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.

Today, I have chosen a special subject to write about - my own motherboard. Why do I call it special? Well, it took some time until I got completely happy with it, but it was worth the wait. I will tell you about this, and why would you use the MSI K9N Neo V3, also known as MSI NEO-F V3, to build a computer, while giving you the technical specifications and features at the same time, so get ready!


Let's start with my story... I had to choose between an ASUS motherboard, and the MSI NEO-F V3, and despite my previous (all positive) experiences with MSI products, I was thinking about buying the M2N-E instead of the NEO-F V3. There was also a Gigabyte board to think about, but in the end I decided to go with the NEO-F V3.

Basically, this is a budget board, but you get a lot of things for your money, especially the 3 years warranty and the all-solid capacitor build, which promises to deliver a very long life to your computer (obviously, you may end up seeing a system based on this board in a museum around 2020, since my old MSI motherboard has some inflated capacitors on it and has been running 24/24 for almost 2 years this way - and it's not dead yet!).

Due to the chipset limitations, you won't be able to run Windows 98/ME on a computer using this montherboard, but I don't think this should be a problem. After buying it, I noticed that a lot of options were not in the BIOS. "OK, this is a new board, so we'll update the BIOS," I said, but I ended up with more options, and a little disaster - memory performance went down the drain. Fortunately, the version 2.5 of MSI NEO-F V3's BIOS solved that issue, and now this baby runs fast as a shark, but I'll get to that part a bit later.

My suggestion is to use this board for a low-end gaming system, since it has decent overclocking capabilities, but there are already a lot of great new ones available, and processors with a TDP over 89W are not supported.


As you can see in the image above, the PCI Express x16 slot is placed below those two PCI Express x1 slots(which you won't use for sure), and a video card with a larger cooling system won't allow you to use properly any of the 3 PCI slots, without any overheating risks. Even more, a video card that's a bit longer may be a problem when you are going to use the SATA ports, but let's get to the good parts, shall we?

If a big video card may lead you into dropping the idea of using any PCI card, it's good to know that the onboard network adapter and the HD sound, both from Realtek, do their job wonderfully. As a side note, the network and sound parts on the mainboard are the only ones not using solid capacitors, but that shouldn't be such a big deal.

Now, let me tell you a few words about performance and overclocking. Last month, when I built a computer using a budget ASUS board, I was shocked to see that I wasn't able to set memory timings manually, so I ended up with a system running 4-4-4-12 DDR2 memory at some default (and really lame) timings. Congratulations, ASUS, you (don't) rock!

Speaking for myself, I managed to easily push my AMD X2 4000+ processor from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz by increasing the FSB to 230MHz on default voltage, but I heard about people achieving stable 250MHz FSB on this board. Anyway, I am not crazy about reaching the limits, I simply overclocked enough to have my memory run at 800MHz. Regarding the memory, I have to tell you that the maximum voltage that can be set in the BIOS is 2.3V, and this could help some people achieve tight timings or pretty high frequencies.

Getting back to the features, I should also mention that RAID is supported, but Firewire is missing. These being said, I guess it has come the time to draw the conclusions...

...so here we go: the MSI NEO-F V3 is a great budget board, with good overclocking capabilities, uses solid capacitors, and performance is very good, no matter if you want to overclock or not. On the negative side, I must quote the uninspired board layout, and the lack of Firewire connectors, because I can't think about anything else bad, at this time.

At last, if you were wondering...this board is Vista certified, but I must give you one last advice - be sure to get the latest drivers from the official page, and don't use the included software overclocking utility. If you have any problems, I'll be sure to help you, and if I can't help you, there's always the official MSI user forum.

Since currently this great board can be found for as little as $78, I think the MSI K9N Neo-F V3 still has some time left until becoming obsolete, although you won't build any record breaker using it. After all, we're not all trying to run Crysis at 1080p resolution, or get insane scores in 3D Mark...

Later edit:

Detect networking problems earlier with network assessment services which can diagnose for potential issues.

If I could do something to make a full day last at least 48 hours instead of 24, buying a gaming console would be the first thing to do afterwards. Unfortunately, I can't make the planet spin slower, so I will stick to my computer for a while, together with Snake Kenzia, when I have a meeting and I get to early or other similar situations (thank you, Nokia!). Anyway, I find it rather interesting to see that Nintendo Wii is headed to domination, despite the strong opposition it has from Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, and this is exactly what we're going to talk about next...


Despite the evolution of gaming related sales this spring, recent figures from NPD show that, while sales of Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3/2 as well as handheld Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable dropped in April, Nintendo Wii sales are very strong, almost as half as they were during the last Holiday season!

Anita Frazier, an analyst from NPD, said "The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31% over last year’s record-setting revenues. This is the first month in many that we’ve seen a decrease in portable hardware and software sales, but it’s important to remember that this year, the Easter holiday fell in March as compared to April in 2007. April 2007 and March 2008 saw sizable games in portable in part due to the holiday timing."

Regarding those figures I mentioned above, it's enough to say that Nintendo Wii, with almost 715,000 units sold in April, managed to surpass the sales Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 2 and Sony PlayStation 3 got together. Do I have to say more?

Well, Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, seems to disagree with the above. He said "This is only the third year of our [X360] existence and only the second year of Sony [PS3] and Nintendo’s [Wii] existence. Are we just amusing ourselves by trying to declare a winner and loser while the customers are still out there deciding? […] I think it’s way too early… When somebody’s well on their way to reaching 100 million units [that would be the time]."

For me, the Wii is a winner in 2008. What's your opinion?