Tech Olive

CES 2011 has now come and gone and what a week it was! While the show officially started on Thursday, companies were already announcing and unveiling new products as early as Monday, and since I didn’t cover everything that happened under the Las Vegas Convention Center roof, I decided to sit down and reflect back on the week, as well as catch up on stuff that I missed.

After the break, I’ll be recapping some of the best in PC products that were shown at CES and give you my prediction on what this year will have in store for us based on what we saw at CES 2011.

Continue Reading »

Those new AMD Fusion chips aren’t going to run by themselves. They need a good motherboard to sit on first. Gigabyte will have you covered when you go out and purchase your Fusion. The GA-350N-USB3 is not only their first Fusion board, but it’s also their first ever mini-ITX board for the AMD platform. While it’s more on the small side as far as size, it packs some serious punch as far as features go. It has USB 3.0, SATA 6Gbps, HDMI, and three times the power for charging USB devices such as iPods and other various PMPs.

The motherboard will come with an AMD Fusion E-350 dual-core chip and Radeon HD 6310 graphics, which is powerful enough to play back Blu-ray content, Gigabyte says.

Pricing or availability is still yet to be had.

[Product Page via Press Release]

Now that AMD officially outed its new mobile offering of processors, it would be appalling on the desktops’ part if they didn’t announce new desktop processors. That’s not the case here, though. The company has just announced and released two new Phenom II CPUs, one being the 3.6GHz Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition and the other a 2.9GHz Phenom II X6 1065T. The new Black Edition is claimed by AMD to be their fastest yet and the 1065T is meant to be a power-saving offering which only squeezes out a 95W TDP.

While AMD says the processors are publicly available now, pricing is yet to be discovered.

via [AMD Blog]

In a direct effort to best Intel’s Atom chip for netbooks, AMD has announced their Fusion chips. To put it quite simply, the chips are a CPU/GPU combo (just like Intel’s Sandy Bridge) and according to AMD, they offer better CPU performance, better GPU performance (with DirectX11 support), dedicated 1080p HD video processing with HDMI out, and a monstrous 10+ hours battery life. Four models of the chip will be available, the highest being a dual-core 1.6GHz chip and the lowest a single-core 1.2GHz.

A couple of netbooks sporting the Fusion chips have already been announced (HP Pavilion dm1 and the Lenovo X120e) and we should definitely see more pop up within the coming days. AMD even says that Fusion tablets should be coming within the first half of 2011.

[Press Release]

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]

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

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]

Here are AMD’s newest and upcoming video cards. The Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 (pictured above) will be the first two out of the gate for the HD 6800 series. Unfortunately, no real details (price, availability) or specs were released, so we can only go by the images. Over at Tested, they did just that. They did an in-depth image analysis of the cards and their findings are quite interesting. One big change from the HD 5850 to the 6850 is that the new card utilizes only one PCI-E power connector instead of the two that the 5850 required, which means AMD made quite a bit of changes to the newer 6800 series.

via [Tested]

UPDATE: We’ve learned that more info about the HD 6800 series will be revealed Friday. Also, we found a  3-minute demo video from LegitReviews that’s pretty interesting. View it after the break!

Continue Reading »

AMD proudly announced a new automatic-update avenue for their GPU drivers this week. It’s no secret that Windows Update will prompt you to install the newest GPU drivers when they become available, but now you can rely on Valve’s Steam client to keep your graphics drivers up-to-date, as well as all your favorite games.

“With today’s exciting announcement from AMD and Valve®, Steam gamers will never again have to worry about finding the most recent ATI Catalyst™ graphics driver. PC gamers can now detect and install the latest ATI Catalyst™ driver for their ATI Radeon™ graphics card directly from within Steam!”

[Announcement]

If you didn’t know (and you should), AMD owns ATI. Now that we settled that, the micro processor manufacturer is finally throwing out the ATI brand. They will keep the names of the product lines, such as Radeon, Eyefinity, and FirePro, but instead of it being called ATI Radeon, it will now be known as AMD Radeon.

This really isn’t a huge surprise. Some people have already been referring to ATI as AMD, even though it was still ATI. And they both sound the same anyway; three letters, both start with ‘A’, both are medioc…..erm…..you get the picture.

via [Tech Report]