As we all know, laptop sales are going slowly up, and the market share of portable computers recently surpassed that of the desktop computers. Obviously, this tendency is not going to fade, and so hardware for portable computers gets faster and cheaper with each day...or bigger, when we talk about internal storage.


Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...

Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).

The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...

As I was saying two days ago, video cards based on the NVIDIA 9600 GT started to show up, and one of the first models comes from Biostar. As you can see below, this card has an attractive design, although it may seem a bit too "serious" for some people. After all, what really matters is the performance, as well as the performance/price ratio, and for a lot of people, this is even more important than raw power, so let's see what's under the hood of the Biostar V9603GT52 video card...


The V9603GT52, announced yesterday, has an engine clocked at 650MHz, 512MB of DDR3 memory running at 1800MHz, and uses the PCI-E 2.0 interface(fortunately, it's backwards compatible, so you don't have to worry about any issues if you want to grab such a beauty for your older PCI-E mainboard). The memory bus is 256-bit wide, and the card's GPU has 64 stream processors.

Output connectors available are S-Video and Dual-DVI, while HDCP and the PureVideo HD are also featured by this card. On top of all, the price is set at $189, and if Biostar is right when saying that the performance gain is 90% when compared to the older 8600 GTS, we just may have a very solid competitor to ATI's HD 3870...

While things don't seem to go extremely well for AMD, it seems ATI has all the chances to make things right, and what can be better for computer users than last-minute technology for smaller prices? I know, the king of kings, the terror of all video cards, the ultimate video card terminator, a card that would destroy a 3-way GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI setup, but it's not (yet) the moment for such a thing...


Doing well in the mid-range market is also great, and since NVIDIA's 9600 GT should arrive in most stores next week, being able to buy an HD 3850 or even an HD 3870 from ATI for less money is extremely sweet. After all, paying an extra 25% or more for only 10% or less performance bonus is not that great, especially since we're talking about differences between 60-70 and 80-90 frames per second, in most games, way above the "red line". Of course, there are also people who need 1080p gaming with all quality settings pushed to the max... but most gamers , especially those on a budget (aren't we all on a budget?), don't have such high requirements from their gaming computer.

Now... where was I? Oh, yeah, price cuts. I love them. Today, ATI sent the 3850 and 3870 prices a bit lower, so now the ATI Radeon HD 3850 shoud be found at prices starting at $169, while the elder brother, the HD 3870, is priced starting at $189. These prices are $10 and $30 less than the price tags set by AMD last year.

Oh... do they really want to make me throw away my X1950Pro before it even has its 1st anniversary (in my computer, that is)? Anyway, if you were thinking about a graphics card upgrade, now it's the right time to claim your prize. For their prices, the HD 3850 and 3870 are surely going to deliver a lot of "bang for the buck"!

Finally, what every NVIDIA fan has been waiting for in the last months, especially those that don't own a top-of-the-line card yet, the 9600 GT, has been announced! With the 8600 GT/GTS cards outclassed by ATI's HD3650, NVIDIA needed to cover the sub-$200 price range with a capable card, and outperform ATI's current cards that fit in the mid-range category(that remains to be seen, of course), and the 9600 GT may be exactly that worthy follower to the 8600 GT series...


Now, it's official - tomorrow, at 8 am EDT, reviews of the card are expected to surface, so everyone will have a better idea on what to expect from NVIDIA's new 9-series graphics cards.

The GPU used by these cards is G94, still with DirectX 10.0 support, while ATI moved to DirectX 10.1 some time ago (we all know this is no such a big deal, but it's a fact worth being mentioned). The prices expected for these cards should go between $169 and $189, depending on the vendor, and if they manage to deliver good performance, ATI may have a problem...

Be sure to get back for more information, it's going to be a pleasure to tell you more about the 9600 GT, as soon as news is going to surface!

Intel's Centrino mobile platform reached its fourth generation when the Santa Rosa platform was released, back in early May, 2007. Its interesting that, after almost 5 years (the "Carmel" platform, first one belonging to the Centrino platform initiative, was released way back in March, 2003), Intel finally decided to make the step and apply the "2" label at the end of the Centrino name...


Scheduled for mid-2008, Intel's next Centrino platform, codenamed "Montevina", is expected to featured the Echo Peak Wi-Fi/WiMAX controller combo or code-named Shirley Peak Wi-Fi controller, allowing you to connect your laptop to WLANs and WANs, a very useful thing in areas having WiMAX coverage.

While the sources stating that Intel's "Montevina" will be the first one in the Centrino 2 line, there's no official news regarding this subject from Intel, yet. Even more, Intel didn't comment anything about this story yet, but when they'll do this, I am sure we'll find out about more interesting differences between the "old" and the "new" Centrino platform, because for now, the WiMAX support seems to be the greatest progress of the Centrino 2, compared to the current Centrino platform...