News for Wednesday, 30 April 2008

Paragon has been working on a new software of data recovery. Paragon Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite will be available for free and will allow copy of critical data on an external or network-based storage volume. It will also work with NTFS volumes.
We offer our readers to be beta testers for this application, and to report your comments and bugs in the dedicated forum topic:
- Bug (let's hope there is none!):
Provide as much details as possible, including your hardware and other applications running during the test.
- Design user interface:
Your comments or reports are welcome.
- New Features
While the application is in beta test, and the general availability (GA) expected to be around the corner. Paragon might not have time to code new features or functions, but it might give ways to improve the next version of this application; or maybe even integrate them immediately.
To download the beta version, click HERE
More information: HERE
To install the application:
- Mount the image disk.
- Burn the image Rescue Kit for Mac OS X - Lite Beta1.iso with the Disk Utility
- Reboot from the CD (this is a image disk including a bootable Linux system, only compatible with MacIntel).
To react: post on the dedicated topic in our forum: HERE.

A few weeks ago, we reported the possible return of the BTO ATI Radeon HD 3870 for the Mac Pro. Today, XLR8yourMac posts some very promising information. It is still rather a pity that Apple users are unable to get Crossfire or SLI support natively.
As mentioned almost a year ago, "Apple keeps playing this nasty game of using GPUs from the previous generation, mostly for cost reason, making Mac users frustrated over time... without speaking of the lack of support for crossover or SLI on the Mac Pro while the hardware is ready to support both..."

Rumor of Combo Mac/PC Edition Radeon HD 3870 in works - I normally don't comment on rumors and nothing official from ATI yet, but I've gotten word there's a Mac/PC (dual boot) Radeon HD 3870 PCIe card in the works, hopefully available at retail channels by the end of May. The card will be PCIe 2.0 but backward compatible with PCIe 1.0 slots. Here's a summary of the info I have on it:
* 512MB of DDR4 vram (256-bit wide I assume)
* Supports 1st gen and 2008 Mac Pros
* Dual boot Windows/OS X (OS X 10.5.2 or later)
* Crossfire supported when booted to Windows
* Mac OS perf. said to be similar to Mac 8800GT (but remains to be seen)
With the Mac 8800GT priced at $279, IMHO the Mac/PC 3870 will have to be priced at or below that card. (And every day that passes means more potential lost Mac Pro owner sales now that there's versions of the Mac 8800GT for both 1st Gen and 2008 Mac Pros.) Again no official ATI info on this mac/pc model currently, although they have (PC/windows focused) pages on the ATI Radeon HD 3000 series.