According to a recent AMD press release, it’s leading the dedicated mobile graphics card market with a 53% market share. They claim they have sold 87.2% more units this year than the same time last year, equating to a 36.5% gain in market share pushing them over the line and into the leading zone

AMD says this is mostly due to the success of its ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4000 chip range, which is prominent in a lot of higher-end laptops from some major vendors such as ASUS, HP and Acer. While the market share gain hasn’t pushed AMD into the black, if a market share like this keeps up, they could be well on their way to getting some good profits.

Another Atom device has been released today – but it it’s not a netbook for once, more  a business nettop. Packing an Atom N280 at 1.66 GHz, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB HDD along with GMA 4500 graphics and the standard connectivity options there isn’t much that makes this different from the next nettop.

However it does have a nice look to it, and the ability to hook to the back of monitors (see below) is a nifty feature for around the office. The way it’s mounted has the power button along with some important ports (USB, card-reader and audio) at the top which is nice. And all this comes only for the price of US$399 – check out Acer’s website if you want one

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If you’ve been loyal to a single search engine for a long time, perhaps its time to see if you might like the results of another more!

Blindsearch, the “search engine taste test”, allows you to see the results of a query from Google, Yahoo and Bing side-by-side and unlabelled and does not reveal which search engine is which until you vote for your favorite results. You never know – they might surprise you.

As a long-time Google user (18960 searches are logged in my Google web history), I was a little surprised to find that for the first 5 searches I made, I prefer Bing’s results. Still, given the numbers 5 vs 18960, it’s going to take some more convincing. The overall results show that Google still shows the best results by voting percentages:

“Results: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. ”

With the experimental nature of the site, the statistics probably aren’t a perfect reflection.

The Blindsearch admin (a Microsoft employee), also mentions the most popular search terms on the post linked above. Surely there must be some other uses for image search.

Continuing in the monthly graphics card driver releases, the latest Catalyst graphics card drivers have been released: 9.8 for August 2009.

We see a large range of game performance increases, mostly graphics intensive DirectX 10 games such as Crysis and Far Cry 2 getting boosts. Download the drivers from the ATi website, and check out the full list of improvements below:

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Seeing the post on the Windows Team Blog reminded me to tell you that the downloads for the Windows 7 Release Candidate will be ending on Thursday the 20th of August (in a few days time).

Make the most of the downloads while you can; download the RC here if you haven’t done so already, otherwise you’ll need to find “other sources” for your Windows 7 needs.

Finally we’ve made the switch to some better, faster and more reliable hosting. Apart from the huge amount of administration benefits we now have, you should hopefully be noticing a faster and more reliable site. We hope you didn’t experience any downtime during the change-over.

Enjoy, The PC Report Team

“What?,” you say. Suzuki? As in the car maker Suzuki? Nope, here we’re talking about the relatively unknown Suzuki Technology who confusingly shares the same name as the car maker.

Anyway, they’ve decided to release a netbook, dubbed the Neutron 701 MNI, complete with a 7″ touchscreen swivelling tablet-like display. Insides wise it packs the usual Atom processor along with a up to 4GB RAM, but what sets this netbook apart is the inclusion of an ExpressCard slot and S/PDIF out, two features we usually only see in full-sized laptops

Even though Suzuki has put up a page for the netbook, we haven’t got any details on availability, release date or price. Shame, for such a nice netbook.

It was said that Windows Server 2008 R2 would be released today on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet, and it has. If you are a subscriber for either service you can head over there now and grab a copy.

Server 2008 R2 RTM’d at the same time that Windows 7 did in July, and was made available to OEMs on July 29. It has a bucket-load of new features, mostly virtualisation-based; check out the full list of new features on the MS website.

According to the guys over a CNET, version 4.0 of the popular Chrome browser has his the Mac OS X platform, and its the fastest browser available. Chrome 4.0 beats the default Safari browser, using the same Webkit engine, by 34% according to their testing

They say Chrome got a score of 657ms on the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark, beating Safari (886ms), Firefox (1,508ms) and Opera (5,958ms). While they say its faster than the PC version of Chrome, we beg to differ, as during our testing we managed to scrape 531ms out of Chrome 3.0.195.6 Beta, which beats the OS X version by 19%. However, these are results from a beta version, so we’ll have to wait and see what the full version pulls with it.

Netbooks are, of course, the number one choice for cheap laptops these days, but if you want something even cheaper at the sacrifice of speed, look no further than the world’s cheapest laptop – the Lanyu LY-EB01. This “laptop” packs a super slow 266 MHz processor, 128 MB of RAM and 2GB of flash memory, making my phone slightly faster than it.

In fact this laptop appears to be so slow, that it can’t use the Luna XP theme (see above picture), or maybe it has slipped back to Windows 2000 to give some extra speed. If you’re up for a laptop that can barely play minesweeper or solitaire, then you might be happy to drop the US$98 price tag, but if you want something more beefy, save up for a real netbook

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