406 Not Acceptable

For one without a next generation console, it’s great news to hear of price cuts. The Sony Playstation 3 will drop to $499, that’s a $100 price cut. Now you might think there would be complaints here, but you would be wrong.

Shock, horror, an update!

DailyTech, have revealed performance figures for the new ATi graphics card, the HD 2900 XT. It seems ATi like to delay their cards as much as I do my updates. Either that, or they have decided releasing their cards in between nVidia’s to better business practice. This avoids a direct confrontation between two new cards, and gives each company a spell with the top card for enthusiasts.

It seems that for now the Nintendo Wii is running ahead in the console wars. The Wii was the second top selling Next-Generation console over Christmas and has improved its sales in January. Analysts are even predicting that 30% of American homes will have a Wii by 2010.

ASUS have unveiled a solution which allows Laptops to attach an external graphics card, to improve gaming performance. We all know that, unless you opt for a pricey ‘gaming laptop’, graphics performance has been the bane of notebooks.

After saving up all Summer — and finding out my finances were so bad that if I didn’t get my job I would have been screwed — I have finally brought myself to purchasing a nice upgrade. After a lovely patent bet coming off — that’s 3 singles, 3 doubles, and a triple — I managed to pick up a lovely AMD Opteron 170, with stepping CCBBE 0615EPMW.

Well, according to Samsung they are. Samsung, along with PQI, are strong advocates of Solid-state drives (SSD), and took the time to talk to DailyTech about the advantages of SSDs. Personally, as you may know, Tech-Rant has been covering SSDs in some detail; as I feel the implementation of these drives in to the mainstream computer will be a turning point in the average system’s performance, similar to that of dual core processors.

A leading story on DailyTech reports that a Sony Exec Says [the] Wii and XBOX 360 are priced too high. It is nice too see Sony having a go at their opposition, but they always seem to mess up — heck at most things these days. Sony executives do seem to have a history of ridiculous comments; just recently European VP Jamie McDonald stated that European gamers “don’t mind” delays with regards to the PlayStation 3. One only needs to read the DailyTech comments to see how absurd this comment was…

Yesterday AMD announced price cuts of between 17-47% across their Opteron product lineup. These price cuts affect AMD’s Opteron processors for Socket 940, 939, AM2 and 1207 chipsets. So, this was another widespread cut by AMD to counter Intel’s Conroe based chips. The most important of these cuts for the enthusiast user will be the Socket 939 Opteron 100 series price cuts which cover the entire 100 series — these cuts will be in the range of 19-46%.