HotHardware and Gigabyte New Year's Giveaway

Now that the holidays and CES craziness are over, we thought it would be a good time to launch our latest giveaway! This time around, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Gigabyte to give away a few of pieces of HOT hardware. Up for grabs, we have a Z68 series, Z68XP-UD3P motherboard, GeForce GTX 560 N56GOC-IGI graphics card, and a Force K3 keyboard and M6900 mouse...

The Grand Prize Winner will receive a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 N56GOC-IGI!

The First Runner Up will receive and a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P motherboard!

The Second Runner Up will receive the Force K3 keyboard and M6900 mouse!

To be entered into this sweepstakes, please follow these quick and easy guidelines below. If you're brand new here, there might be a few more steps necessary, but otherwise it's pretty simple!

1) - First: Make sure you're a registered member at HotHardware.com. You can also login with your Facebook or Twitter accounts if you'd like.

2) - Be active in news and article discussions and the forum community here at HotHardware.com. Your posts are your entries! (Only quality posts will count. No Spam please.)

3) - "Like" the Gigabyte and HotHardware Facebook pages if you haven’t already done so.

4) - That's it!

The contest will run through February 3, 2011, at which point we'll pick and announce the lucky winners. Get in early and post here, in the HH news discussions and in our forum often!

** Please note, this give-away is for U.S. or Canadian residents only. The winner, if selected and located at a Canadian ship-to address, will assume all duties / taxes associated with delivery. Any / all winners are responsible for any applicable taxes associated with contest prize.

This is a great chance for to you to win some hot new gear from Gigabyte! Good Luck!

Read More

MSI Ballyhoos 3DMark 11 World Record Set by X79A-GD65 (8D) Motherboard

Motherboard makers have long gone after the enthusiast crowd by implementing overclocking friendly features into their products, and these days companies get just as excited about benchmarking and OCing world records as end users do. Take MSI, for example, which is happy as can be that its X79A-GD65 (8D) was part of an overclocked system that set an official world record for the Physics portion of Futuremark's 3DMark 11 benchmark.

Singapore overclocker "Spyboy48" broke the record during an overclocking contest sponsored by MSI, Kingston, Enermax, and Cougar.

"The new record score, 19090, set with an Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor and MSI X79A-GD65 (8D) motherboard is a great achievement in overclocking skill. At stock settings, a similar system would get a score of about 11000, so Spyboy48 improved the CPU performance of his system by almost 75 percent," MSI said in a statement.

MSI says eight different overclockers scored over 18,000 in the same benchmark, and seven out of the 10 Hall of Fame Physics scores came from this contest.

Read More

Thecus Unveils Cavium-Powered N4100 EVO NAS Device

The folks at Thecus have just unveiled their latest low-power Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, the N4100 EVO. This new N4100 looks just like previous iterations of this 4-bay NAS, and sports Thecus’ useful LCD and front panel buttons (among many other features), but this latest device is powered by a new, lower-power dual-core SoC from Cavium. The full scoop is available in the PR below...

---

Thecus N4100EVO: The First Dual-core Cavium-based 4-bay NAS 
Intelligent design: Evolve your digital office

12/12/2011 – Taipei (Taiwan): Thecus is well known in the market for always putting innovative hardware and state of the art technology on the table for a fair price in order to guarantee our customers the best value. Thecus’s new N4100EVO NAS offer a broad range of advanced features and differentiate themselves with low-energy hardware for those who place strong value on cutting down their electricity costs and carbon footprint. This cost-effective hardware is the first four-bay NAS on the market to feature the speedy and efficient dual-core Cavium CPU to get the quick transfer speeds necessary for large backups and heavy use. The N4100EVO is designed to change the way you run your office, at home or at work.

Dual Core CPU The N4100EVO doesn't bust your budget and still has plenty of power to throw around. It integrates a Cavium dual-core processor, making file sharing, web hosting, and even heavy data backups easy and fast. This four bay NAS will also have 2 USB 2.0 ports for easy data backup to and from external hard drives and an LCD screen for more convenient administration.

Hardware RAID and the Powerful XOR Engine
The XOR Engine makes the N4100EVO the first SMB/home NAS on the market to use dedicated hardware to lighten the load of building RAID and free up the CPU to keep your NAS running fast. The N4100EVO embeds a dedicated XOR engine in order to speed up all RAID 5 computations and minimize one of the main drawbacks of RAID protection: rebuilding time!

A Well Rounded Software Bundle
It is important to give users the support and applications they need to take full advantage of storing and networking their data. That’s why Thecus provides a lot of useful tools to be sure their NAS can be pushed to the fullest extent. If you feel you are a tinkerer, you can also develop your own modules and share them with the community.

• Thecus Firmware includes support for all the newest advances: XFS, 3TB HDD, SATAIII HDD, iSCSI, an open source module system, and more.
• The powerful Acronis Backup software makes backups easy and keeps your data safe!
• More than a dozen free modules are available on the Thecus website, including:
  • A download manager for BitTorrent, eMule and HTTP. You don’t even need to switch on your computer!
  • The brand new Piczza! photo server, which allows you to share your pictures with friends and family in a smart and easy-to-use interface.
  • A Web Disk module to upload and download data simply and easily to and from your NAS.

"As the demand for storage capacity continues to grow, SMB/home users are requiring greater integration of storage into their environments,” said Florence Shih, Thecus Technology General Manager. “The N4100EVO is designed to deliver performance, features, and reliability at an affordable price to satisfy these needs.”

“Cavium is delighted to be working with Thecus in introducing the revolutionary 4-Bay NAS product to the market,” says Douglas Cheung, Director of Marketing for Consumer and Home Networking at Cavium. “Our ECONA family of dual-core System-On-Chips (SoCs) deliver best–in-class NAS performance with the lowest power consumption. N4100EVO leverages these attributes of ECONA SoC to deliver an energy efficient 4-bay solution without compromising the performance or cost targets.”

Read More

Brace Yourself for Higher RAM Prices, Adata Says

If you spot a good deal on DRAM and could use an upgrade, you may want to pull the trigger rather than wait and hope prices will fall even further. According to Adata CEO Simon Chen, DRAM prices are likely to rebound in January 2012, mostly because of cuts in DRAM output made earlier in the year. The effects of those cuts are about to take effect, especially as PC makers get ready to replenish their inventories, Chen warns.

Chen was also quick to point that Adata is one of two companies that kept a steady focus on DRAM modules (Kingston is the other), while most other companies shifted the bulk of their operations away from system memory in order to focus on NAND flash memory for SSDs and other more stable markets.

Adata might also be making a mountain out of a mole hill here. DRAM is almost as inexpensive as tap water, so even if prices go up next month, it probably won't be enough to sway most users out of making a purchase. On the flip side, the timing is crummy, as hard drive prices are also higher these days, though for a different reason (flooding in Thailand).

Read More

AMD Radeon HD 7970: 28nm Tahiti GPU Review

We have been hearing about AMD’s “Southern Island” family of graphics processors for quite some time. Even during briefings for the Northern Island series of products which ultimately became the Radeon HD 6000 series, news about Southern Islands was already trickling out. Rumors about these parts have been rampant for what seems like ages, but now, just in time to get all you hardcore gamers fired up this holiday season, AMD is officially taking the wraps of Southern Islands. More specifically, today AMD is announcing their latest flagship single-GPU, the Radeon HD 7970.

As you may suspect, if you paid attention to Eric Demer’s excellent keynote address at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit and the resulting onslaught of news that followed, the top-of-the-line GPU in the Southern Islands family—codenamed Tahiti—features AMD’s totally new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. In addition to being the firstGPU to feature GCN, Tahiti is also AMD’s first GPU to be manufactured at 28nm, their first with PCI Express 3.0 connectivity, the first with DirectX 11.1 support, and the first to sport a few other new technologies we’ll cover a little later (ZeroCore, PRT, multi-point audio).

There’s a lot to cover, so we’re not going to take up any more bandwidth telling the backstory. Up next are some preliminary details regarding the Radeon HD 7970 and other GPUs in the Southern Islands family, followed by a deep dive into the technology and a full performance profile of the fastest single-GPU money can (almost) buy...

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Graphics Card

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Specifications & Features

---

We’re going to go into much more detail a little later, but here are some preliminary details regarding the Tahiti-based Radeon HD 7970. The GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors featuring AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and is paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. The maximum number of displays supported per GPU is six, just like the previous generation Radeons, but the display output configuration has changed; one of the DVI outputs has been nixed.

The "Southern Islands" Family of AMD GPUs

The Tahiti GPU isn’t the only memory of the Southern Islands family slated for release, however. It is the only one to feature GCN, but new mainstream and “sweet spot” 28nm GPUs are coming too. The Pitcairn core will power the Radeon HD 7800 series, while Cape Verde will be the foundation of the Radeon HD 7700 series. We’ll have more details regarding those parts in the coming months.

Before we move on to the inner working of Tahiti and the Radeon HD 7970 in general, we should highlight a few previous HotHardware articles that are pertinent to today’s announcement. Although it’s based on a new GPU, the Radeon HD 7970 shares many features with previous-generation Radeons, like CrossFire, Eyefinity, PowerTune, UVD, and more. Since we won’t be covering those topics in depth here again, we’d suggest giving the following articles a glance.

• AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman
• AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut
• AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition Gaming
• AMD Radeon HD 6870 CrossFire with 5x1 Eyefinity

In the Radeon HD 6800 and 6900 series launch articles, we discuss a number of features like PowerTune, the UVD video engine, and Eyefinity. In the Eyefinity specific articles, we further explain the technology, discuss performance, and show a number of demos of Eyefinity in action on a variety of screen configurations. 

Read More