this time, flash memory prices are extremely low, and since price is no longer a problem, producers are already moving towards new and faster technologies. The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) group came up with a high speed interface able to provide 5 times the performance of current flash devices, and Intel, together with Micron, are the first ones to announce NAND flash memory chips using it.

Today's NAND flash memory reaches read speeds of up to 40MB/s, and data is written on this medium with up to 20MB/s. According to sources from Micron, the new high speed NAND memory is fully compliant with ONFI's specifications, achieving 200MB/s reads and write speeds of up to 100MB/s. Currently, they are manufacturing SLC 8Gb units, as well as stacked 16Gb and 32Gb versions.

Anyway, we won't get to see devices using this new NAND memory too soon, since USB 3.0 devices should take full advantage of it, but since mass production is scheduled to start in the second half of the year, we won't get old until then either..

MSI has just announced the release of not one, not two, but three video cards based on the Radeon HD 3000 series graphics chips from AMD/ATI, and I thought it would be a good idea to give you an all-in-one news package too. Anyway, you won't probably buy all of them at once, but if your family is large enough, I am sure you can find a good card for every computer in the house... These being said, let's move on and face these three new beauties from MSI, all of them being officially released on the 31st of January, shall we?

I'll start with the cheapest member of the family above, the MSI R3400 series cards, pictured at the bottom of the image... so, we have an entry-level card featuring the new 55nm chip and based on the same architecture as the R3600 series, with less stream processors, texture units and ROPs, but with the same HD capabilities, DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support. Although it won't blow gamers out of their seats, its low power requirement and passive cooling solution recommend this card as the perfect choice for your family's media center PC.

Next on the list, we have the mid-range R3600 series, featuring a 256 bit ring-bus, 512MB of GDDR3 memory and 120 stream processors, and a decent active cooling system, as you can see in the right corner of the image. With a gaming performance about the same as previous generation 2600XT cards and superior multimedia capabilities, a R3600 card would fit perfectly in your office/Internet/casual gaming computer, but when we're talking about kids...

...kids should take care about school, first of all, but how can they give their best at school, if their gaming PC doesn't live up to their expectations? If you don't want your kids to think about why a certain game doesn't run as smooth as possible on their computer, then you should grab the R3870X2 for them, without any doubt! In the end, you may be about $450-$500 lighter, but those money would buy your kids a high-end card featuring two 55nm graphics chips, 1GB of GDDR3 memory, no less than 640 stream processors, 32 texture units and 32 ROPs, with simply outrageous processing capabilities (over 1 teraFLOPS of GPU data processing power). Oh, and this card will also bring you a bit of rest & relaxation, because you won't see the kids complaining about their sluggish gaming computer for quite a while!

At this time, the MSI official website doesn't show the products from these series yet, but they'll appear for sure in the coming days, so keep your eyes on it!

This subject may be a bit off-topic for our site, but I think we have to talk about this, because Asustek is one of the largest hardware manufacturers on the planet, with almost 100,000 employees all over the world. The device advertised using the slogan "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play", the ASUS Eee PC subnotebook, to be more precise, proved to be a good move from the Taiwanese company, and now they are planning an entire line of Eee computers...

"It all started with a small, cheap and interesting subnotebook" - maybe this is going to be one of the first lines in the story of the Eee family to be written in a possible future, if things go well. If not, it's going to end with the subnotebook and its three followers - the desktop, the HDTV and the all-in-one PC.

First of all, the ASUS E-DT, or simply Eee DT is the next product of the Eee family to hit the market, and its target is to compete with small and cheap desktop PCs similar to the Mac Mini. Based on an Intel Celeron CPU, the computer should be priced somewhere between $200-$300 (the cheaper, the better, especially since there's a huge market to be exploited in emerging countries). This computer will use Linux and will be sold without a monitor.

The ASUS E-Monitor will have a 19-inch or 21-inch screen, should incorporate a TV-tuner, and is expected to arrive in September, for a price below $500, making it an interesting alternative to Apple's iMac or Dell's XPS One. Well, there may be a little problem here - the E-Monitor will also use Linux, and some users may keep away from it because of that...

At last, we have the Eee HDTV, a 42-inch LCD HDTV coming with a built-in PC based on...yeah, you got it - Linux! While this one is also expected to pop up in September, there is no additional information about it, but let's hope they are going to make it full HD-capable.

In the last months, I had a lot of discussions with many people about computer upgrades and the fact that currently, most users have much more processing power at their disposal than they need, and Asustek seems to have the same opinion but, unlike me, they have the power to make things right.

Last November, Jonney Shih, Asustek's CEO, said "Traditional PCs are too powerful, no matter in the home or office; we are seeing quad-core rising with octo-core coming in the near future, and the more cores in a CPU, the more memory the system needs. Is all this really necessary? With the Eee PC we decided to go back to basics, to bring the focus to just functions and reasonable price levels.".

These being said, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that, a year from now, the Eee PC will be the elder member of a big and happy family(if I didn't mention it so far, I will do it now - I just love the Eee PC)!

InnoVISION Multimedia Limited is a well known PC hardware developer and manufacturer from Hong Kong, established back in 1998, while their manufacturing operations started earlier, in Shenzen, China(1990). When talking about video cards(and sometimes, mainboards too), their Inno3D brand is well known, and includes a variety of 3D cards, but all current models bearing this name are using NVIDIA chipsets. From now on, things are going to change, since a new brand belonging to InnoVISION is born, its name being Force3D...

Practically, there are no big things to say about this move. Just as PcPartner uses two brands, Zotac for NVIDIA-based cards, and Sapphire for those using ATI GPUs, InnoVISION is going to have Inno3D for video cards using NVIDIA chips, and Force3D for those using ATI GPUs.

I don't know what others think, but for me, one thing seems certain - ATI is going up, and this will surely help AMD too. For now, I only have two questions that need to be answered in the coming months...

First, since Inno3D was a brand also used for a few motherboards that are using NVIDIA chipsets, should we expect Force3D mainboards with AMD/ATI chipsets, or they will stop at video cards only?

At last, no matter how good it feels for ATI fans to get an extra alternative available on the market, the big battle between ATI and NVIDIA should start in March, or a bit later, as soon as NVIDIA's 9xxx series is launched, especially the long-awaited 9800 GX2, the card expected to be the "3870X2 killer"...