Thread: Anandtech News

Today, we will be looking at the ASUS P8P67. Although the board has been available for some time, this is one of ASUS' cheaper full size P67 ATX offerings. Considering it has a price tag of $155 ($140 with rebate), it offers quite a few useful features such as DIGI+ VRM, BT GO! (Bluetooth), a total of four USB 3.0 ports, and Quad-GPU CrossFireX support.

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If you're buying a Mobo now get the z68 ASUS board (see my sig/blog for my rig). Great board, goes perfect with i5 2500K for affordable upgrade route and was only around 180 at frys.

Yesterday AMD announced that it had begun revenue shipments of the first Bulldozer processors for servers. More specifically AMD is referring to its Interlagos CPU which features two Bulldozer die on a single multi-chip-module package. A single Interlagos CPU features 16 integer cores (8 FP cores) and will work in existing AMD Opteron 6100 series platforms. AMD mentioned that the production version of Interlagos was ready in August, the past weeks have simply been used for testing and validation.
What about the Socket-AM3+ version of Bulldozer? AMD mentioned that it will be shipping Zambezi processors before the end of September and is "tracking to an expected Q4 launch and availability for those parts". Why the lag between server and desktop parts? A look at Bulldozer's architecture reveals that it's clearly aimed at servers - addressing that market first makes the most sense. Secondly, AMD's Opteron parts have traditionally run at much lower frequencies than their desktop counterparts. It's always easier to push out a lower clocked part than to push the envelope of the design and process. Finally, it looks like the desktop part went through one more stepping (perhaps related to clock speed?) than Interlagos which pushed back its launch.
With AMD saying that Zambezi will ship in September but launch in Q4 it's safe to say that rumors of a September launch date aren't true. Q4 encompasses October, November and December. My money is on an early-to-mid Q4 launch.


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I recently received an email from a reader asking for advice on the "best" laptop Dell has to offer. The reader's work is footing the bill, but with the requirement that it had to be a Dell laptop. He wanted to get the best Dell had to offer, which immediately brought the Precision line into play. Without knowing the exact intended use, however, it's difficult to say whether the money and performance would be justified. For those of you running CAD/CAM, 3D rendering, or doing heavy video editing on the other hand, such a purchase could certainly pay dividends, as Dustin recently showed in our HP EliteBook 8670w review.
Once you've got the fastest mobile CPU and GPU in your laptop, the next performance upgrade should be clear: you add an SSD or two. Dell has now updated their M4600 and M6600 that launched in May with the option to add up to two 512GB SATA 6Gbps SSDs, plus a 128GB mini-PCIe SSD if you need even more storage. Dell appears to be using the Samsung PM830 SSDs, and while Samsung SSDs haven't always been the fastest options, the PM810/SSD 470 and now the PM830 are changing the situation.
The PM830 is Samsung's first SATA 6Gbps SSD, with up to 500MB/s read speeds and 300MB/s write speeds. Purely random performance also looks quite good, and with AES-256 encryption it's easy to see why Dell would opt for the PM830 line in their mobile workstations. Dell specifically cites working with video content in their Enterprise IT blog as a major advantage of a fast storage subsystem, and we can attest to the benefit of fast SSDs for such tasks. Another benefit Dell touts is the durability aspect of SSDs--no moving parts makes them far more shock resistant than even the best HDDs.
Of course, 512GB SSDs don't come cheap, and Dell is charging $1120 to upgrade the M4600/6600 from the base 250GB HDD to the 512GB SSD; adding a second/third 512GB SSD will tack on a cool $1350 (making the first SSD a substantially better value, unless you think a 250GB HDD is worth anywhere near $230). Samsung's consumer model SSD 830 parts are not yet available so we can't compare pricing directly, but as one example you can grab Crucial's M4 512GB for $770 (but without AES-256 support). RAID 0/1 support is also available on the M4600, and the M6600 includes an option for a third drive and RAID 5 (but only with the 128GB mini-PCIe SSD).
As a final note, Dell has also updated the graphics offerings on the M6600 to include the NVIDIA Quadro 5010M with 4GB GDDR5. That brings the Precision M6600 up to parity with the HP EliteBook 8670w, though there are still differences. If it wasn't immediately clear, the Precision line is for serious work and professional use, and the $1640 upgrade from the AMD FirePro M8900 to the Quadro 5010M is yet another indication of the target market. Max out the hardware configuration on the M6600 with three SSDs, the i7-2920XM, 16GB DDR3-1600, and a Quadro 5010M and you're staring at a fat $10G. That might seem crazy, until you consider the software packages these things are designed and certified to run can cost easily twice as much as the hardware.


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Responding to this week's rumors that Samsung might be looking to acquire MeeGo, the Linux-based mobile operating system introduced by Intel and Nokia, Intel's Systems Software Division manager Doug Fisher stated that the company remains "committed" to the OS, though he followed that by saying that he could "only comment on what's happening today."
MeeGo, which has user interfaces for netbooks, tablets, and smartphones among other things, was originally introduced in February of 2010 by Intel and Nokia, and was intended to be a merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo operating systems. However, since Nokia struck up a partnership with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 on its handsets, the OS has stuggled to find a home.
Rumors stated that Samsung was looking to buy MeeGo for a variety of reasons - to integrate with its existing Bada operating system, to compete against Android and Windows Phone 7, or just to shore up the company's patent portfolio. Fisher's statement refutes these rumors, at least for now.
Of course, there is often a disconnect between what companies say and what they later do. If Intel continues to have trouble getting MeeGo adopted by its partners, you can bet that the OS could yet be discontinued or sold.
Source: PCWorld


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You asked for it, you got it: in house, a review of Sony's longstanding 13.3" road warrior S series. It's light, has a matte screen, switchable graphics, a mainstream Sandy Bridge processor, and the potential to last all day (and then some) on the battery. From the outside, at least, the Sony VAIO S looks like a winner at nearly any level. But did Sony cut any corners to get the VAIO S' price down, or should it be on any traveller's short list?

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Windows 8 news continues to trickle from the Building Windows 8 blog at a steady clip: today, Gabe Aul detailed changes to the Windows 8 boot process that promise to drastically reduce startup times.
The team wanted to come up with a startup method that would deliver the benefits of a cold boot (a "fresh session" at startup, no power usage when off) while reducing the amount of time that it takes to load the operating system from disk to RAM.
To accomplish this, Microsoft has combined aspects of a traditional Windows shutdown with system hibernation, which saves the contents of your RAM to disk and then restores it to RAM at next boot. While a Windows shutdown currently closes all user programs (the "user session") and then all system services and processes (the "kernel session") completely before powering off, Windows 8 closes the user session and saves the rest of your RAM's content to disk. The kernel session can then be restored to RAM quickly at next boot - this is more speedy than traditional hibernation both because there's less data to restore to RAM from the disk (just the kernel session, as opposed to the kernel session and the user session), and because restoring hibernation files is a fully multithreaded process in Windows 8. If the feature works as well as it does in the Microsoft demo video, it is indeed quite impressive.
Microsoft notes that drivers are still initialized during this startup process, which means that driver and system updates should no longer require a "full" reboot of the system (something Microsoft has been promising since the Longhorn days). However, for those of you more comfortable with a traditional "full" shutdown, there are command line options to toggle the new feature on and off ("powercfg /hibernate off" which has the unfortunate side-effect of completely disabling hibernation), and also to initiate one-time full shutdowns ("shutdown /s /full").
According to Microsoft, these improvements should benefit users with SSDs and HDDs alike, and will be especially noticeable when paired with systems supporting UEFI, the BIOS replacement that is slowly being adopted by most major PC manufacturers and motherboard makers. For full details, as always, you can check out the very detailed post on the Building Windows 8 blog.
Source: Building Windows 8 Blog


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The TouchDroid project, which was created just weeks ago in the wake of HP's Touchpad liquidation sale, has already disbanded. The project's discontinuation stems not from technical problems but because of accusations of code theft by the CyanogenMod team, which has also been working to bring Android to HP's defunct tablet.
After the TouchDroid team posted a video showing off the Touchpad running a touch-enabled install of Android 2.3, the CyanogenMod team accused TouchDroid team members of stealing code from the CyanogenMod port and passing it off as their own. In the end, the TouchDroid team gave the CyanogenMod team credit for its work, posted a dump of what they had done up to that point and declared that the team was "no longer actively working on a port" of Android to the Touchpad.
Meanwhile, the CyanogenMod team's work continues, and appears to be going well - at this writing, the only major component that doesn't appear to be functioning in their port is wi-fi, and at this rate I'd expect that to be fixed soon. In the meantime, you can read the Android Police report for a full description of the chat transcripts, forum posts, and tweets through which this drama unfolded.
Source: Android Police


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Dust off your old-school shooter skills: a demo for the indie cyberpunk FPS Hard Reset is now available.
Hard Reset comes from Flying Wild Hog, a Polish developer made up of talent from People Can Fly (Painkiller), CD Projekt Red (The Witcher) and City Interactive (Sniper: Ghost Warrior). You play an Army veteran tasked with defending humanity from a growing robotic threat.
In an effort to best serve their audience, Flying Wild Hog chose to make the title PC-exclusive and it shows. Their proprietary engine is capable of some truly stunning visuals, and the combat – full of circle-strafing and back-pedaling – harkens back to older id Software shooters. It also includes more modern weapon customization to keep things fresh.
Hard Reset releases at $30 next Tuesday, but if the brief demo wins you over, you can save a little cash by pre-ordering for $27.
Source: Steam



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