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NVIDIA to Stop Making Chipsets?

GeForce 8800GT Buyers, Beware of Unpleasant Surprises

Nikon Offers D3 Owners Buffer Capacity Increase

Nail 'Em Down USB Dongle

Prices for CD-R and DVD±R Media May Go Up

First Look at HIS IceQ 4 Cooling



NVIDIA to Stop Making Chipsets?

According to preliminary information supplied by the source, NVIDIA is going to stop making chipsets.

Earlier this week, NVIDIA held a special meeting with its motherboard partners to decide whether to continue chipset manufacture or not.

While motherboard manufacturers are keeping silent about this, preliminary information indicates that NVIDIA is going to quit this business and merge the "chipset team" with GPU department. Thus, some vendors of ready product are hastily finishing (or cancelling) their projects related to nForce 7 series.

The loss of this business may affect the success of NVIDIA's GPU products. E.g., sluggish adoption of nForce 200 (BR04) chip that means SLI support on Intel X58 boards forces NVIDIA to find new ways of licensing and introducing multi-GPU support to motherboards based on AMD and Intel chipsets. Otherwise, the High-End market segment might be occupied by AMD with CrossFireX.

Source: DigiTimes


GeForce 8800GT Buyers, Beware of Unpleasant Surprises

According to the sources, some GeForce 8800GT buyers got cards with specifications lower than expected: 96 shader processors instead of 112 and 128-bit bus instead of 256-bit. While the bus width was stated in card descriptions, the decreased amount of shaders was not mentioned. Such a turn makes purchased cards even slower than 9600 GSO. The problem is that these cards (Point Of View R-VGA150868) are being sold as 8800GT and potential buyers might not be aware of this "surprise".

At least one buyer that complained to Point Of View was promised a replacement. According to company explanations, the bus width of 128 bits must be clearly stated in product promotion materials. As for the amount of shaders, R-VGA150868 must have 112 of them, not 96. This exactly served as a reason for replacement.



According to Point Of View, to which the German source is referring, other vendors will also be offering 8800 GT cards with 128-bit buses. However, NVIDIA claims it has been unaware of this and that Point Of View is acting on its own.

Sources: Computerbase.de, techPowerUp!


Nikon Offers D3 Owners Buffer Capacity Increase

Owners of full-frame Nikon D3 DSLRs can now double buffer capacity of their cameras. The result can be estimated with the help of the table below based on data from company's website. E.g., in FX mode with 14-bit uncompressed RAW bursts become 20 frames longer (36 vs. 16).

The upgrade costs 500 USD plus shipping costs and might take as long as two weeks. In case the time span increases (given all D3 owners rush in for upgrades, for example), the company promises to notify owners about this.



Source: Nikon


Nail 'Em Down USB Dongle

Dutch plankton released a funny USB dongle by the name of "nailed". It's easy to imagine the reaction of people around you, when they see a giant nail sticking out of your machine. Perhaps, only the "cable stub" can provide a similar effect.

The body of nailed is made of polyurethane. The novelty is 90mm long, its head is 34 mm in diameter, and memory capacity is 2GB. Considering such moderate storage size, this original USB dongle is rather expensive (29.50 EUR).







Source: plankton


Prices for CD-R and DVD±R Media May Go Up

It's not a secret that products labeled with popular brands are made on OEM terms by other companies. E.g. Taiwanese CMC Magnetics is one of the largest manufacturers of optical media.

In addition to the 10% increase of CD-R and DVD±R OEM prices planned for August, CMC Magnetics is going to adjust prices upward again in Q4. The reason is that the increase in August will barely allow to compensate increasing production costs. OEM prices have been dropping for the last 2-3 years due to local competition, pointed out company chairman Robert Wong.

The company has not decided yet the amount of quote adjustment. It will depend on the size of additional income that CMC will require to reach the breakeven point in 2008 and profitability in 2009.

About Blu-ray Disc (BD) media CMC is more conservative. Wong believes that growth of investments into BD production is restrained by royalties. By the way, production of CBHD media (China Blue High-definition Disc) might become more attractive from this point of view. Anyway, according to Wong, 2009 may become a turning point for the BD market.

Source: DigiTimes


First Look at HIS IceQ 4 Cooling

The IceQ series used in HIS graphics cards are, perhaps, the most original solutions in the class. Such coolers have always offered significantly more attractive combination of noise and temperature characteristics than ATI's reference.

It seems the fourth generation of these coolers will be used in Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Turbo and Turbo-X, according to the source.

No exact clock rates were disclosed, but naturally this graphics card will be overclocked.



The IceQ 4 cooler itself covers GPU, memory modules, power circuitry and utilizes two heatpipes for improved heat removal from GPU. To ensure ejection of hot air from enclosure, designers had to sacrifice the neighboring slot space.



According to the source, HIS Radeon HD 4850 ICEQ4 Turbo and Turbo-X will go on sale this month, prices being higher by 25 and 35 USD respectively, comparing to prices of graphics cards with reference coolers.



Source: Donanim Haber


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