There’s nothing particularly special about the design or layout of this keyboard/mouse combo – it’s just a standard look with a pretty standard set of buttons; nothing too flashy or special. On the inside though is something unique and a first for wireless keyboards and mice: both the keyboard and mice of the Logitech Wireless Desktop MK710 have a 3 year battery life from a pair of AA batteries.

Of course, the claim of 3 years battery life may not be true for all; it’s based on a standard 2 million keystrokes per year and various conditions for the mouse. However even so you won’t need to change those batteries for several years saving you from the hassle and saving the environment from waste. If you’re European and want this package it should be available to you this month. Americans will have to wait until April to get their hands on the Wireless Desktop.

Today AMD has taken one big step in announcing that samples of their Fusion APU (Advanced Processing Unit), codenamed “Llano”, should be available in the first half of this year with volume production in 2011. The 32nm chip will pack both a quad-core processor as well as  a DirectX 11 supporting graphics processor on the one die. The chip is said to run at 3GHz+ and will support DDR3.

This “Llano” chip will go head on with Intel’s single die CPU+GPU solution, Sandy Bridge, which is also set for a 2011 production release. However, AMD will have the heads up on the Intel chip with their DX11-supporting GPU (which is based on the Evergreen DX11 lineup); Intel’s chip only supports DX10. AMD is also boasting that the chip will be less power consuming thanks to  power gating – a technique used on Intel’s Nehalem chips to help lower a core’s power and power up another core (hence Turbo Boost).

Also, for those of you wondering, Intel’s Arrandale and Clarkdale chips are not the same as these single-die CPU+GPU solutions – the Arrandale/Clarkdale chips have two dies (one for the CPU and one for the GPU). Anyway, no doubt we’ll see more of these chips later this year.

Never fear! Another Radeon is here! And so soon too after we saw the HD 5450 just last week. Anyway the new card is the ATI Radeon HD 5570 and of course it supports DirectX 11, Eyefinity and all the other features that the HD 5000 series cards have. The HD 5570, like the HD 5450, is targeted at the HTPC users with its low profile, low power consumption, low price and quiet cooler.

The HD 5450 is made on the 40nm process and has 627 million transistors on its die. The core clock comes in at 650MHz with 400 stream processors and 20 texture units for a total power of 520 GFLOPS. The card will have 1GB of DDR3 RAM on board with a clock of 900MHz and a data rate of 1.8 Gbps. It’s also rated at using 9.7W of power during idle with a “typical” rating of 38W.

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IBM recently opened up a bandgap for graphene-based field-effect transistors and now there here to show us what this means for all of us. IBM has demonstrated a 100GHz (that’s right, 100 gigahertz) graphene transistor that IBM hopes will eventually reach commercialisation and then replace the standard silicon chips we use today completely. Of course, the technology is in it’s early stages, but it does look promising for future processors.

Even though actual commercial chips are far off, IBM says that “the breakthrough we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance devices and integrated circuits.” Look into the future guys and you may see these chips in widespread use…

Like Linux and also want a small desktop PC? Try out the Open-PC Atom powered nettop designed specifically for those of you who use and love Linux. It comes with hardware that requires only completely free drivers and no proprietary software at all – an Atom N330 dual-core CPU at 1.6GHz, an ASrock motherboard, 3GB of RAM, Intel GMA950 graphics, a 160GB hard drive all in a mini-ITX case with 250W PSU. It also comes preloaded with a KDE-based Linux distro configured for the computer’s hardware.

The Open-PC will be available at the end of February for €359.

The new HP G62t is a fairly nice looking laptop, comparable to the Envy 15, and comes with a fairly nice price tag too of only US$599 for the base model. For that price, you get a new Intel Core i3 processor at 2.13GHz (although you can pay more and get an i5 or i7 instead), 3GB of DDR3 RAM, a 160GB hard drive that’s upgradeable to 500GB, a 15.6-inch LED display, Intel HD graphics (not so great), DVD burner, Wireless N and a multitude of connectivity options.

If you want to get this Macbook-Pro-esque laptop it should be available now in stores as well as via the HP website.

AMD has been on fire recently releasing card after card into their DirectX 11 HD 5000 series. Now they are catering to those who want to build a HTPC with the newest card – the ATI Radeon HD 5450. The HD 5450 has much the same features as the bigger and more powerful brothers, including DirectX 11 support and ATI’s Eyefinity multi-display technology. The card is very power friendly (~20W when in use) and is half height and passively cooled making it perfect for your HTPC.

The HD 5450 performs well for what you need it to, namely all types of media playback including Blu-ray/1080p – which is perfect with low CPU utilisation. However, if you’re planning to buy this card for gaming, thing again. It consistently performed well under the it’s nearest brother, the HD 5670, in many games so don’t even bother gaming on this card. This card starts at US$49 and should be perfect for HTPC that needs to be silent, low powered and small.

Note: This card underperforms all 25 cards on our graphics card rankings list, so it has not been added.

Today sees the release of the highly anticipated update to the most popular bittorrent client: uTorrent 2.0. One of the major changes to uTorrent in 2.0 is the addition of the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP). The uTP aims to reduce network congestion and interference between uTorrent and other network-using applications – this is one of the reasons ISPs throttle torrent traffic and uTP aims to solve that issue.

For the end-user the benefits of uTP are faster downloads thanks to less network congestion, and faster web browsing while uTorrent is running. For ISPs, less congestion means that the torrent protocol is gentler on their network, which should benefit them as well as other users using the network. And for those wondering if the interface has changed, it has, but only slightly (see the screenshot below).

You can download/upgrade to uTorrent 2.0 by downloading it from here. If you need to downgrade to 1.8.5 for whatever reason, you can grab it from us here

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According to the latest report from Fudzilla, there is going to be a two new Intel Atom processors, both with support for DDR3 memory, coming later this year. The two CPUs will be the Atom N475, which is clocked at 1.83GHz and has a TDP of 6.5W, and the Atom N455, which like the N450 has a clock speed of 1.6GHz and a TDP of 5.5W will also have support for DDR3. New netbooks with the Atom DDR3 processors should be coming in the second half of the year.

A post made on Twitter today by NVIDIAGeForce has given away the names of the new graphics cards soon to be released by Nvidia based on the GF100 chip. Apparently the naming scheme is going to skip a whole number and go from the GTX 200 series to the GTX 400 series, with the first two cards being named the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470.

Is Nvidia trying to give a twice as powerful card a twice as grand name? We’ll have to see when the cards are properly released, which should be soon.