Nvidia's Full Kepler Lineup Leaked to the Web

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:21:39 +0000

Anticipation for Nvidia's upcoming Kepler launch is running high these days. Rumors and early reports suggest Kepler's going to be king of the GPU castle when it's released, promptly stealing back the performance crown that sits atop AMD's Radeon HD 7970, but details have mostly been sparse. That is, until now. A full lineup of Kepler graphics cards has been leaked to the Web, complete with specs, release dates, prices, and more.

Here's part of the full monty, according to EXPreview Lenzfire (original source):

• GTX 690: 2x1.75GB, 2x6.4 billion transistors, $999, Q3 2012
• GTX 680: 2GB, 6.4 billion transistors, $649, April
• GTX 670: 1.75GB, 6.4 billion transistors, $499, April
• GTX 660 Ti: 1.5GB, 6.4 billion transistors, $399, Q2/Q3 2012
• GTX 660: 2GB, 3.4 billion transistors, $319, April
• GTX 650 Ti: 1.75GB, 3.4 billion transistors, $249, Q2/Q3 2012
• GTX 650: 1.5GB, 1.8 billion transistors, $179, May
• GTX 640: 2GB, 1.8 billion transistors, $139, May

EXPreview Lenzfire posted plenty of other details about each GPU, but what's really interesting is how Kepler's performance supposedly scales. According to EXPreview's charts, the GTX 680 and 670 will outpace AMD Radeon's HD 7970 by around 45 percent and 20 percent, respectively, and GTX 670 will run around 20 percent faster than the 7950.

Based on the leaked info, you can expect the GTX 660 to offer roughly the same performance as a current generation GTX 580, and the GTX 650 Ti as a GTX 570, GTX 650 as a GTX 560, and the GTX 640 as a GTX 550 Ti.

Ultrabook Ultra-Roundup: 4 Top-Notch Notebooks Reviewed and Compared

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:24:07 +0000

Will this new class of slim, trim, relatively affordable portables be the Next Big Thing?

You’d have to actively be avoiding the tech media over the past several months not to have heard about Ultrabooks. Their coming has garnered a boatload of buzz, fueled in no small part by Intel’s $300 million fund to get hardware and software makers behind the cause.

Ultrabooks are Intel’s answer to the spread of ARM-based tablets—a way to capture the hearts and minds of the masses with an x86-based portable device (of the Intel persuasion, natch). To that end, Ultrabooks are required to meet a few key “desirability” standards. They must be slim, lightweight, have generous battery life, and boot and resume from hibernation in brisk fashion. It’s also understood they should look cool. As Apple products so clearly demonstrate, style sells. And sure enough, Ultrabooks—at least those that have debuted so far—are heartily infused with MacBook Air influence.

So are these new, “cool” devices the next must-have products? Is all the hoopla warranted? We review the first four Ultrabooks to kick off the category. All are 13.3 inch models, but each brings its own brand of hot-newness to the table, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, as you’ll see on the following pages.

Acer Aspire S3

Priced right, but far from perfect

When Ultrabooks were first announced it seemed doubtful that manufacturers could turn out these wannabe MacBook Airs at the sub-$1,000 price Intel was promising. Acer put those doubts to rest with the Aspire S3, which debuted at $900. Given its relative affordability, it’s not surprising that the Aspire S3 makes a few compromises in its Air aspirations.

Measuring .68 inches at its thickest, the ever-so-slightly wedged three-pound chassis is matte silver throughout, save for its black rubber hinge and gray keyboard. An attractive brushed-aluminum lid lends the S3 a solid feel and a classy countenance—at least when the notebook is closed. The inside and underneath are all plastic. Nevertheless, the S3 feels rigid when held by one corner, and we like that it opens almost 180 degrees.

Overall, the S3’s island keyboard is comfortable to type on, although the key press is a bit shallow and many of the oft-used keys around the periphery, such as Enter, Shift, Backspace, etc. are truncated. That’s particularly true of the arrow keys, which also double as volume and screen-brightness controls. Using the S3’s unified clickpad, which supports multitouch functions, didn’t give us any woes.

Closed, the S3 cuts a more impressive figure, with its handsome brushed metal lid on display.

Port selection is spare, a quality of all Ultrabooks, and here consists of a headphone/mic, a media reader, HDMI, and two USB 2.0 ports—the S3 is the only Ultrabook in this roundup not to feature USB 3.0.

Acer tapped the Core i5-2467M for processing duty. While the base clock is just 1.6GHz, it can Turbo up to 2.3GHz, and thus performed better in most benchmarks than the 2.13GHz Core i7-640LM Arrandale CPU in our zero-point ultraportable rig. The S3’s lagging score in Quake III is no doubt the result of its single-channel RAM, which is particularly problematic in older titles. Conversely, its score in Quake 4 demonstrates the advances of Sandy Bridge’s integrated graphics, although the gaming chops of any ultraportable out right now will be pretty limited.

In our video playback test, the S3’s battery lasted five hours; it recharged to full capacity in half that time. Videos themselves looked crisp and color-accurate on the S3’s 1366x768 glossy screen if the screen was tilted just so. Otherwise, color and detail were diminished to varying degrees.

The S3 is unique among these Ultrabooks for featuring a mechanical hard drive, but it’s paired with 20GB of NAND flash for SSD caching, using Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT). Thus, your most-often used programs benefit from the SSD’s faster performance. The S3’s boot time of approximately 39 seconds, however, was a good deal slower than that of the SSD competition.

Acer also offers a $1,300 S3 model with a Core i7 and a 240GB SSD. But truth be told, the body is better suited to the lower-cost category, where it must make due with the modest praise of being a decent budget option.

$900, www.acer.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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Toshiba Portégé Z835

Lightest load, lowest price, least compelling

Toshiba does Acer $100 better, offering the Z835, a Best Buy exclusive, for $800. Its low price is matched by its light weight. At two pounds, 6.6 ounces, it beats all the others here by a good half-pound. But the Z835 also looks and feels the cheapest of the bunch. Its construction seems less solid—particularly the lid, which has a disconcerting amount of flex.

The Z835’s dark-gray and black color scheme is peppered with chrome accents that look a bit dated. All the keys on the Z835’s island keyboard are normal width, but they are also slightly squat, which takes getting used to, as does the shallow travel of all keyboards of this ilk. The keyboard’s backlighting is a surprising feature at this price—and not one currently found on the more expensive Ultrabook models. A traditional touchpad of decent size with discrete right and left buttons stands out among the other Ultrabooks’ clickpads.

The Z835’s hardware specs are another reflection of its low price. The centerpiece is a 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M, which doesn’t benefit from any Turbo boost whatsoever. This renders the Z835 the slowest in the benchmarks of all four Ultrabooks, and even slower than our elderly zero-point, except in Quake 4, thanks to Sandy Bridge graphics.

Only the Portégé Z835 offers a backlit keyboard—a standard feature of the MacBook Air.

The Z835 also skimps on storage capacity, offering just 128GB. It’s full-SSD, but that’s not saying much. The Toshiba NAND flash coupled with a Toshiba controller mustered just 187MB/s sequential reads in CrystalDiskMark—half the speed and then some of the other two SSDs in this roundup. More pathetic still, the Z835’s sequential write speed of 49.23 is 40 percent slower than that of the HDD in Acer’s S3.

On the brighter side, the Z835 offers the most generous array of ports, with full-size VGA in addition to full-size HDMI, two USB 2.0 ports plus one USB 3.0, and an Ethernet port—a rarity in this roundup.

The Z835’s glossy 1366x768 screen isn’t spectacular, but it reproduced pictures and videos without noticeable flaws and the viewing angle is thankfully wider than that of the Acer S3. In our battery rundown test, the Z835 played a continuously looping video for close to five hours. It took about three hours to completely recharge. It booted to Windows in 24 seconds, which isn’t bad.

Even more so than Acer’s S3, the Z835 deserves credit for offering such a svelte and exceedingly portable form factor for its price. But reaching that price entailed compromises—a few too many, in our opinion, to grant this product more than a mild endorsement.

$800, www.toshiba.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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Asus Zenbook UX31E

Now we're talking turkey

With the Asus UX31E, all the fuss about Ultrabooks starts to make sense. Its all-metal chassis, cut from a single sheet of aluminum, is undeniably handsome. And while this attractive metal wedge that’s just .71 inches at its thickest brings to mind the fine craftsmanship of a MacBook Air, it’s by no means a knockoff. The UX31E possesses a unique character that’s admirable in its own right. And at $1,050, it’s $250 less than its similarly spec’d Apple counterpart.

Silver inside and out, save for a black bezel around the screen and black backing to the keyboard, the UX31E sports a faintly etched pattern of concentric circles on its lid, while the deck is adorned with a pattern of brushed vertical lines, interrupted only by a spacious clickpad. While clickpads can be persnickety and frustrating to use, we didn’t have any issues with the pad on the UX31E. As for the keyboard, the size and spacing of the keys feels right, and although the key press is shallow, there’s a satisfying click at the end of each depression.

Another welcome feature of the UX31E is its 1600x900 screen resolution, besting the 1366x768 of the other screens in this roundup and the 1440x900 of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air. Like all the others, the UX31E’s screen is glossy; it produces a bright, vivid picture and holds up well off axis.

The two speakers embedded in the chassis are powered by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower tech and put out surprisingly full audio for a device of these dimensions.

Internally, the UX31E also impresses. Its Core i5-2557M proc is clocked at 1.7GHz, with a max Turbo frequency of 2.7GHz. Combine that with a SATA 6Gb/s SSD and you’ve got a machine that posts healthy gains over our zero-point in the benchmarks and some of the fastest scores in this roundup. To put it in perspective, the UX31E had sequential read and write speeds of 463MB/s and 341MB/s, respectively—pretty darn close to the spec’s max bandwidth. Sadly, the SSD is just 128GB.

The UX31E’s battery life surpassed five hours in our tests. It recharged to 50 percent in less than an hour, and reached a full charge in three. Booting to Windows took 23 seconds.

Asus throws in a tasteful, brown padded carrying case for the UX31E, as well as a matching pouch that holds two connector dongles: USB-to-Ethernet and Mini VGA-to-VGA. Yes, Mini VGA is built into the unit (who knew it even existed?), along with Mini HDMI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, headphone, mic, and a media reader.

All told, the UX31E weighs in at three pounds, 2.1 ounces (or 8.3 ounces, if you add the power supply). If going toe-to-toe with Apple’s Air on both design and specs, while beating its price, is what it takes to achieve product hotness, then Asus has done it.

$1,050, www.asus.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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Lenovo IdeaPad U300s

Hits all the right notes except price

Lenovo also brings its A-game to the Ultrabook party. And well it should, since it’s asking almost $1,500 for the IdeaPad U300s. That’s premium, business-ultraportable price territory. It’s therefore apropos that the U300s has the most businessy aesthetic, although not at the sake of sleek design. Like the Asus UX31E and the MacBook Air, the U300s is crafted from a single-sheet of aluminum. It eschews the wedge form factor established by Apple and instead uniquely mimics the lines of a hardbound book, with the top and bottom edges protruding slightly all the way around the perimeter, the way a book’s covers protrude past the pages. It makes for a distinct and pleasing silhouette.

Both bottom and top are dark gray—Graphite Gray, to use Lenovo’s parlance (Clementine Orange is also an option)—while the deck and screen bezel are matte silver. The inside is clean and minimalist, consisting of a power button, island keyboard, and large clickpad. The Shift, Enter, Caps, Tab, and Backspace keys are all slightly shortened, but typing on the U300s was a mostly comfortable, trouble-free affair, and the glass-surfaced clickpad is sublime.

We love that the U300s's deck is free of third-party branding, but that tack helps pay the rent.

Ports include one USB 3.0, one USB 2.0, full-size HDMI, and a headphone/mic combo. Lenovo is alone in this pack for excluding a media reader. A small button on the notebook’s left side launches Lenovo’s OneKey Recovery, which walks you through creating a system image that can be launched from the same button should your system fail. The U300s also supports Intel’s Wireless Display technology. So with a WiDi adapter (purchased separately) attached to your TV, you can stream any content from your notebook via Intel’s software.

Enough with the extras, how 'bout the hard stuff? The U300s is powered by a Core i7-2677M, which is clocked just a hair above the Core i5 in the Asus UX31E, at 1.8GHz. The two units traded wins in the benchmarks, although the U300s performed significantly better than the UX31E in Photoshop, for inexplicable reasons. In Quake III, the U300s suffered the fate of all single-channel RAM configs. For storage, Lenovo taps a comparatively spacious 256GB SSD. It’s a SATA 3Gb/s device using a year-old J Micron controller, but it comes close to maximum bandwidth, and subjectively speaking, the U300s feels plenty snappy. It was the quickest to boot to Windows, posting 17 seconds flat.

The U300s’s screen quality is on par with the UX31E’s, albeit at a lower res of 1366x768. Battery life for the two was also similar, exceeding five hours. Lenovo, however, had the speediest recharge, hitting 50 percent in 30 minutes.

So, yes, the U300s offers a good deal of quality for the price. But it’s nonetheless costly, and by contrast, the Asus UX31E is the better Ultrabook value.

$1,495, www.lenovo.com

Our zero-point ultraportable is an HP EliteBook 2540p with a 2.13GHz Intel Core i7-640LM, 4GB of DDR3/1333 RAM, integrated graphics, a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive, and Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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Inside Out: Anatomy of An Ultrabook

On the whole, Ultrabooks aren't the most upgrade-friendly devices. Of the four we reviewed, only the Asus and the Toshiba models seem to grant interior access that doesn't entail potential damage to the machine—and even those devices each require the removal of 12 screws, plus the use of a tiny security bit, in the case of the Toshiba. Here's what Toshiba's Z835 packs under the hood.

1. USB 3.0: Like most of the Ultrabooks here, the Z835 features USB 3.0. It comes compliments of an NEC controller.
2. CPU: To save space, the Z835's Core i3-2367 uses a ball-grid array, soldered to the board, rather than a higher-profile socket. That negates a future CPU upgrade.
3. RAM: The memory configuration is interesting, consisting of a 2GB SO-DIMM that can easily be upgraded, as well as 2GB of memory soldered to the board.
4. SSD: A standard mSATA drive allows a future swap out—a nice consolation since the 128GB Toshiba drive that comes with the Z835 is small, as well as slow by SSD standards.

The Upshot on Ultrabooks

Where do they stand in the "must-have" product universe?

Now that we’ve seen what Ultrabooks have to offer, we can fairly say the category has promise. Intel’s success with Sandy Bridge, its strong desire to keep the ARM crowd at bay, and its deep pockets have spurred impressive strides in device development—shoot, two months ago, we couldn’t have imagined an ultraportable as capable and attractive as Asus’s UX31E fetching anything less than $1,400. To see a first-gen product of that caliber hovering just above a grand says something.

Are Ultrabooks ready to overtake tablets? Probably not—right now. Granted, even the current crop’s mix of stylishness, generous battery life, fast boots, and real PC performance will give some tablet shoppers pause when weighing the pros and cons of each device class. But the prices of Ultrabooks are still a little high (particularly for the more lustworthy models) to compete with $200-$500 tabbies.

And then there’s that little matter of touch. For the time being, Ultrabooks don’t come with touchscreens—a primary factor in tablets’ appeal. Nor do Ultrabooks hook into an app marketplace. Expect those things to change with the release of Windows 8 in 2012. Win8’s Metro UI will not only look the part of a mobile OS, but also be optimized for touch, and rumor has it the OS will include an integrated app store.

Yes, a touchscreen has the potential to add to an Ultrabook’s cost, but Intel is already working on that. At the Intel Capital Global Summit in November, CEO Paul Otellini made it clear that touch-based Ultrabooks will be a big focus for the company in 2012. Part of that includes getting the cost of touch down. Intel’s $300 million Ultrabook fund will help with that. Ultimately, Otellini wants to see Windows 8 touch-based Ultrabooks starting at $699.

Ivy Bridge will also figure prominently in Ultrabooks’ future. Intel’s next CPU will be manufactured on a 22nm tri-gate process, making it more power efficient than Sandy Bridge chips, and it will feature an entirely new graphics core that’s reportedly going to offer 50 percent better performance than Sandy Bridge in 3D games and feature DirectX 11 support, to boot.

All told, there’s potential here for these devices to be tablet killers—if value and functionality mean anything. For now, though, Ultrabooks should at least make portable-PC shoppers happy. All the models we reviewed here represent a big shift in the laptop landscape, from design, to form factor, to price. Yes, Asus’s UX31E offers the most compelling mix of all these factors, but we believe that Ultrabooks as a whole have serious merit as ultraportable general-purpose PCs.

Confessions of an Elite Pirate

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:37:23 +0000

The BitTorrent community used to think that law enforcement had better things to do than hunt them down, but that all changed in mid-2005, when US-based EliteTorrents was raided by the FBI and ICE. The site had over 130,000 users, and was run by a small number of dedicated staff, including one 19 year-old who recently spoke about the ordeal. He gives a peek inside the first big Torrent bust of what has become an ongoing war on piracy for US law enforcement.

StonyVision, as he was known online, got into the file-sharing scene around the age of 15. In early 2004, StonyVision’s massive upload bandwidth got the attention of the still-embryonic EliteTorrents. He joined the staff and began renting servers to push out hundreds of megabits per-second over BitTorrent. StonyVision eventually tired of EliteTorrents, and made his exit in April of 2005, but it was too late to escape the coming FBI dragnet. 

May 25th 2005 was the day the FBI and ICE went after EliteTorrents. After shutting down the site, agents arrived at the homes of the EliteTorrent staff, StonyVision included. The 19 year-old lawyered up and started fighting back. The prosecutor had ample evidence, and was seeking a prison sentence as high as 5 years. StonyVision is the first to admit he was lucky to get a sympathetic judge, and was able to avoid jail time. He payed a $3500 fine, served 6-months house arrest, and 3-years of probation in which he was unable to touch a computer.

StonyVision has only recently been able to get back online with his own computer, and reports he was inspired by the anti-SOPA movement last month. His two felony convictions for sharing files has made job applications a little tricky, but he says his self-destructive streak is no more. 

Avast Misidentifies Steam As A Trojan

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:48:10 +0000

Are you having troubles getting Steam to boot up today? If so, the problem might not be with Valve's blockbuster gaming service; the issue could be your antivirus, instead. This weekend, the freebie Avast! antivirus misidentified a Steam component as a nasty little Trojan and sent the executable to the time-out box known as Quarantine as a result. The problem: SteamService.exe was a totally clean file, and Steam won't run without it.

Fortunately, the muck-up only lasted about an hour and a half, according to The Register. Avast! yanked the bonked definition around 90 minutes after it went live. While the goof shouldn't have happened in the first place, kudos to Avast! for fixing so quickly, and on the weekend to boot.

If you were affected, restoring the file from Quarantine might get Steam up and running again. However, several Steam users needed to reinstall the service, resubmit their verification code and reboot their PC to get Steam working normally again, and many warn that installing SteamService.exe again can be a lengthy process.

Where you affected by Avast's false positive? How easy was it for you to get Steam up and running again?

Woman Ordered to Decrypt Laptop Claims She "Forgot" Key

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:56:30 +0000

After being ordered to provide the decryption code for her laptop last month, a Colorado is claiming that she no-longer remembers the key. The laptop belonging to Ramona Fricosu was seized as part of a mortgage fraud case in 2010. The government has spent the last few years working to force her to decrypt the hard drive, claiming that doing so would not violate her 5th Amendment right not to incriminate herself. 

“It’s very possible to forget passwords,” said Philip Dubois, attorney to Fricosu. “It’s not clear to me she was the one who set up the encryption on this drive. I don’t know if she will be able to decrypt it.” This case has been a complicated one, as the Supreme Court has never ruled on the status of digital encryption as it pertains to the 5th Amendment. Fricosu has until the end of the month to comply with the ruling, at which time she will be found in contempt if she does not.

This leaves the judge in a tough spot. Fricosu would likely be jailed for failing to comply, but there’s no definitive way to prove she still knows the encryption key. Lawyers suspect she will be jailed in an effort to force her to cave. The judge will have to decide how long to hold her, as the court cannot jail her indefinitely without proof she is withholding the key. Do you think courts should be able to force people to provide an encryption key?

Sandboxed Flash Player for Firefox Now Available in Beta Form

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:05:28 +0000

Adobe on Monday announced the availability of Flash Player Protected Mode for Mozilla Firefox. Essentially a sandboxed version of the popular browser plugin, Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox is currently in beta. Hit the jump for more.

The popular plugin is no stranger to sandboxing technology, having supported sandboxing within Chrome for over an year and in Internet Explorer for longer than that. Back in late 2010, when Adobe first enabled sandboxing support in Chrome’s integrated Flash Player, the company had hinted at the possibility of the technology being extended to other browsers.

“Today, Adobe has launched a public beta of our new Flash Player sandbox (aka “Protected Mode”) for the Firefox browser,” announced Peleus Uhley, a senior security researcher at Adobe, in a blog post. “The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach. Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities.”

“Sandboxing technology has proven very effective in protecting users by increasing the cost and complexity of authoring effective exploits. For example, since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X.”

This particular Adobe Flash Protected Mode implementation requires Firefox 4.0 or later and supports both Windows Vista and Windows 7. The beta is available at the Adobe Labs site.

Brazil Files Lawsuit Against Twitter, Says DUI Checkpoint Accounts Must Go

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:15:41 +0000

Twitter is i hot legal water with the government of Brazil today, which has filed a lawsuit against the micro-blogging company. At issue are a number of Twitter accounts that Brazilian authorities say are being used to warn drivers of police traffic controls. The fines are set to start rolling in if Twitter does not close these accounts. 

Brazil has been working to reduce rates of driving under the influence in a nation with a reputation for lax traffic laws. Twitter is hugely popular in Brazil, and that has led some individuals to create accounts that tweet the location of police checkpoints and radar traps. The Brazilian government says the accounts are not only illegal under the law, but ethically dubious. 

Increased police checkpoints are designed to save lives, they say. That some of these pages have begun mixing in general traffic information with the checkpoint locations has not impressed the Brazilian courts. The lawsuit asks for Twitter to be fined nearly $300,000 per-day that the accounts stay up. If the company loses the case, it might have no choice but to give its new region-specific filtering tool a spin. 

Google Starts Laying Fiber In Kansas Cities

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:31:08 +0000

Google's plans to bring a face-meltingly fast 1Gbps Internet connection to Kansas Cities (in both Missouri and Kansas) took a big step towards becoming reality today. After haggling with city officials about wire placement on utility poles, a deal was finally struck, and the company is ready to get down to brass tacks and start actually laying fiber.

"As we build out Google Fiber, we’ll be taking thousands of miles of cables and stretching them across Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri," general manager Kevin Lo announced on the Google Fiber blog. "At first, we’ll focus on building this solid fiber backbone. Then, as soon as we have an infrastructure that is up and running, we’ll be able to connect Google Fiber into homes across Kansas City!"

There's no word on which neighborhoods or areas will be getting first dibs at the fiber, though. Google hopes to start delivering actual 1Gbps service to KC customers by the end of the first quarter, according to the project's FAQ page. Since they're only starting to lay fiber now, don't be surprised if the roll out slips back a bit.

Thermaltake Expands Toughpower and Smart Series Power Supply Lines

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:40:02 +0000

Depending on how you look at things, the power supply is arguably the most important component in a build, and is at least one of the most underrated. Thermaltake over the years has worked hard to be known as one of a handful of reliable PSU brands, and its Toughpower and Smart Series are generally well received around the Web. Today both of those lines are expanding with new wattage options.

Thermaltake is fleshing out its Toughpower series with 550W, 650W, and 750W models, each of which is 80 Plus Gold certified with 87-92 percent efficiency at 20-100 percent load under real world load conditions. In addition to 80 Plus Gold certification, these Toughpower units live up to their name with massive single +12V rails delivering 50A on the 550W and 750W models, and 60W on the 850W model, and by using 100 percent Japanese capacitors.

Rounding out the Smart Series are 750W and 850W models. These are 80 Plus Bronze certified to deliver 82-88 percent efficiency at 20-100 percent load under real world load conditions. Single +12V rails are also a staple of Thermaltake's Smart units, with 62A available on the 750W and 70W on the 850W. They use flat modular cables and are similar to previous Smart models, except the 750W and 850W adopt 100 percent Japanese capacitors like the Toughpower line.

No word on price or availability.

Netflix Dives Into Content Creation, Launches "Lilyhammer" Original Series

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:11:48 +0000

Hangover Monday has turned out to be a pretty momentous day for fans of digital television watching. But while pirates bemoan the death of BTJunkie.org and Redbox gears up for a new streaming service venture with Verizon, Netflix is entering a new phase of its own: content creator. Today, the company launched Lilyhammer, a mob drama starring Steven Van Zandt of Sopranos and Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band fame. It looks like Netflix knows where its binge-watching strengths lie, too; all 8 episodes are available for immediate viewing.

As if Van Zandt didn't sound multitalented enough, he also wrote and produced the show, given him one hell of a rounded-out resume. The show is named after the city of Lilyhammer in Norway; after Van Zandt's character testifies against a New York mob boss, he is moved to the title town as part of the witness protection program.

If the show's reception in Norway is any indication, Lilyhammer might be worth checking out.

"Lilyhammer" is also showing on Norwegian television and (is in its) third week on the air," Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos wrote on the company's blog. "The show is a national sensation, with 1.2 million of the nation's 5 million people watching every week. It is the most watched TV show in Norwegian history."

Lilyhammer is just the first of many new original shows slated to hit the streaming giant. Netflix plans on running new episodes of the long-canceled cult hit Arrested Development as well as House of Cards, a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and directed/produced by David Fincher, the mind behind Fight Club, Se7en and The Social Network.

So, does Netflix's original content intrigue you? If you're not a subscriber, does the addition of new programming make you more likely to start dropping $8/mo. for a streaming subscription?