Tech Olive

Ross Rubin, who writes a weekly column on Engadget called “Switched On” (and is also the executive director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm The NPD Group) has unveiled his 2010 Switchies winners. For the best new PC input device of 2010, he chose Microsoft’s Arc Touch Mouse with Apple’s Magic Trackpad as the runner-up.

Other winners included Acer’s TimelineX series of laptops as the best new notebook PC with Apple’s MacBook Air and HP’s Envy series as the runner-ups. Best new printer was awarded to HP’s Envy printer.

via [Engadget]

This isn’t too much of a surprise since a lot of hardware is limited using firmware and software tweaks, but it’s been discovered that AMD’s Radeon HD 6950 can basically be turned into a HD 6970 with a flip of a switch. The guys over at techPowerUp show how you can take your HD 6950 and unleashed its true potential. Obviously, there’s a word of warning attached to this little hack. It’ll void your warranty and you should be aware that the actual HD 6970 uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector for its power, while the HD 6950 only has two 6-pin connectors. This could possibly cause troubles if you max out the card while the hack is being taken advantage of.

via [techPowerUp]

If you’re like many PC enthusiasts and are constantly kneeling down to tinker with your computer, here’s a simple trick to make things easier for you. If your PC tower is on the floor, prop it up on a skateboard instead for easy access when you need to mess with some cables. Just makes sure to give the cables some extra slack and then simply pulling out the skateboard/PC will be a snap.

If you want to take it to the next level, you could create a dedicated rolling platform for your PC tower, which would consist of nothing more than a piece of plywood and some cart-like wheels that you can pick up at any hardware store.

via [Lifehacker]

A while ago, Seagate launched the Barracuda LP, which was a low-powered hard drive for the environmentally friendly. This time, the company has launched its successor, the Barracuda Green. We must say it’s not the most unique of names (we’re looking at you, Western Digital), but it does server its purpose. Seagate calls it the highest performing eco-friendly desktop hard drive in the world by making it low-powered without sacrificing much performance. It spins at 5,900RPM and uses the company’s own SmartAlign technology to enable the benefits of the new 4K sector standard. It’s available now in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB flavors. A 6Gbps option is available for the 1.5TB and 2TB models.

[Press Release], [Product Page]

Epic Vid of the Week is a weekly series that showcases an awesome video that we or our readers discover. Some you may have seen before and others you may have not. If you’ve discovered any videos that are worthy of an Epic Vid of the Week title, let us know!

We all should know by now that Google has their own operating system for netbooks called Chrome OS. In this video, we’ll see the Cr-48 netbook get destroyed several times in creative ways, but at the same time we’ll learn about some of the advantages of using a Chrome OS machine.

It’s said that AMD‘s upcoming Radeon HD 6900 series will hit store shelves in just a couple of days, but if you have down on your wishlist, you might want to consider scratching it out because several rounds of tests done by Fudzilla have indicated that the upcoming “video card of all video cards” is slower than Nvidia‘s current flagship offering. In one of the tests done in 3DMark 2011, the HD 6970 scored just below an 8000 while the GTX 580 scored 8700. In some of the tests, the slightly less-powerful GTX 480 almost stood nose-to-nose with the HD 6970.

via [Fudzilla]

Image Credit: Fudzilla

Today Seagate announced what they say is the industry’s first 2.5-inch enterprise-class hard drive to boast a whopping 1TB storage capacity. The Constellation.2 series of hard drives from Seagate sport a 6Gbps interface with the option to go with either SATA or SAS and also come in 250GB and 500GB flavors. Seagate says the new drive will ship with Dell machines later this month.

[Press Release via Twitter]

The concept alone sounds far fetched, but the nifty minds at Shogun Bros. have come up with a mouse that’s also a gamepad, complete with joysticks and everything. The Chameleon X-1 sports an adjustable DPI optical sensor that goes up to 1600 DPI and has a 125Hz polling rate. The gamepad, which resides on the bottom of the mouse, has everything you’d want in a gamepad including force feedback. Shogun Bros. say that we should expect the mouse to ship sometime in Q1 2011 for the very competitive price of $55. Will the mouse be enough to replace our Xbox 360 controllers for PC? Probably not, but this does look like an excellent option for on-the-go gamers.

[Shogun Bros. via Engadget]

A group of major technology manufacturers have banded together to rid VGA of their products all together by 2015. AMD, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Samsung and LG have said that DisplayPort and HDMI connections will lead the way. AMD will lead the charge by removing VGA, as well as DVI-I from all of its products by 2013. They believe that DisplayPort 1.2 will eventually be the default interface for PC monitors and HDMI 1.4a for TVs. Of course, they won’t be the first to push VGA out of the way. Apple was one of the first manufacturers to dump the 20-year-old display technology from its Mac lineup back several years ago.

via [Electronista]

This isn’t the first machine spotted running Intel’s new Sandy Bridge chip by any means, but it’s the first with benchmarks included, and boy are they impressive! This leaked 17-inch Alienware M17x gaming laptop scored a 15,940 in 3DMark06 sporting a 2GHz Core i7-2630QM with integrated graphics. Yes, integrated graphics. Furthermore, a higher-end version of the M17x scored a 20,155 running a 2.2GHz Core i7-2720QM with AMD Radeon HD 6900M graphics. Not too shabby.

[Notebook Review Forums via Engadget]

Image Credit: Chip Hell