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Sapphire Radeon HD 2400XT and 2600XT pricing announced
More than two months after Nvidia got its mid range cards out of the door, AMD has finally followed suit. The prices are much lower than we expected:
The Radeon HD 2600XT 256MB DDR3 clocks in at £70, which is comparable in performance to the Geforce 8600GT, but actually a little cheaper.
The 2600Pro 256MB DDR2 is £59. The 2400XT 256MB DDR3, which is a significant step down in performance, costs £49 and the 2400Pro 256MB DDR2 costs £32, which looks like an absolute steal for a DirectX 10 card.
All prices include Vat and HDMI dongles are included with the 2600s but not the 2400s.
No word from any vendor on the dual-chip 2600XT that will have two GPUs. It's called the Radeon HD 2600 XT Gemini and AMD claims it will compete with the 8600GTS. AMD suggests a price of $189-249, just $40 more than the single core 2600XT.
All the iPhone news that's fit to print
Bookmark PCW's special report to keep up to date with all the iPhone news from across the pond as the launch frenzy reaches its climax.
Radeon HD 2600XT first impressions
We just put the Radeon HD 2600XT through its paces in our labs. The successor to the X1650 chip, it's AMDs fastest mainstream product and will compete with Nvidia's Geforce 8600GT on price.
We tested with AMD's latest stable drivers '8.38.9-rc3' but there exist some 'performance' drivers out there which we'll soon give it a go with.
So, we achieved 5971 in 3DMark06 and 10,358 in 3DMark05, making it faster than the 8600GT in both these theoretical benchmarks at 1,024x768 running on an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, 1GB Ram and a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor.
It's faster in Half-Life 2 without anti-aliasing and just using trilinear filtering, but slower when 4xAA and 4xAF is turned on.
It's slower in Far Cry and slower in UT2004 by margins of 10 per cent. It's a similar case in Doom3 where the HD 2600XT looses out to the 8600GT at low resolution but beats it at 1,600x1,200 and beyond.
The Radeon HD 2600XT isn't a patch on the Geforce 8600GTS which is more expensive, and AMD hopes to compete with the faster 8600GTS card with the Radeon HD 2600XT Gemini, which is a single card with two 2600XT chips on it.
Where the Radeon HD 2600XT does save face though is in its vast array of features.
Commodores return in dual-core format
Commodore paraded their new machines in Soho last night, along with two pizzas and a drinks bar.
The come back for the now-Dutch company is a flashy one, because each PC comes with a high quality paint job. The basic design of every Commodore PC will remain the same though, and this includes the case construction and noise insulating padding.
There are over 100 different paint schemes to choose from which cleverly get applied to the case in a vacuum to avoid bubbles forming.
The company will be selling machines through retail in the UK but it won't name the shops yet. There aren't a whole lot of retailers in the UK that could take it on (Dixons, Maplins, Stapples… Tesco?) but one retailer stands out like a sore thumb and where the shoe fits…
Apparently if you buy a PC in a shop that only has a Hello Kitty paint job (say), Commodore will send you a second set of panels with the paint job of your choice, avoiding the problem of limited stock.
Machines will be customisable but there appears to be four very specific ranges, dubbed C=g, C=gs, C=gx and C=xx.
The starter machine (C=g) costs £950 inc. Vat and includes a Core 2 Duo E6320 1.86GHz processor, nForce 650i motherboard, 2GB Ram, 250GB 7,200rpm hard disk, 550W PSU, an Nvidia 7900GS 256MB and Vista Home Premium.
This is hardly groundbreaking technology for the price, but the paint job looks great up close and LED lights sprucing up the box will draw in punters like no tomorrow.
Linux on a stick
Fancy a complete Linux-powered computer on a USB key? Look no further than Calao Systems' USB-9260, which uses an Atmel system-on-a-chip incorporating a 190MHz ARM processor. There's 64MB of Ram and 256MB of Flash memory for storage, plus a 10/100 Ethernet port. An advanced version with VGA is also under development. The USB-926 will be available 'soon', but there's no indication of pricing.
[thanks to Linuxdevices via Slashdot]
Windows Home Server gets closer to release
One of the products we're most looking forward to this year, Windows Home Server (WHS), got a step closer to release recently when it entered the release candidate (RC) stage. We're currently installing this on Vitual PC 2007 to see how it looks.
If you want to see how other beta users are getting on, there's now an open Microsoft forum for you to browse through.
WHS is based on Windows Server 2003, and is intended to work as a dedicated home storage server that automatically backs up all your home PCs and allows easy file and media sharing. You can also access it from anywhere via the internet. It's a NAS with knobs on, if you like.
Hardware requirements aren't too onerous, with a minimum spec of a 1GHz Pentium III and 512MB of Ram plus 65GB of hard disk space. Obviously, the more storage you have the better, and one of the good features is that you can keep on adding as many internal or external disks as you wish, since it's not a Raid-based solution. You can set up folder duplication, though, to protect against hard disk failures.
We don't know a firm release date yet, but it's supposed to be sometime during the second half of 2007.
iPhone doesn't work as a USB storage device
According to a tip-off we've received here at The Test Bed, it seems that there's a large amount of doubt about whether the iPhone - due to launch on 29 June, just in case you hadn't heard - will work as a USB2 mass storage device. If not, you won't be able to carry around your data files with you like you can with an iPod. So at least there might be something this wonder-phone can't do...although no doubt the corporate types will be very happy you can't use it to slurp up the contents of the departmental server.
Tosh stick notebook in flying basket
I've had hands on with Toshiba's new ultra-portable notebook, the Portégé R500, which it claims is the world's lightest at just 779g.
Despite the miniscule weight it includes a 12.1in LED-backlit display and full qwerty keyboard.
At this weight it's actually as light as Samsung's Q1 and Medion's Rim 1000 ultra-mobile PCs, both of which we've reviewed. We found them lacking in the usability department and I'd personally plump for a light notebook like the R500 instead.
Toshiba is quiet on the UMPC front, saying they've got nothing specifically planned because they don't think Schools – and education is the only place for UMPCs according to Tosh – really need them.
To coincide with the launch Toshiba is backing David Hempleman-Adams to cross the Atlantic in the first wicker-basket hot air balloon ever to go state-side to the UK. The man freely admits he could be crashing into the Atlantic a long way before reaching his target.
Asus A8Sc exclusive UK preview
We've got our hands on to one of Asus' first Santa Rosa notebooks to land in the UK, the A8Sc.
The A8Sc has been slightly redesigned from the previous A8S model, which never made it to the UK in the first place.
It's a surprisingly thick 14.1in notebook that tipped our scales at 3.10KG including power adapter. The dark plastic construction is good though and it all makes for a solid piece of kit.
Asus included a Core 2 Duo T7300 in our preview model with 4MB L2 cache, however this version won't be on sale in the UK. An A8Sc with a T7100 is to go on sale though, this being the only T7000 chip to have a castrated 2MB L2 cache.
Vista upgrade programme screws up again
We've had over 500 outraged comments on our blog about being scammed out of cash for their free Vista Express upgrade, or even being charged four times over by Moduslink for a single product.
Long delays and almost none-existent communication from Moduslink has made Vista a mirage for many, but the icing on this mud-cake has just been set:
We've now received numerous reports that Moduslink is sending out 64-bit copies of Vista to customers who ordered 32-bit variants and vice versa.
One reader received this email, two months after he initially received his upgrade CD:
"Dear customer,
It has been brought to our attention that one of our customers received an incorrect DVD (64 bit DVD instead of a 32 bit).
Since your package was shipped in the same serie, it may have happened that we have sent the incorrect DVD to you as well. To ensure that you can have a flawless installation of the software, we have decided to ship you a replacement 32bit version as a precaution. This DVD will be shipped shortly to you.
Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
With kind regards,
The Upgrade Redemption Support Centre
Toll-Free phone : 00800 666 44 666
Email address: MSTUPVISTAEMEA@moduslink.com
Toll paid Phone : +31 880016102
Technical Upgrade Program Vista
P.O. Box 252
7300 AG Apeldoorn
The Netherlands"
We asked Microsoft for a comment and are still waiting for a response.
See also:
Vista express upgrade on hold
Moduslink responds to Vista criticism
New Opera mobile phone web-browser brings Wii functionality
Opera has released a new mobile phone browser that can zoom in and out of a page like on the Nintendo Wii.
Combined with a cheap mobile phone it is the "iPhone for the poor man today", according to Opera's vice president of engineering, Christen Krogh.
This is because phones using the browser will be able to surf the net faster than Apple's iPhone can, despite the iPhone using relatively high-bandwidth Wi-Fi to transfer data.
To back up his claims, Krogh demonstrated a GPRS enabled phone downloading a website at a comparable rate to a video of the iPhone doing the same when Steve Jobs demonstrated it in January.
Opera Mini 4 uses server-side compression techniques that render websites for a small screen on Opera's servers before sending them to a mobile phone at 5-20 per cent of the original size.
Pages have their original layout plus there's support for Flash 7 animations. Krogh said transfer times are "a bit faster as well" compared with the Mini 3.
Opera Mini 4 is available today as a free beta download. A final version of the software will be available over the summer.
The company is also proud to announce that Opera Mini, present on 15 million unique phones, is more widely used than Apple's Safari browser… in the Ukraine.
Perhaps Opera's sniping at Apple is because it sees the iPhone as a threat, since it's a closed device that probably won't ever feature Opera's software.
My PC went for a prong
This is a cautionary tale about how a tiny piece of plastic can disable all the high technology in a PC. My main home machine packed up a few days back and it was not until this weekend that I found time to open it up and find out why.
The PC uses an Athlon 64 processor sitting in Socket 939 on a Gigabyte mainboard. Surrounding the socket is a plastic base with three little prongs on two edges which are used to hook on the CPU cooler and clamp it down. The CPU cooler I had fitted for some reason used only one of these prongs – not enough, as it turned out.
The prong broke, possibly due to stress induced by the hot weather; the cooler dropped off, the thermal cutout kicked in and the machine stopped. I wasted a couple of hours failing to improvise a prong, and it looked like I'd have to dismantle the whole machine to replace the cooler base.
Instead I popped into the Computer Fair that happens every Saturday near London's Goodge Street underground and found a cooler that hooked into all three prongs. Of course there are only two left on one side but I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is one occasion where two prongs really do make a right.
How to make and take web calls on your mobile phone
We have two products in for review that offer a home or small-office version of the gateways many cheap-call vendors use to undercut the big telcos. The Mobigater, from a Bulgarian firm of the same name, and the IP Voicelink for IPDrum, both allow you to make and receive web calls on a mobile phone.
You insert SIM card from an operator of your choice, which gives the device is a phone number. You can call that number to make an international web call; conversely any web call to the number can be diverted to your mobile. If you are always ringing your mum in, say, Kuala Lumpa, you could have a gateway at either end of the line.
The Mobigator is restricted to Skpe calls but the IP Voicelink has a SIP option.
So can you make this cheaper than using one of the cut-price operators? Well some operators allow you to call one designated number for free, and all offer deals bundling hundreds of minutes for local calls, so you probably can.
We've been slow to review the Mobigater due to factors beyond our control but we will be looking at both devices in the next few days.
Fritz hits the Dect
A new version of the AVM Fritz!Box telephony-enabled router, which earned a coveted five-star PCW rating, packs a DECT base station enabling it to talk directly to hands-free phones.
It also has a faster processor, allowing it to support a USB 2.0 port – the previous version only supported slow USB 1.1.
Manufacturer AVM is big in Germany and is trying to raise its profile here and find more dealers for its products, according to spokesman Thomas Braun.
The older Fritz!Box 7140 router has two phone ports, allowing you to make web or standard calls from an ordinary handset. You can plug a base station in but the new built-in one will allow you to address several phones individually, turning it into a versatile home switchboard.
We should be getting the new box in soon for review so we will spare you more details. Suffice to say that our reviewer said the Fritz is easy to use out of the box, yet has a host of advanced features when you need them. Which is always a good sign in hardware or software.
New light on solar power and how motoring robots could take over US
Our report on Eastman Kodak's new digicam technology is not the only interesting story to emerge today from on MIT's excellent Technology Review site. It reports how a US company has developed a solar cell that converts 40.7 percent of the incident light energy into electricity. The device uses a little-known class of metamorphic materials and is designed for use with lenses or mirrors to focus light, minimising the use of the costly photosensitive components.
Efficiencies as high as 50 percent are said to be on the cards, with the promise of cheaper solar panels.
TR also reports on Stanford University's entry in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) urban challenge, in which robots vehicles will have to race round city streets, obeying all traffic laws and avoiding obstructions - including other traffic.
A test run by Stanford's computer-controlled Volkswagen Passat, called Junior, saw it perform three-point turns and negotiate streets. Most impressive was the fact that it managed to follow the US rules for stopping and starting at a four-way junction, which is more than your reporter can do: I froze traffic at a junction in Stanford, foolishly waiting for others to move when it was my right of way.
As I nearly died the same day down the road in Palo Alto, looking the wrong way when driving onto a dual carriageway, it may be that I need a robot driver that does not forget that they drive on the right in the US.
It sounds like US drivers are in even more need of help. TR reports that 42,000 people die on US roads each year. Add to that the annual toll of 30,000 gun deaths, it's a wonder they have anyone left. Maybe they'll all kill each other off in the name of freedom and the entire place will be taken over by robots.
BT's 'limited-edition' Home Hub - grab one quick!
BT says it's attempting to add a touch of class to the living room with its new LIMITED EDITION Home Hub - available from 1st July.
Yes, that's right, you, along with just 199,999 other lucky punters, could be the proud owner of a stylish black Home Hub. Just imagine the sheer envy of your neighbours when they catch a glance of it - that guy from those BT ads would be speechless.
Quick, head to BT's site before they all go!
Pinnacle's PCTV To Go hits a glitch
We're in the process of testing Pinnacle's new PCTV To Go Wireless - a similar product to the Slingbox that lets you watch your home TV over the internet.
We managed to set the device up with no problems at all (installation was actually very simple) and it streamed our Sky+ box to PCs on the same network perfectly. However, trying to view TV over the internet from a remote location is causing problems.
The PCTV To Go Player software installs fine, but clicking on the Connect button to hook up to the PCTV To Go simply brings up a "PCTV To Go service is not running. Please re-install PCTV To Go software" error message - needless to say, re-installing didn't work.
A live chat session with a Pinnacle technical support engineer was about as useful as a chocolate teapot (and not nearly as tasty). Our engineer, who will remain nameless, patiently listened to our problem, had a long think, asked a few questions, had another long think and then decided he'd done his job and left the chat. Maybe he slipped on the wrong button (perhaps we're being too kind), but it doesn't help us much.
Hopefully this is just a minor glitch that will soon be sorted since it's an otherwise impressive piece of kit. Watch out for the full review soon.
UPDATE:
It would appear that, contrary to the manual, you need to install both the Player software and the full installation software in order to get the Player working. What's more, it didn't like our corporate firewall and came up with a "P2P service is not responding" message. When we tried it from a standard ADSL line in the Labs it worked fine.
Sainsbury's learns that two sides are better (and cheaper) than one
Once upon a time a man went to a large manufacturer of matches and offered, for a phenomenally large fee, to cut at a stroke a large proportion of its costs. The manufacturer agreed, provided the man could fulfil his pledge. The man said: "Just put a striking edge on one side of your matchbox instead if two."
Legend has it that the manufacturer paid up. The story may be a modern myth, but something of the sort seems to have happened to the big retail chains, which have just discovered double-side printers.
It seems that Sainsbury's is the first company in Europe to install double-sided receipt printers, at a huge saving in paper costs and eco-friendly trees. The printers were launched by NCR last year, and now other retail chains are said to be jumping on the bandwagon.
But the big stores are far from alone in being behind the curve on this issue. Considering the widespread concern over ecological damage from paper manufacture, it is astonishing how few office and home printers are duplex.
PCW goes on Safari
Our story today about all the vulnerabilities that have been found in Apple's new Safari browser may seem a little unfair, considering that this is beta code in which one would expect to find bugs. In fact the whole point of beta testing is to find them. But if you shoot your mouth off as much as Apple chief Steve Jobs does, you must expect to get some flak back - and he did say the browser would be secure from Day One.
I've been using Safari intermittently for a day and quite like it. It has a clean design and crisp response and seems to run some of our company's web-based apps rather better than Explorer. Cliff Joseph will be posting a full review soon. But it has to be said the Apple, for all its self-proclaimed user friendliness, is not above giving its users cryptic messages. The one above left appears occasionally when you click the Back button. Its reference to a "form" may mean something to Apple's coders, but in the context of what I was doing it means nothing to me.
How Sexy Salome brought her art to the sleazy streets of Soho
We are not averse to a bit of culture here at PCW Towers, particularly when it is just down the road. This grand reproduction of Rubens' Samson and Delilah is one of 30 paintings from the National Gallery that will be on view in the streets of London's Soho district for the next 12 weeks. We are bang in the middle of Soho, so they are (so to speak) our neighbours.
The idea is to publicise how easy it is to go and see pictures at the gallery, which is also just a five-minute walk away. Oh, and to publicise the work of HP, which has been digitising the gallery's collection and which printed out the full-sized reproductions using its new Designjet 10000s large-format low-solvent printer. A waterproof laminate makes the pictures allegedly graffiti-proof. Soho gets rough at night, when gentle PCWers are not around, so it will be interesting to see what state they are in after 12 weeks.
The pictures have been arranged so you can do what HP and the gallery are pleased to call a Grand Tour of some of Soho's sleazier streets. Gallery director Charles Saumarez Smith was tickled by the siting of Caravaggio's Salome receives the head of John the Baptist outside an "adult centre" (above) near a number of doorways bearing signs such as "model upstairs".
"Just the sort of place Caravaggio liked to frequent," he said.
Sexy Salome was probably the first-century equivalent of the local lap dancers, too.
Anyway it serves to show how lucky we are to live in London, with the free gallery down the road where you can slip in take in a picture when you feel like it. Incidentally it has an excellent audio guide. And if you can't make it here, you can take a virtual Grand Tour here. Meanwhile those of a Freudian bent might care to consider why the National Gallery chose to grace Soho's red-light district with two images of female-inspired emasculation.
Super-thin DVD disc promises eco-friendly covermounts
German optical disc manufacturer ODS has just announced a super-thin flexible DVD disc that it claims will revolutionise the enormous DVD covermount market. At 0.6mm thin and weighing 8 grams, the EcoDisc uses only half the amount of polycarbonate found in a standard DVD. As it's only a single-layer construction, it doesn't need the usual non-biodegradable bonder and so is should be more environmentally friendly than standard discs.
According to ODS, 1.6 billion discs were distributed via newspapers and magazines in 2005 in Western Europe, consuming 18,000 tons of polycarbonate.
The only major downside is that the disc won't work in slot-loading DVD drives.
Kingston announce DDR3 pricing
Kingston have revealed details about their DDR3 memory modules in both the HyperX and ValueRAM product lines. Available in 512MB and 1GB modules as well as 1 and 2GB kits, the first modules are clocked at DDR3-1375 (1,375MHz) for the HyperX line and DDR3-1066 (1,066MHz) for the ValueRAM. Kingston will also launch 1,333MHz modules in the ValueRAM line for the upcoming X38 chipset from Intel.
The latency’s (CL7-7-7-20 CAS7) of these first DDR3 modules are higher than DDR2 but it’s expected they will drop quickly once DDR3 gets established, and while the latency may be higher than DDR2 the voltages are lower 1.8v and 1.5v for the 1375 and 1066 speeds respectively
Pricing details are listed below
HyperX
KHX11000D3LLK2/2G 2GB 1375MHz DDR3 Kit £265(+ VAT)
KHX11000D3LLK2/1G 1GB 1375MHz DDR3 Kit £144(+ VAT)
KHX11000D3LL/1G 1GB 1375MHz DDR3 DIMM £133 (+ VAT)
KHX11000D3LL/512 512MB 1375MHz DDR3 DIMM £72 (+ VAT)
ValueRAM
KVR1066D3N7K2/2G 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 Kit £226(+ VAT)
KVR1066D3N7K2/1G 1GB 1066MHz DDR3 Kit £123(+ VAT)
KVR1066D3N7/1G 1GB 1066MHz DDR3 DIMM £113 (+ VAT)
KVR1066D3N7/512 512MB 1066MHz DDR3 DIMM £61 (+ VAT)
Native Openoffice.org for OS X available
An early alpha version of Openoffice.org for OS X has just been made available for download. As befitting an alpha version, many features don't work, such as printing and copy & paste, but the Mac community will no doubt be happy that progress has finally been made on this port of this popular free office suite.
Win a Buffalo Linkstation Live Multimedia server
If you haven't done so already, there's still time to enter our online competition to win a Buffalo Linkstation Live Multimedia server with 250GB storage courtesy of tgrav.com.
All you have to do is answer this simple question:
What bundling feature does tgrav.com offer?
-The bag-o-matic
-The bundle-of-joy
-The bundle-iser
To enter, head to our competition page now.
Vista's old-school crashes
I had my first full Vista crash this weekend. It happened when I was playing with the Windows Classic interface that sends any Vista desktop back in time to when I were a lad [sic].
My whole system froze, without any other programs open, while I was adding toolbars to the taskbar. There was no way back other than to kill the power. The 2000 look is one of the best in my opinion, but I suspect Microsoft spent less time working on it than Aero and as a result it's less stable.
Microsoft's decision to replace the 'Start' writing with a Windows flag in Vista confuses a lot of novice users when they try to get on with their work, so the classic look is definitely in demand.
It was a stupid decision for MS to have to select Start to shutdown in the first place, but it has become ingrained in many minds who couldn't care less.
Sigma SD14 firmware update released
If you caught our recent review of the Sigma SD14 digital SLR and ended up splashing the cash and buying one, you'll be pleased to hear there's a new firmware update available.
The new firmware mainly consists of bug fixes, but it also brings improved image quality when reviewing photos on the LCD viewfinder and a slow-sync option when shooting in aperture priority mode.
Although the SD14 is short on features, it's easy to use and performs extremely well - a big step up from the Sigma SD10.
Read our full Sigma SD14 review to find out more
Download the latest firmware from Sigma
