Tech Olive

Hello, Earthlings! After we realized that we have a ton of cool stuff just sitting around and collecting dust, we decided to get rid of it the easy way by giving it away to our loyal readers. This cool stuff ranges from stickers to gaming headsets to case fans to gaming mouse pads and more. Some items are brand new in the box, while others have been opened up for review purposes.

Here’s the deal, we’ll be giving away one item through Twitter every Monday at 6:00PM EST until we run out of stuff to giveaway. We’ll ask a trivia question and the first person to reply to us with the correct answer will be the winner for that week. Sound simple? It is, so be sure to follow us on Twitter for your chance to get some cool, free stuff!

A few rules:

- You can only win one time (to keep it fair).
- You must be a resident of the United States (sorry, foreigners).
- Winners will be notified via DM in Twitter. They must respond before the next week’s giveaway or else they will forfeit their win.

Image Credit: c.j.b

Dell’s proudest laptop creation is no more, no longer. The Adamo XPS has been given the axe after only four months of existence. A lot of us our scratching our heads as to why the 0.4-inch thick, flagship notebook from Dell was booted shortly after its launch. It seemed like Dell put a lot of money and energy into marketing this thing. Dell had this to say as to why they ended the notebook’s life:

“It [Adamo XPS] has not been “discontinued” as such, but was meant to be a proof point to Dell’s design and engineer capabilities. Because of this, it was similar to a “limited edition”, and most of the original supply has since been accounted for.”

So, it seems that Dell just wanted to show off their mad skills, but I think I would be more impressed if Dell actually continued with the XPS, showing that they could provide support for the device and continue to improve it.

via [CrunchGear]

Razer has announced a new product…if you can call it that. The Razer Salmosa Pro-Gaming Edition is a very limited run (50 units total) of a shrunken-down Salmosa. Other than that, it’s exactly the same hardware, color and price; $39.99.

It’s a very confusing and underwhelming announcement considering the Salmosa isn’t a very popular mouse, so wouldn’t it make more sense to give the Diamondback or Lachesis a new, improved and/or limited edition release? At any rate, the new version of the Salmosa is only available to North American buyers while the limited supplies last.

[Announcement]

For the first two months of 2010, Gigabyte is said to have sold between 3.1 million and 3.3 million motherboards, which is up to par with the 3.2 million to 3.3 million of Asus’ sales. However, Asus won’t go down without a battle. It’s said that they are looking to slash prices of their motherboards to increase sales. The company thinks they’ll be able to ship 5 million motherboards for the first quarter.

via [DigiTimes]

Image Credit: Mike Babcock

Personally, I thought I’d never see this coming, but seeing the swarm of modders fitting their netbooks with HD decoders has persuaded Asus to go ahead and put their own HD decoder in their upcoming 1005PR Eee PC. Other notable features include the new Atom N450, a 10.1″ 1366×768 display, 11 hours of battery life, 250GB HDD, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth, WiFi, USB 2.0, Ethernet, 0.3MP webcam, multitouch trackpad, and the Broadcom BCM 70015 HD decoder, which will be able to play full 1080p HD video without a hiccup, something older netbooks can’t brag about. Sadly, no official word from Asus yet on pricing and availability.

[Asus via Hot Hardware]

Finally, we get to see if Nvidia’s new Fermi card is any match for ATI’s monster HD 5870. Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing at Nvidia gives us a quick walkthrough of their benchmark for the GTX 480 and how the new card really excels in tessellation, but looking at the graph of the results themselves doesn’t really make us ooh and ah. Yes, the GTX 480 does perform a bit better than its competitor, but isn’t this thing supposed to blow it out of the water? It’s a brand new card going up against another card that’s a half-year old….By any means, you can catch the video after the break.

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Shown for the first time at CeBIT, was Thermaltake’s new designs of three new gaming keyboards (for low, mid-range and high-end budgets) and a gaming mouse, which are all part of a new product line dubbed “Tt Esports.” Fudzilla (head over there for a few more pics) received some hands-on time and fed us some details, so join us after the break to find out more!
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The netbook market is a very unique one. It’s is still so young that the devices are lacking in speed, but the trade-off is portability and long battery life. So, as it stands, there’s a mad dash for hardware developers to try and find the best balance of performance, portability and most importantly, battery life. All while trying to keep the devices in an affordable and competitive pricing bracket. So, let’s find out how one of Asus’ latest revisions of their wildly popular Eee PC line holds up in the ever-evolving netbook market.

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On top of the two O!Play media players that Asus has, they’ve now discreetly uncovered their third model, dubbed the O!Play HD2. The only specs that we know of so far is that — from the photo — it will have eSATA, USB, and memory card support, but if it’s anything like the other two players, it’ll sport HDMI that will output 1080p HD video and either ethernet, 802.11n, or a combination of both. Stay tuned for more info as it comes in.

UPDATE: We’ve found out that the player will have HDMI 1.3, Composite, Component, Optical outputs, USB 2.0, eSATA, CF/SD/Memory Stick card readers, and a USB 3.0 PC link. I’m sure more info will come at us later in the day so stick around.

via [SlashGear]

There are times when people do something completely unnecessary just to get people’s attention. This is very well one of those times. Using five LSI Mega RAID SAS/SATA raid cards, Patriot was able to cram in a whopping forty 256GB solid state drives into one PC. The rig, which was unveiled at CeBIT, also sports two 1000W Thermaltake power supplies, a server motherboard with dual Intel Xeon 5550 CPUs, and 48GB of DDR3 RAM. It’s said that the system is able to make a copy of a Blu-ray rip in just under a second. We’re talkin’ speeds of around 8GB per second. Yes, please.


via [Tom's Hardware]