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Written by Maxit
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A-Data introduces the S701 USB flash drive and SDHC memory card Eee PC special edition. For those who recently purchased an Eee PC and looking for additional storage – A-Data offers these accessories to storage your entire digital life.
A "Permanent" Second Storage Drive
Even before Asus launched its Eee PC – this new budget notebook was already a success. However one of the limitations of Asus’s Eee PC is the limited storage. In today’s daily life, we all use and share a great scale of digital images, audio and video. To storage our digital life, the Eee PC may be insufficient for some users. Through built-in memory card reader, A-DATA SDHC memory card can be used as a "permanent" second storage drive. This 8GB SDHC memory card offers larger capacities at great prices and able to store 4,000～6,000 pictures, more than 2,000 mp3 songs and 14 ~16hrs MPEG videos.
Your Eee PC Gets Accessorized
To share your digital files, you can choose A-Data’s S701 USB flash drive special Eee PC edition: white exterior with leather carrying strap. This S701 will be the best accessory to match your Eee PC. This product also won prestigious iF and Red Dot product design awards and is the best way to show your own style.
The S701 and SDHC memory card have life-time warranty that assures you to store all your files for an extended period.
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Written by John M
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The 2000 MHz barrier is all history, Team Group has gone and demolished it with a 2 GB DDR3 memory kit (2 x 1 GB) that works at a frequency of 2133 MHz (PC3 17000).
To accomplish this record breaker, the modules must endure between 2.1 and 2.2 volts. Evidently, being so much above the standard 1.5V for DDR3, special cooling measures are called for, which could be summarized with the words "Super Thermal Conduction Black Heat Spreaders" (we know you love those). In case all that mambo jambo is worth a zit, we always have a lifetime guarantee, right?
As with many CES "presentations", they are still nowhere to be seen, but it will be curious to see how this memory fares with such latencies as 10-10-10-30.
Link: TechConnect. |
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Written by John M
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Buying memory is nowadays cheaper than ever before. Such a proposition would be commonplace when talking about any other kind of computer hardware but, as we all know, DRAM price fluctuations have given us more than one chill and nobody is sure how long the current situation will last.
Some fortune tellers like Ben Tseng, vice-president of ProMOS (a memory chip maker) consider that "is possible that DRAM prices go up again in the 2nd quarter of 2008". This prediction is based, once again, in the belief that Windows Vista will finally start to sell well, thanks to the big companies buying big.
Maybe is time for us, as costumers, to wish for prices to raise just a little. Last time memory was such a bargain (in '97 and '98) it all ended with a skyrocketing that placed memory modules at twice it previous value for the most part of '99. It's in no one's interest to have the sector sustain repeated loses (like SMIC had to face recently).
Link: DigiTimes. |
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Written by John M
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The leading memory chip maker, Micron, started recently to produce 2 Gb ones, opening the way for up to 4 GB memory modules. That translates into a maximum of 16 GB for your desktop PC (provided that your motherboard and your OS support them). The drawback about this news story, is the DDR3-only aspect of it, which leaves most of the current owner base out of the water.
Mass production is expected to begin without further ado, with speeds that will stop at 1333 MHz for the time being.
A side effect of the increased density of these chips is that, besides increasing capacity, they will eat less power (as long as you need fewer 78nm chips, for the same storage size, than you needed when using the old ones).
Link: TG Daily. |
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Written by John M
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We would all want to store our data on fast, inexpensive RAM chips, yet such a thing doesn't exist. What we have instead, are very expesive products that may even require a battery so they don't lose the information, or just plain and slow HDDs in an old fashion.
Now, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (a Taiwanese goverment funded institution), in partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), ProMOS Technologies, Powerchip Semiconductor, Nanya Technology, Macronix International, and Winbond Electronics, plans to end their developement of phase-change memory in no more than three years.
PRAM doesn't lose data when power is switched off, similar to conventional flash memory, but it can rewrite data 30 times faster and is expected to have 10 times the life span.
Althoug Samsung will be first to the market with a PRAM product (next year), ITRI will deliver higher storage capacities (if everything goes according to plan).
Link: InfoWorld.
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Written by John M
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Since the introduction of Intel's 865, more than four years ago, many things have changed. We now have processors with bigger caches and RAM works at double the frecuency it then did. ¿Is dual channel still as much of a performance boost? Tom's Hardware is asking the same question.
Armed with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (and it's 4 MB L2), a P35 board and two gigabytes of Corsair CM2X1024-888C4D, it's time to do some beching under Windows XP Professional SP2.
Games like Call Of Duty 2, Prey and Quake 4, give a performance spread between 2% and 4%.
Multimedia aplications like Lame MP3, DivX 6.6, XviD 1.1.3 or Mainconcept H.264 v2,
suffer losses that range from the undetectable to 5% (h263 based
codecs).
Even a compression program like WinRAR 3.7, traditionally very sensitive to changes in the memory subsystem, is only affected by a mere 2%.
Considering the option to raise OC a little higher when running in single channel mode, and the small price delta dual channel kits cost you, maybe it's time to broaden your buying spectrum.
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Written by John M
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Elpida Memory and Rambus have announced a 512Mb 4.8GHz XDR chip that delivers a data transfer rate of 9.6GB/s. Made using Elpida's 70nm process, XDR DRAM is Rambus proposed standard for next-gen platforms. Aside from consoles, we don't see anybody in the PC industry embracing this new adventure.
To achive such speeds with just a 600MHz clock, Octal Data Rate (ODR) technology is enabled. Just compare that to the double data rate conventional RAM has been using for more than six years now.
Production is expected to start on April 2008, and this time Rambus has a product that's not only fast, but one that promises to deliver bandwith accordingly.
Link: The Inquirer.
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Written by John M
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G. Skill is the one pushing the envelope for DDR2 this time around with a Pair of 2GB modules (4GB kit) that run at a guaranteed clock speed of 1000MHz (PC2-8000) at the low latency settings of 5 (CL), 5 (TRCD), 5 (TRP), 15 (TRAS). You need between 2.0 and 2.1V to get them there, though.
The F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ kit should be available soon and allow some users to finally install up to 8 GB of RAM without having to sacrifice Core 2 overclocking potential. I'm talking about the ones with low multiplier CPUs that need to run their memory at a ratio of 1:1 at least.
Link: TeawkTown. |
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Written by John M
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Windows Vista isn't selling well, and it looks like DRAM manufacturers are losing hope in the prospect that sales will pick up pace in time for them to get rid of the stock they accumulated for the new OS.
Fudzilla reports on the subject:
"According to the news today [21st] its a great time to buy DRAM. Dynamic RAM (DRAM) has dropped to its lowest price of the year this week and industry analysts predict the price may go even lower.
When DRAM dropped dramatically in May of this year some manufacturers
held onto their DRAM hoping to recoup some of their losses. With
todays precipitous decline those hoping to regain losses will likely
dump their remaining existing inventories to prevent taking a further
hit on its value."
Failed strategies inlcude also the fight for market share, which leads manufacturers to build new factories and ramp up production to a point where oversupply happens. There's no other choice, then, than to sell at bargain prices. Even against the odds of not making a profit. |
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Written by John M
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"Sunnyvale, Calif.September 10, 2007 OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide
leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability
memory, today announced production of the industrys first Intel
Extreme Memory modules, a new memory solution that implements a
high-performance specification optimized and predefined for the
impending Intel X38 chipset."
Okay, so we got ourselves another fancy name, just what does it mean? To make a long story short, it means easy overclocking for the masses. Until now, when you wanted to get over SPD (Serial Presence Detect) frequencies or under the latencies specified by it, you had to do it the hard way (manually). That requiered some knowledge and restricted the audience. With the new Intel chipset comes a new kind of SPD called Extreme Memory Profiles (XMP) that aims to replace the previous standar by allowing more aggressive timings and higher speeds to be automatically selected.
The OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Intel XMP Ready Titanium Edition specs are as follow:
- 1600MHz DDR3 CL 8-8-8-27 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)
- XMP Profile 1: 1600MHz 8-8-8
- XMP Profile 2: 1600MHz 7-6-6
- Available in 1GB modules and 2GB kits
- Unbuffered
- Titanium Z3 XTC Heatspreader
- Lifetime Warranty
- 1.8 Volts
- 240 Pin DIMM
- Optimized for Intel X38 boards
I'm not sure this will be very successful, because the enthusiast and overclocking community doesn't find anything useful here, and the general public is not interested in anything else than CPU clockspeed. Intel and partners will need to spend a lot on marketing. |
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