News for Friday, 3 February 2006

All of us dream of ever more powerful graphic cards for an improved gaming experience. As a result, costs are going up and so does the power consumption, which has been skyrocketting lately.
In this context, Xbit Labs decided to test many of these cards, and they were not disappointed by the results.
Although the consumption of the graphic cards remains reasonable compared to the overall one, the latest GPUs appear to be power hungry monsters when it comes to 3D, and the winner is... the latest Radeon X1900XTX which draws more than 120W when running the most demanding 3D calculations, while the Geforce 7800 GTX 512 MB "only" needs 95W.
Just to give you an idea, this was the overall consumption of the first Powermac G4. Even when they do nothing, these cards still need as much power as Mac mini running applications. Fortunately, the latest G5 come with a 1000W power unit.
Renewable energies? Yeah sure...

Together with the release of our article dealing with RAM modules selection for Apple notebooks, we had organized a special discount on Swissbit modules. Today is the last day for this offer, so read the article and find the special link located at the end ;)

Some users have been facing problems with the keyboard of their brand new iMac Core Duo. Randomly, but regularly, the keyboard freezes, and one needs to unplug it to solve the problem; till the next freeze.
According to the unlucky users, the problem could be linked to the keyboard itself and not to the iMac Core Duo. Indeed, if you change the keyboard for another one, it solves the problem.
So, if you are facing such problem call the AppleSupport to get a new keyboard as replacement; it should fix the issue.

It happens much faster than initially anticipated, but the iMac G5 17'' has just been removed from Apple Store.
Apple was not known before for taking such quick decision concerning its hardware models. It really seems that the x86 transition is going to be much faster than originally planned.

A new war is brwing between the two giants: Matsushita has filed a lawsuit in the USA against their arch-rival Samsung for patent violation.
The patent refers to DRAM memory modules, which covers LOTS of stuff Samsung produces.
This is just another round in the Electronics Wars, and there already is an ongoing lawsuit related to plasma TVs.