Tuesday News, May 17th 2011

Its on folks, after a few years of being stonewalled, XSR is back working with OCZ; and what a good way to get back into the swing of things. Today it’s the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD that we’re looking into; hopefully it’s not the last one we’ll do either, so I better do I good job; though I can’t give them an easy time either, what a dilemna.


For those looking for a new slimline graphics solution, this new midrange card from Powercolor might just tick all the right boxes. If space is at a premium then this card offers ‘full fat’ gaming performance with 775mhz core speed and up to four cards supported in CrossFireX.


Phison SSDs aren’t as well-known to computer hardware enthusiasts as those controllers from SandForce or Indilinx. For many within the industry, SandForce dominated the 2010 market in much the same way that Indilinx did throughout 2009. But not everyone can afford the premium brand names, or desire the fastest solid state drive technology. Building on the name of their budget Torqx TRB product line that came in 32/64GB capacities, Patriot Memory issues the Torqx 2 series for high-performance power users with capacity up to 256GB. The Patriot Torqx 2 SSD is specified to offer 270 MB/s reads over the SATA 3.0 GB/s interface, with write speed reaching 230 MB/s. In this article, Benchmark Reviews confirms these results by testing the Patriot Torqx 2 on a B3-stepping Sandy Bridge platform with plenty of bandwidth headroom.


ByteSized

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AMD is releasing a new FirePro card, passively cooled and squeezed TDP to compete in the VDI and GPU Compute space – and FirePro V7800P is launching in a brand new Dell PowerEdge blade server at the end of the month. We bring you the details and talk about how important Windows Server OS is to AMD’s
future GPU Compute strategy, as Windows Server 2008 R2 will now be officially supported by Catalyst Pro drivers.


AMD launched yet another Deneb SKU, named Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition, and clocked to yet another all time fastest from AMD – 3.70 GHz. After recent price cuts, Phenom II X4 980 will cost around $185, which puts it back to back with Intel’s locked SB models Core i5 2400 and 2500. This may be the last time for our
friend to shine and battle out with the competition.


As expected, Lenovo have done their best to brush up their best-buy business notebooks series and present a product that is bound to have good grades with users who know exactly what they want.


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