News for Friday, 9 February 2007

Hereafter is a photo of the future high-end Radeon graphic card to be released in March.

VR-Zone indicates some information related to the specifications of this monster. Well, we should say ogre, indeed, this card wipes out all previous records as it will consume 270W... and will be 30 cm long.
Thanks fully for Mac users, the Mac Pro features already the 2 required PCI Express power connectors required to feed this graphic card, as well as the dedicated space to plug it in.
Who said that it was getting slightly ridiculous?

zaybacker wrote in with this information:

Hello, I wanted to let you know of a test I just did with MacFUSE (FUSE-Compliant File System Implementation Mechanism for Mac OS X) and the NTFS-3G plug-in.
A Applenova.com user has created an installation package for the NTFS-3G Plugin.
Installation is now very easy as it is no longer required to compile the source.
There are 3 packages to install:
MacFUSE 0.1.9
NTFS-3G
MacFUSE Tools
Once installed, all NTFS hard drives (internal or external) will be mounted in read/write mode.
Although it is important to run a scandisk on the disk in Windows and to properly eject/unmount it from the system (both Windows and OS X).
User permissions are not managed and writing to the disk seems rather slow.
To finish, here is a small screenshot

To download the files:
http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=21842&page=7

LG announced that its BD and HD-DVD compatible standalone player BH100 should arrive in Europe in April. Its expected price, 1300-1400 Euros, will not target mass consumer electronic markets, but video fan might adopt it quickly as it will be compatible with both blue laser formats.

LG also announced the successor of its current blue laser burner GBW-H10N, the GGW-H10N. It will support read/write BD, DVD and CD format (read/write), but will also be able to play HD-DVD media. It should be available at the end on Q1 2007.
So if Apple is getting ready to adopt blue laser based SuperDrive, it would be nice to see a BD and HD-DVD compatible burner to find its way into MacPro. In iMac and MacBook it will come later on as it will require a slot-in model.

PCI-SIG, the group which defined the PCI Express standard, published specifications for the fabrication of an cable which can transfer a PCI Express bus outside of a computer.
This standard is compatible with PCI-Express 1x to 16x.
The specific data on this standard is reserved for members of the consortium, so we still don't know the thickness nor maximum length of the cable.
This standard does not actually bringing anything revolutionary, manufacturers have already been offering their own external solutions. This will just standardise the connection.

Within one month, the price of DDR-2 667 MHz chips has dropped 27% down. If it did not translate into the final price in shops due to the buffering effect of stocks yet, it will in the future.
This "overproduction" of memory chips might be the consequence of the "Vista effect", as it was publicly known that Vista would require at least 1GB to be usable. In addition, analysts were predicting that adoption of Vista would boost RAM modules sales... so one should conclude that either Vista is not a blockbuster, or Vista-bundle hardware PC sales are lower than expected.

Yesterday, we published an article detailing how to replace the processor of an Intel Mac mini. (http://www.hardmac.com/articles/68/). So naturally, today, we've posted a performance comparison of different processors that we installed.

We tested a core solo 1.5 GHz, a Core Duo 1.66 GHz, a Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz and a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz.
You can find the article here:
http://www.hardmac.com/articles/69/