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Intel is slashing prices once again as older products slide into lower performance brackets. The big hit with this round of cuts is the Q6700 quad-core processor. The Q6700 dropped from $530 to $266 while the Q6600 dropped from $266 to $224. While the Q6700 has become a piece of “old” technology, these older 65nm chips still have some kick left in them with the most recent batches hitting 3.8GHz to 4.1GHz on air cooling. Keeping in mind that the 45nm quad-core processors are both expensive, multiplier limited, and have low FSB walls, the Q6700 might be the chip of choice for budget-minded consumers. You’ll be hard pressed to get the $283 Q9300 up to 4GHz whereas the Q6700 should hit 4GHz with ease and scale to 5GHz under extreme cooling.

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I came across this link earlier today and thought it would be very useful for my target audience. Microsoft is essentially extending what is their older Microsoft Development Network Academic Alliance (MSDNAA) to all college students across the globe. Unlike MSDNAA though, DreamSpark is limited to software development tools whereas MSDNAA gave you access to a variety of operating systems and development tools. Even with these limitations though DreamSpark is a fantastic foot forward for Microsoft in both publicity and attracting the brightest minds in the industry.

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Been a bit busy guys but I found this interesting enough. Powercolor is sponsoring a contest with the goal being score the lowest 3DMark 2003 score. Contrary to most contests where the goal is to be the fastest, PowerColor has decided to reward people for the slowest machines. The reward for having the lowest 3DMark2003 score will be a PowerColor HD3850 AGP video card, which makes sense as in theory an AGP-based system should be the slowest of them all. I find this to be great news as ANYONE can compete so long as their computer can complete 3DMark2003. I myself haven’t got any “old” computer parts lying around but I’m going to give this a shot with my laptop’s integrated graphics and maybe my desktop with my 8400GS, if I don’t blow it up for my 2008 XS Cheapazchips run this afternoon. Hope some of you decide to try your hand at this, it should be loads of fun. I’m already thinking of ways to cripple my computer, oh this has me excited.

You heard me right, it is officially over. Micron, the manufacturer of our favorite 2×1GB DDR2 modules that featured D9GMH and D9GKX modules has switched their commercial line of Ballistix over to D9HNL. This is also bad news as the 2×2GB kits on the market have these same ICs and have shown to clock badly for the voltages given. All of this is bad news for us as DDR2-1200 will become a thing of the past for your average sticks. D9HNL is great news for Micron though as they will see profits jump as it takes half the ICs to manufacturer a stick of ram. Gone are the days of $50 2×1GB kits capable of DDR2-1200 with 2.2v, it’s a valid comparison to drop Ballistix performance into the crowd of ProMos and Elpida chips that dominated the budget market. If ever there was a reason to migrate to DDR3, this would be it as DDR2 performance will continue to average out with fewer and fewer high-clocking kits. I suspect within the next three to six months we will see decent 2×1GB DDR3 kits drop below the $150 price barrier. Already there are some decent DDR3 kits hitting $190 with some fantastic results. Now we need the P45, X48, and 790i motherboards to launch for some serious DDR3 clocking. So long D9GMH and D9GKX, you had a killer run.

I am certain part of the world had a nervous breakdown when YouTube dropped off the Internet yesterday. I know I myself was un-phased by this event until my roommate asked me if YouTube was down for me. Slightly puzzled, I moved on with my day and didn’t give it any thought till this afternoon when I saw the news. The basic story is Pakistan decided to block YouTube within it’s IP range. It however did this by effectively routing traffic to a data blackhole where the packets would die. It then propagated this new route to other ISPs, toting it as a quick route to YouTube’s servers. This new routing table quickly propagated through the worlds routers and voila, YouTube DNS requests resulted in packets being sent into the abyss of Pakistan. This is just another case of companies trusting other companies and not verifying their results, happens all the time. No worries though, the routes were fixed and all was well within a few hours. Next up I say is Wikipedia, re-direct it to IsItChristmas.com. Perhaps blocking YouTube is a radical way to increase GDP by removing this popular video site from the population. According to the source, there are clips that offend Pakistan, a simple “please remove this garbage” would have worked.

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Intel is bringing out the big guns to capture the mainframe market. Dunnington, which consists of six Penryn cores on a single piece of silicon and a shared 12MB L3 cache. This processor will be destined for the 4-socket Tigerton system and will replace the 65nm quad-cores that had previously occupied such systems. While Dunnington will feature a 120w TDP, you are talking 20w per core which is identical or lower to the TDP for the previous Tigerton chips. Dunnington will be the final upgrade for the Tigerton s604 as Nehalem based chips support eight core and sixteen threads will launch in Q3 2008. Now all of you salivating over the above chips, be prepared to shell out a few thousand dollars for the low-end chips. Now the best part, it’s a monolithic core, AMD toted it’s quad-core as being superior, what do you say to a hexa-core?

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Nvidia’s next generation video cards have started to hit retailers starting with the 9600GT. Contrary to previous generations with the product launching starting at the high-end and working it’s way to the bottom, the 9xxx series will start with the mid-range followed by a mixture of high and low end parts. Just to put this new 9600GT in comparison, it will sit below the 8800GT, equal the 8800GS, and compete with the HD3850. Given that this 65nm GPU will utilize high speed GDDR3 and is a derivative of the 8800GT, which has been shown to overclock very well with modest cooling, it wouldn’t be surprising if this 9600GT really brings the heat to AMD’s midrange.

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Samsung announced earlier this week that they will begin mass producing their high speed 64GB 1.8″ solid state drives. These drives are a step above the common drives currently launching as they are capable for 100 MB/s reads and 80 MB/s writes which is a considerable jump from the average 40MB/s reads and 25MB/s writes. This will be great news for consumers as these speeds combined with their ultra-low access times should yield some nice performance increases for laptop and desktop consumers. Initial reports are pricing these drives are nearly $1,000 but expect these prices to drop a few hundred dollars as the market slowly becomes flooded with these and competitor’s drives. According to Samsung though, these drives will be initially reserved for select Dell and Alienware laptops, so us “average” consumers will have to wait in line. I can already see it, two of these in RAID0 and two terabyte drives in RAID1 for the ultimate combination in desktop storage.

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