We take a look at the latest newly announced
products.
Corsair joins fan club
Corsair has ticked another step off its PC
domination plan with the announcement that it’s entering the fan market,
following the memory maker’s relatively recent move into making cases, PSUs,
SSDs and peripherals. The new Air Series fans will be available in two
categories – high air flow (for cases) and high static pressure (for radiators
and heatsinks), with Quiet and performance models in bot h categories. Most of
than fans are 120mm models, although there’s also a 140mm unit in the high
airflow line-up, and they’ll also be available in black, red, blue and white.
OCZ updates vertex 4 firmware
OCZ claims owners of its Vertex 4 series of
SSDs can now squeeze more performance from them with the latest 1.4 firmware
update. According to the company, the maximum write speed of the 120GB version
will increase massively from 200MB/sec to 420MB/sec, while the 256GB will now
write at a maximum of 465MB/sec, increasing from 380MB/sec. Meanwhile, OCZ says
the maximum read speeds will increase from 535MB/sec to 550MB/sec across the
board.
OCZ says the speed boost comes from a
‘predictive read algorithm, which anticipates and responds to commands not yet
issued by the host’. You can grab the new firmware from
http://tinyurl.com/Vertex4Firmware, but the flash process will destroy all the
data on the drive, so make sure you perform a backup first.
Crucial SSD and llano price crash
Crucial SSD
Now is the time to jump in and relegate
your clattering hard drive to media storage duties, if you haven’t already.
Crucial has just knocked loads off the asking price of its award-winning M4
SSDs (see Issue 104, p64).
The 128MB M4 now costs $135 inc VAT from
www.ebuyer.com, while the 256GB flavor now costs just $262.5 inc VAT. There are
no excuses now!
Meanwhile, AMD has also been hitting its
Llano chips with a price-beating stick. The A8-3870K Black Edition now costs
just $127.5 inc VAT from www.aria.co.uk – a bargain for a half-decent CPU and
GPU in one unit.
Geforce GTX 670 revealed
Sadly, we didn’t have time to get hold of
the one of these and put it through its paces before we went to press, but
Nvidia has now started filling out the GeForce 600-series ranger of GPUs even
further. The new GrForce GTX 670 has seven Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) units,
rather than eight found on the GTX 680, resulting in a total of 1,344 stream
processor. Meanwhile, the GPU has a base clock of 915MHz, which can GPU boost
to 980MHz. Both 2GB and 4GB flavours will be available, and the default
effective GDDR5 speed is 6,009MHz. We’ll be reviewing the GeForce GTX 670 in
our next issue.
