Even after Nvidia downplayed their original report that GeForce 8400-8700 cards were failing in large numbers due to overheating, Dell has issued a BIOS update for all of its machines running the affected GPUs anyway. The update tweaks the fan settings to “regulate temperature fluctuations” to keep the maybe-faulty-maybe-not chips cooler. So who do we believe here?

Granted, it’s not hard for Dell to roll out a BIOS update that bumps cooling fan RPMs, so it makes sense that they would cover their ass in this way. Although more fan means more noise and less battery life, so the update is not without its costs. Either way, Dell is taking the issue seriously, which makes it seem like the the problem is a little more serious than what Nvidia is saying.

The update is for the following systems: Inspiron 1420, Latitude D630, Latitude D630c, Vostro Notebook 1310, Vostro Notebook 1400, Vostro Notebook 1510, Vostro Notebook 1710, XPS M1330, and XPS M1530

Source: Gizmodo

Intel’s Larrabee architecture for visual computing is slated for 2009 release; The Radeon HD 4800 series graphic card, the world’s first fuelled by a teraflop processor, was launched in India recently, by AMD (Anand Parthasarathy); The GeForce graphical unit powered by nVidia’s GTX280 chips.

In the pecking order of personal computer chips, co-processors were children of a lesser breed. Remember the heydays, two decades ago, of the Intel 80386 central processing unit? Customers who wanted to quicken the number-crunching capabilities of their PCs invested in an additional maths co-processor, the 80387, to accelerate what were known as floating point operations, by performing them directly on the hardware. As the main processor became more powerful, such add-ons became unnecessary.

Then came a new era in computing, fuelled by the gaming fever of the world’s young and restless customers, who looked to the PC not for productivity but picture power: fast action and mind-blowing graphics. No general-purpose processor was able to deliver the realistic gaming that such users demanded…. and so was born the new niche of graphics cards, fuelled by a new class of Graphical processing units of GPUs, optimised for the superior speeds demanded by PC and video games.

nVidia, Asus, Creative…. new brands emerged that created a separate hardware category, running on chips that, in many cases, outperformed general-purpose processors, mega flop for megaflop. Indeed, the Cell processor created by IBM for this burgeoning market was so good at what it did that scientists were quietly slipping it into mission-critical and military systems.

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BFG Technologies, a supplier of advanced nVidia-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies and other PC enthusiast products, has announced the nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC 512MB PCI Express 2.0 graphics card.

Backed by free 24/7/365 tech support and lifetime warranty, the graphics card is overclocked out of the box and pushes the limit in ultra realistic game play with nVidia PhysX technology, offering extreme HD gaming with 3-Way SLI.

The 9800 GTX+ OC provides optimal power management with HybridPower technology. Packing more performance than the standard 9800 GTX, this graphics card promises a first-class entertainment experience.

Based on nVidia’s reference design, the new OC-branded card has 128 Stream Processors set at a frequency of 1890MHz and a GPU clocked at 780MHz, both up from the 1836MHz and 738MHz found on stock models. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ OC also has DirectX 10 support, a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 2250MHz (2200MHz stock). It costs a sweet 167€.

Source: Biosmagazine

Santa Clara (CA) - After demonstrating beta drivers featuring GPU-accelerated physics on 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament III (GeForce GTX and 9800 boards), Nvidia is getting ready to release the official Windows driver.

This driver will support PhysX acceleration on all capable GeForce 8, 9 and GTX cards, while carrying Microsoft’s WHQL certificate. More importantly, the new ForceWare driver is expanding PhysX support to all currently available PhysX titles on the market, including Ghost Recon 2: Advanced Warfighter and Warmonger.

We expect that downloads of free games such as Warmonger and will actually spike once again in August, since now those games will be playable on a variety of cards.

By Theo Valich

Fujitsu-Siemens’s Amilo 3000 laptops have always been decidedly stylish in their two-tone duds, and now the company’s polishing them up a bit with new Centrino 2-based guts. First out the gate is the 15.4-inch Amilo Pi 3540, which features the new platform and NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS graphics driving a display Fujitsu-Siemens claims is dramatically better than the industry standard. There’s also a spill-proof keyboard, silent mode, and a 15-in-1 card reader. Europe only at the moment, should be out in August starting at £699 ($1,392).

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Firefox 3.0 Recently faced critical Vulnerabilities that is fixed in Firefox 3.0.1

Fixed in Firefox 3.0.1
Crash with malformed GIF file on Mac OS X
Command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running
Remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter

Download Firefox 3.0.1

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NVIDIA today quietly published details for its two highest-end GeForce 9M series notebook graphics chips following leaks by PC makers. The 9800M line is now NVIDIA’s flagship and is much closer to desktop-class graphics than the earlier 9600M; the top-end 9800M GTX has 112 effects processors that compares closely to the 128 of the desktop 9800, suiting it to desktop replacement portables and very compact desktops. It runs at 500MHz at its core with a 1.9GHz effective memory speed.

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