The PC Report

This news is sure to disappoint a lot of buyers out there who bought either a Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 or GTX 470 and were waiting for the pure awesomeness of 3D gaming over three monitors. The Nvidia 3D Vision Surround technology that rivals ATI’s Eyefinity multiple monitor gaming solution has been delayed until the end of June. Nvidia fans were originally supposed to get this feature via a driver update sometime in April but this date has slipped, presumably due to technical issues getting three monitors pumping out 3D games together.

For now, if you desperately need a trio of monitors pumping out your games we suggest you look to a Evergreen-series ATI card, all of which come with the aforementioned Eyefinity technology.

According to the latest reports, Seagate could be readying a 3 TB hard drive for release later this year. Problem is – most systems can’t handle the upped storage thanks to ancient 30-year old BIOS restrictions that is limited to 2.1 TB hard drives. Anything over 2.1 TB and your system will read less than the full capacity of the drive, with Seagate’s tests showing that as little as 990 MB of a 3 TB drive is visible in XP. There is a solution to this logical block addressing (LBA) standard:

Craig [a Seagate rep] explains that “we need to extend that to Long LBA addressing,” in order to get around this. Long LBA basically increases the number of bytes used to define an LBA address in the command descriptor block, but it also requires a supporting OS.

According to Seagate, this includes the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista, as well as modified versions of Linux, but it doesn’t include Windows XP. Not only that, but you may not even be able to see 2.1TB of a 3TB drive when using Windows XP.

It looks like if you’re wanting a 3 TB drive in your system you’ll need to do a major overhaul. Maybe this will force some more users onto 64-bit with better systems

Apple, just a month after the refresh of their Macbook Pro line-up, have released a new 2010 model of their cheaper Macbooks encased in polycarbonate unibody white. The new Macbook comes close to the 13″ Macbook Pro in terms of specifications, with the CPU being bumped to a new Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, DVD SuperDrive and new Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics also seen on the 13″ Pro. The battery in the new Macbook is said to last around 10 hours, with the design of the laptop staying the same as the late 2009 model.

The new model Apple Macbook is now available for your consuming from the Apple Store. Prices in the United States stay at US$999, which puts the 13″ Macbook at a better purchase than the US$1,199 13″ Macbook Pro if you go just by solid specifications. This revelation brings us to think: will Apple be refreshing their Macbook Air, the only Mac laptop not to have received a 2010 refresh, any time soon?

Skype has some great new features planned for the next (5.0) release of their popular video/audio chat application. Group video chat is one of those fantastic new features, which will allow you to chat with up to four other  people in one big video chat – if your internet bandwidth can handle it. The Skype 5.0 beta is available just for Windows at the current stage; Mac and Linux users will have to wait to get their hands on some group video chat action. Check the source link for a download.

We’ve reported on the next card to the GTX 400 series before, and today we’re getting some new details about the card. Supposedly the previously known GTX 460 has been renamed to the GeForce GTX 465 as Nvidia wants the 460 name for a lower powered GF104 card rather than a GF100 card like the GTX 470/480.

Specs still remain similar to the GTX 460 we saw before, with the card sporting 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked effectively at 3,206 MHz on a 256-bit memory interface. 352 stream processors will be present on the card along with a 607 MHz GPU with a 1,215 MHz shader clock – which happens to be the same as the GPU on the GTX 470. The card, tested by Chinese site eNet,  is apparently faster than an ATI Radeon HD 5870 during Far Cry 2, but is worse than a HD 5830 in Crysis Warhead.

The card is rumoured to be launching next month, with more details rolling out hopefully sometime around Computex in early June.

Mac users rejoice today as Valve finally releases their much awaited Mac client for the Steam gaming network and digital distributor. The new client works on all Intel-based Macs (sorry PPC users) and comes with a surprising number of games on launch day. Portal is available along with Civilization IV - both highly recommended games by the staff here – Torchlight, Braid and a variety of other games from smaller publishers are also available with the total number of games coming to 63 as of right now.

Valve has plans to port their entire collection of games based on the Source engine to the Mac, which should include PC favourites such as Left 4 Dead and the Half Life 2 series. To get you started with the launch today, both Mac and PC users will get to download and enjoy Portal for free up until May 24 – we advise you take up Valve on this fantastic offer. As the Mac Steam network continues to grow, more games should be added to the collection so keep an eye out for your favourites.

Microsoft Office 2010, along with SharePoint 2010, were launched officially today during an event at the NBC Studios in NYC. Stephen Elop, president of the business division at Microsoft, lead the event and launched the new products, along with a lot of the usual marketing stuff like mentioning how the new software will benefit your business and save you money. Outlook 2010 with the new social integration features was a major focus of the presentation along with the collaboration capabilities of Office 2010 when used in conjunction with SharePoint 2010.

Other than that, Microsoft announced that Office 2010 will be available to the general public on June 15 as expected, with a continuing program running between March 5 and September 30, 2010 where if you purchase and activate a copy of Office 2007 you will be eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2010 via an online download. There will be 5 editions of Office 2010 available at launch, ranging from US$99 to US$499 depending on what programs are included.

Joining the AMD Athlon II range today are six new CPUs, all of which should provide some good bang for buck thanks to the under US$150 price point. The upper end of the new line-up consists of a quad-core Athlon II X4 640 which comes loaded with a 3.0 GHz clock speed, 2 MB of L2 cache and a 95W TDP. The mid-range Athlon II X3 445 comes with a 3.1 GHz clock speed, 1.5 MB of L2 cache and a 95W TDP. Finally, the 3.2 GHz Athlon II X2 260 with 2MB of L2 cache and a TDP of 65W fills out the dual-core sector. Prices for these processors are US$122, US$87 and US$76 respectively.

Also coming to us are three lower power processors – the Athlon II X4 610e, X3 415e and X2 245e with are clocked at 2.4 GHz, 2.5GHz and 2.9 GHz respectively with prices of $145 for the quad, $102 for the triple and $77 for the dual. All three CPUs have a 45W TDP which is perfect for a home server or media PC. All the processors released today should be available in stores pretty soon, if not right now.

A new motherboard from Asus will soon be hitting the shelves that allows mix-and-match graphics cards from different vendors thanks to the Lucid Hydra chipset present on the board – this means you could chuck in an ATI card along with a Nvidia card! The Asus CrossHair IV Extreme will be the next out of Asus’ line of high-end motherboards packed with great features like the mix-match GPU support  and also Bluetooth RoG Connect, as seen on the Maximus II Extreme, will also be present.

The CrossHair IV Extreme packs an AMD AM3 socket along with the 890FX chipset to support the latest in AMD processors including the new Phenom II X6s. What we can deduce from the pictures provided is that there will be dual-channel DDR3 support, upwards of nine SATA ports which at least two of should be SATA 6 Gbps, five PCIe slots and one standard PCI slot and Core Unlocker and OC Turbo Key buttons. We hope USB 3.0 is present on the board.

The CrossHair IV will certainly sport a nice expensive price tag when it becomes available – which is currently unclear.

Some students thought it would be funny to rig an alarm inside a Microsoft Office 2007 box and see what happens when people try and steal it…