A MicroBTX PC case from AOpen: Entertainment PC DIY

Sonoma: the official announcement in Japan

Corsair unveils 2GB USB dongles

ELSA introduces Quadro FX 1400/540 PCI-E graphics cards

A MicroBTX PC case from AOpen: Entertainment PC DIY

Such an interesting novelty appeared these days in AOpen portfolio — a miniature B300A-250BKF microBTX PC case. The new product strongly resembles the latest Entertainment PCs of Hewlett-Packard, so we guess in some near future you will be able to assmble such systems yourself. The case is expected to cost $95.

The novelty offers 1 x 5.25" and 1 x 3.5" bay for optical of FDD drives, 1 x 3.5" for a HDD, 4 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE 1394 ports. The case size is 390x350x108 mm.

Source: PC Watch

Sonoma: the official announcement in Japan

Intel, as expected, introduced its Sonoma platform, which is the second generation after Centrino. The changes touched all the components, including CPU, chipset and WLAN.

Pentium M clock rates were increased from 2.00 to 2.13 GHz, ULV models now have clock rates up to 1.2 GHz, while LV processors now offer clock rates up to 1.5 GHz. FSB clock rate was increased from 400 to 533 MHz.

Alviso chipset (Mobile Intel 915 Express) was optimized for PCI Express and now supports DDR2 SDRAM and the new bus architecture. The graphics performance was doubled comparing to the 915 series. The chipset now supports TV-Out, Dolby Digital 7.1 audio.

As for WLAN (Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG), this part of the platform now supports 802.11a standard, besides the b/g. Also, like all the latest WLAN solutions, Intel´s product supports IEEE 802.11i as well.

Note that the company didn´t revise PSU technologies for the new platform, but just used the existing. According to the European offices of Intel, the battery power and lifetime remained almost the same, but still the latter could be prolonged using the extended power saving features of the chipset.

Sources: Intel Japan, PC Watch

Corsair unveils 2GB USB dongles

Corsair Memory officially unveiled its new Voyager 2GB USB 2.0 dongles, CMFUSB2.0-2GB.

These feature rubberized shock- and dampproof casings and provide 19 MB/s read speed. The MSRP in North America is $189.

ELSA introduces Quadro FX 1400/540 PCI-E graphics cards

ELSA Japan introduced two new graphics cards on NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs: Quadro FX 1400 and Quadro FX 540. The new workstation solutions support PCI Express x16 bus and SLI (Scalable Link Interface), DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5 APIs.

The former novelty bases on Quadro FX 1400, has 128 MB of 256-bit DDR SDRAM memory, 2 x DVI-I (up to 1920x1200 on each). The MSRP is $1,000.

The latter, Quadro FX 540, has 128 MB of 128-bit DDR SDRAM, DVI-I (1600x1200), S-Video/HDTV (1920x1080 or 1080i) and D-Sub (2048x1536) interfaces. Its MSRP is $380.

Source: PC Watch

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