The Zone

Kingston will be holding their 20th Anniversary celebrations at the PIKOM PC Fair (III) 2007, at their booths at the KLCC Hall 5 Booth 558 as well as the Persada Johor booth J124 venues. Visitors to the fair who purchase more than 1GB of Kingston products will be given a scratch card which contains redeption vouchers for Qee collectors items. Don't know what a Qee is? Look below:

Cute, isn't he? You can also win 512MB DataTraveler disks and other goodies, so don't forget to drop by!!

I'm not sure what to make of the rumors that Sony plans to revive their little robotic canine companion by integrating it with the Sony PS3 and PSP; it sounds like a neat idea in theory, but whether it will actually be successful is another thing.

I remember coming across the Aibo a few years ago in a Sony showroom in Sydney and while I was impressed with it, I wasn't compelled to buy it. The original Aibo was a very expensive toy, and coupled with the expensive PS3, I doubt it will fly off the shelves. It should make an interesting technological showpiece though. Plus you don't need to worry about toilet training it.

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Lucky people Pc Games Hardware got their mitts on NVIDIA's latest triple-SLI configuration which includes three 8800 Ultras, a 1200W PSU and Crysis. Unfortunately they weren't able to play the game 'smoothly' as it only maxed out, at ultra settings at 37.9fps. If this isn't an indicator of how all our rigs suck, nothing else can drive home the point that Crysis is a resource hog. The latest hogzilla, anyone?

  
This lucky dude named Dominick V. Strippoli recently got his hands on not one or two of the uber-fast MTorn 16GB SSD drives, but nine of them, affixing them in a RAID 0 config and benchmarking the wicked setup using almost all of the real-world performance benchmarks including notoriously slow Vista load times, Crysis and Photoshop. Interestingly, to get the setup running at its full speed, you really need the best RAID controllers, something which pushes the cost envelope higher. Check out his review here - SSD Drive Review. Super high speed computing, anyone?

Card Manufacturers are abuzz with their plans to release the new 8800 GT chipset with 1GB of memory. Seeing as how succesfull the 512MB version of the chipset is, most pundits are already hoping that such a move will double the 8800 GT card's already exceptional performance. But will it really do that?

The practice of doubling or adding on more memory to a graphic card is not something new nor is it unprecedented. The most recent case is the addition of 1GB worth of memory to 8500 GT and 8600 GT graphic cards. From our experience with the 8500 GT 1GB the increase in performance is marginal at best, with only 1 to 2 frames per second added on. The key there was the type of memory used, since it was only 1GB of GDDR2.

If card manufacturers are willing to add on 1GB of GDDR4, then maybe we can see a notable increase in the performance for the new 1GB 8800GT cards, but if there is only going to be more GDDR3 or worse GDDR2, well... we'll see when it arrives in our hands.

Hot off the virtual pressrooms and into the 1st Jan fire! Asus reportedly is going to preview its second generation of Eee PCs, the computing solution that took the world by storm, beating other initiatives for low-cost computing by more than 350000 units shipped at the end of December last year. Now, just after winding down New Years celebrations, Asus has released a mysterious press release (in Chinese) which mentions that the second generation Eee will come with an 8.9" screen, among other delightful upgrades such as models with embedded XP, a price of no more than 50k yuan, and even WiMAX connectivity (which might be revealed at CES, thanks to this invite here). Stay tuned as we unravel the happenings.

 p.s. I was just about to get one!! Thanks for letting me wait 4 months more Asus! :D

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We've finally got our hands on the 8800GT 1GB and yeah, it uses lovely, lovely GDDR3. Previously we've seen only marginal increases in the 8600 GT when upped to 1GB. We attributed that to the fact that it mainly used GDDR2 and still had that 128 bit bottle neck in the memory management factor. But now that we've got the 8800 GT (a much more noteworthy GPU) with a full complement of GDDR3 and 256 bit memory interface, we're kind of hoping for a better ride.

Our resident theorist posits that it shouldn't really make much difference since we'll be testing in DX10 which handles memory much better than DX9. Find out later when the review comes out.

Say hi to the world's thinnest notebook. Jobs and Co have done it again, unleashing the MacBook Air to the world yesterday at Macworld 2008. While it is simply stunning to look at, the Air does have some minor drawbacks - it works only with wireless networks, its too thin for an Ethernet port (can you believe I'm typing this? I can't myself), the baseline USD$1799 model only has a 80GB hdd whereas the USD$3098 one has a 64GB SSD - a whopping price increase, and the fact that all your hardware is sealed like an iPod makes this a tough buy.

On the other hand, it has a gorgeous 13.3" 1280 x 800 screen that is LED-backlit, Micro DVI adapter, Wireless-N, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, Core 2 Duo 1.6 or 1.8GHz processor, standard 2GB DDR2-667 memory, full-backlit keyboard AND a multi-touch/gesture pad! All of these in a clamshell that is only 3 pounds (1.3kg) and is only 19mm thick at its thickest point! That's thinner than most mobile phones! And it has a Core 2 Duo inside!!

Its a tough decision to make.

Check out Apple's guided tour video for more info.....and for size comparisions of course.

Although it’s still a concept, this inflatable mouse will really hype up a game of Doko Doko Maji Shinpan (if it was ever released on the PC) as you can experience a soft, fluffy gaming experience that has never been offered before. While it might make the Logitech Air mouse all green with envy, we see that most people wouldn’t be bothered about blowing up their mice, especially at a boardroom meeting, however geeky you may be!

[Yanko Design]

Crysis gamers using 2 HD3870 cards in a crossfire setup have complained that during the game objects such as far off trees and clouds tend to flicker and become distorted. After trying out Crysis using the HD3870 X2, the same flickering objects were also observed. This seems to support earlier claims by AMD that the X2 is just two HD3870's crossfired on the same card.

(Don't bother looking for drivers from AMD-ATI, you can fix the flickering objects problem for either your CrossFired HD3870s or your HD3870 X2 by downloading and installing the 140MB Crysis patch 1.1 file.)

This tends to shoot down further rumours that you can do a triple CrossFireX or quad CrossFireX setup using the HD3870 X2s mainly cause a single HD3870 X2 is already more or less recognised as a CrossFire setup in itself, then you shouldn't be able to hook up more than two HD3870 X2 cards in a single setup.

Despite our cheap affordable and cute Eee PC fetish, there are other UMPCs out there which are cute enough to upsurp the People's portable computer. Case in hand, the Kohjinsha SH series. Although the brand is established in Singapore, their units have only been trickling in of late, and although we are new to the whole Kohjinsha scene (its huge south of JB) we can see why; this sub RM2.5k UMPC packs a whole lot more features compared to Asus' aneroxic model. 120GB HDD, standard 1GB of RAM on the SH811W model (the white one), Windows Vista, Bluetooth, WiFi, MS/SD and CF card reader and.....tablet functionality! More pics after the jump!