Samsung HDD 500 GB notebook

Capacity and price have been the advantages of traditional hard drive technology over the increasingly popular solid state disk drives. Samsung is the first HDD manufacturer to ship a gigantic 500 GB 2.5” hard drive (Fujitsu was first to announce such a drive), which is almost 16 times the capacity of the mainstream SSD (if we can call the SSD mainstream) and twice what is currently considered the higher-end of mainstream notebook hard drives (250 GB).

You won’t be able to achieve any speed records with Samsung’s 5400 rpm Spinpoint M6 drive, but three 2.5” platters holding 167 GB each is the highest capacity currently available for notebooks. You could store up to 160,000 high-resolution digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies or 60 hours of HD video on the drive, Samsung said.

The suggested retail price of $299 is about twice what would currently pay for a 5400rpm 250 GB hard drive, and about 50% more than what 320 GB 2.5” drives (Hitachi was the most recent manufacturer to announce such a drive) are going for currently. SSDs cannot compete on price with these large-capacity hard drives yet.

Vendors such as Dell are currently charging somewhere between $210 and $300 for a 32 GB SSD and $510 for a 64 GB SSD ($850 including a separate 200 GB HDD). If you were to purchase such a drive in retail, you would have to calculate about $400 for a 32 GB SATA SSD (IDE models are available from about $180). 64 GB versions are currently selling for about $2000, 128 GB versions for $3100 and up and 256 GB SSDs recently showed with prices starting at about $7500.

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New Samsung 1 TB HDD

Samsung sent over a press release revealing the new Spinpoint F3 line of high-density hard drives that only use two platters. Operating at 7200 RPM rotational speed, the new line provides up to 1 TB (Terabyte) of storage, meaning the drive's two platter disks would consist of 500 GB each. By using only two disks, the drives use less power and offers 30-percent higher performance than a three-platter drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor.

“Our customers require not only additional capacity but also high performance for their server and desktop storage systems, while promoting a green environment,” said Choel-Hee Lee, vice president of marketing, Storage Systems Division, Samsung Electronics. “The massive capacity-per-platter and high-performance features of the new Spinpoint F3 make it an attractive solution for driving the growth of high-density storage.”

Samsung also stated that the Spinpoint F3 series is compliant with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive (RoHS), and uses SilentSeek and NoiseGuard to "achieve a quiet operation system." The drives also use a 3.0 Gbps SATA interface, Native Command Queuing features, and a 16 MB / 32 MB buffer memory.

The 1 TB Spinpoint F3 drive is scheduled to ship in August, however the 500 GB version (using 250 GB per platter we assume) is now available worldwide.

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Sony Computer Entertainment Europe boss Andrew House says PSP Go’s $249/€249 price point is based on a “premium” associated with new hardware.

Speaking to MCV, House explained that PSP Go’s price wasn’t set in a bid to protect retailers’ margins – which will be hit by the handheld’s download-only software model - or to cover Sony’s research and development costs.

“Those aren’t the factors,” he said. “When you introduce a new piece of hardware you have the opportunity to say there is a certain premium that is associated with it, and we took that into account.

“As with all hardware launches you look at the business model, the cost structure, and the necessarily level of profitability, and you use that to set the wholesale price. Much as we do with any other hardware.”

PSP Go has yet to be officially priced for the UK market, but multiple indie retailers told us earlier this week that they were downbeat about the recently announced system’s prospects.

Chips MD Don McCabe told us that he isn’t currently planning on stocking PSP Go upon its October 1 release, while Grainger Games purchasing director Chris Harwood said that PSP “appears to have died as a format.”

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Zotac's Ion Board On Windows 7: Nvidia Re-Arms Intel’s Atom : Introduction

We’ve done a ton of Atom-oriented content, from reviewing the processor’s merits on its own, to pitting it against Athlon and Nano, to testing it in a ready-made machine and evaluating performance under Windows Vista. When we say the CPU is an enabler in the netbook market, but sorely lacking as a solution to your desktop needs, we’re basing that judgment on almost a year’s worth of power and performance data.

Of course, we’re also grouping Intel’s accompanying 945G-series chipsets in with that opinion, since they have been, up until now, the only core logic accompanying Atom processors.


Earlier this year, we were able to take a sneak peek at the first platform with Atom support able to go up against Intel’s own anemic Atom-oriented chipsets: Nvidia’s Ion. First encountered at this year’s CES, we were impressed by just how much modern connectivity and GPU muscle the company had crammed into its proof-of-concept design. We were told to expect more Ion-related news in the months to come.

Now, almost six months later (and after the announcement of Acer’s AspireRevo nettop), we’re seeing the first mini-ITX motherboard based on the Ion concept, which means the do-it-yourselfers out there now have their own path to pursing an Ion-based platform. Will they want to, though? That’s the question we’re setting out to answer here.

Nvidia’s Ion: Stepping Out

That first Ion concept was truly stacked. It included lots of USB 2.0, analog 7.1-channel output, optical output, DVI, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA storage connectivity. As you already know, that box’s capabilities come from the Nvidia GeForce 9300 chipset, which the company is now calling its Ion Graphics Processor (IGP—get it?).


As a quick recap, the GeForce 9300 (or IGP as we’ll call it from here on out) is a single-chip solution that combines the functionality common to most northbridge and southbridge chipset components.

Exceptional I/O includes support for up to five PCI slots, six SATA 3 Gb/s ports, a total of 20 PCI Express 2.0 lanes across five links (1 x 16-lane and 4 x 1-lane), integrated Gigabit Ethernet, 12 USB 2.0 ports, and HD Audio.

The northbridge-y features include a dual-channel memory controller able to accommodate either DDR2-800 modules or DDR3 at speeds of up to 1,333 MHz. Nvidia claims front side bus speeds of up to 1,333 MHz, supporting Atom, Celeron, Pentium 4, and Core 2 processors. Temper your excitement about those modern memory and bus settings, though. The Atom 330 soldered onto Zotac’s board sports a 533 MHz FSB and communicates with DDR2 modules-only.

And then there’s the integrated graphics. Derived from Nvidia’s G86 GPU, the IGP sports 16 shader processors and relies on shared system memory. The graphics core runs at 450 MHz while the shaders operate at 1,100 MHz—down a bit, actually, from the GeForce 9300 we reviewed last October.

With the chipset specifics out of the way, let’s take a look at how Zotac has turned Nvidia’s IGP into a mini-ITX motherboard.

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Asus And DFI: Core i7 Micro-ATX Motherboards Compared : ATX Without The Waste

With support for full-sized components and up to four expansion cards, the Micro ATX format has always been more than adequate for the majority of high-end builds. Yet while enthusiasts have typically cited inadequate quality or design as the primary reason for not considering this option, manufacturers have cited lack of demand as a reason for not putting their best efforts into a board this small. A few attempts by manufacturers to win loyalty among space-conscious enthusiasts have mostly been rejected by a market that maintained its traditional view of the former problems.

The popularity of Micro ATX portable gaming enclosures is finally starting to break the cycle of negative assumptions as customers are forced to make a decision about what hardware to put inside. Current top products are undoubtedly as feature-laden as many of their full-sized counterparts, incorporating high-end devices and support for even the largest dual-slot graphics cards in CrossFire and SLI. Always a target of upper-range Micro ATX motherboard sales, professional media and home theater enthusiasts may instead choose to load up to three media-centric devices in addition to a single-slot graphics card. With this much flexibility, confessing that they don’t actually need more expansion room could be the hardest problem for many builders.

Yet few of us will even consider smaller devices until we can see that they function as well in every respect as the larger parts they replace, so today we’ll compare these against the fastest of our full-ATX samples. Before we go into the details of that test, let’s take a closer look at the features we so eagerly endorsed.


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When I first looked at Nvidia’s Ion platform last month, I tested in three different ways: as a desktop PC, as a gaming system, and as a home theater machine.

Of course, this meant a lot of extra time was spent actually using the configuration that Zotac sent my way. During the course of testing, I convinced myself that I’d never be truly happy with Ion as a desktop system, even under Windows 7—the operating environment I used, assuming Vista would be too cumbersome. It was just too slow. Sitting there waiting for menus to pop and apps to open just isn’t my gig—and I suspect many of the enthusiasts who read Tom’s Hardware would feel the same about a new technology purchase.

I also wasn’t impressed enough with Ion’s gaming performance to recommend it in such a role. Sure, I could jog around Ironforge using Fair settings in World of Warcraft, but who spends close to $200 on a motherboard/processor for that? When it comes to gaming, you could do much better for the money, or even a little more money.

Intel suggested that Ion was overkill last week at Computex, and it was right. Nvidia’s GeForce 9300 platform is more chipset than the Atom processor can handle. Though, to be fair, we’re expecting more out of the architecture here than Intel designed it to deliver.

Nevertheless, if there was one segment in which I suspected Ion might be able to succeed, it was the HTPC market, where GeForce 9300 could offload playback of HD video content and, hopefully, factor Atom right out of the picture.

Ion In The Theater

Given the platform’s GeForce 9300 foundation, which includes the latest generation of Nvidia’s PureVideo (VP3) technology, hardware offload of MPEG-2, VC-1, and AVC (H.264) is fully enabled—a good omen for using an Atom-based PC in a home theater environment.

Additionally, the chipset was said to support 7.1-channel LPCM audio over its HDMI output. Now, this feature is more important than you might realize at first. If you’re watching Blu-ray content on a big-screen TV in a home theater, there’s also a good chance you’re using six- or eight-channel surround sound. There are actually a few different ways to achieve multi-channel audio with your HTPC. Perhaps most familiar to the PC crowd is through a TOSLINK optical (or S/PDIF coaxial) output connected to your receiver. You can transmit encoded Dolby Digital and DTS signals over an optical cable, but not Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio—the two optional, lossless formats commonly featured on Blu-ray movies.

In order to play back TrueHD (with a maximum bitrate of 18 Mb/s) or DTS-HD (with a maximum bitrate of 24.5 Mb/s), you have to use an HDMI 1.3 connection. Hallelujah, Ion has that.

From there, you have two options. You can either pass the encoded Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD signal to your receiver, which performs the decode and plays back the lossless studio soundtrack in all of its glory, or use your DVD software to decode the signal and pass multi-channel linear PCM over the HDMI output (so long as it’s supported).

The problem with the former is that it requires a protected audio path—otherwise your decoding software will fall back to lossy codecs like Dolby Digital and DTS. We’re still waiting on a chipset that’ll do this, but right now the only component in the lab capable of it is Asus’ Xonar HDAV 1.3 sound card, a $200+ add-on. Incidentally, this is how you get your receiver to light up with the TrueHD or DTS-HD logos (meaning the receiver is leveraging its built-in decoding capabilities).

The problem with the latter is that it requires specific platform support. For instance, ATI’s 780G/790GX will only pass stereo LPCM (you can do AC3 and DTS, though). Nvidia's GeForce 9300 and Intel's G45 both support 7.1-channel LPCM over HDMI.

As an aside, and for the record, this is the way Sony’s Playstation 3 is able to serve up TrueHD and DTS-HD playback. You don’t get the little lights on your receiver flashing Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, but you can view the playback status as a movie is playing and see the PS3 is doing the decoding, then sending uncompressed LPCM to your receiver.
Well, Ion supposedly supported multi-channel LPCM via HDMI. However, in my initial review, I revealed that, despite Nvidia’s claims, Ion wasn’t outputting multi-channel audio in either Windows Vista or Windows 7, in either PowerDVD 9 or TotalMedia Theater 3. Had it been a persistent flaw, that would have been a deal-breaker for Ion as an HTPC solution.
Fortunately, I was able to work with both Nvidia and CyberLink to get PowerDVD 9 working properly under Windows 7. The latest build, 1719, properly enables multi-channel LPCM output via HDMI on Windows 7 (TotalMedia Theater still doesn’t work).

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Why is Microsoft dropping the Xbox 360 price so fast?

The Xbox 360 is on track to have 2 million sales in the UK by next week, according to industry number crunchers at Chart-Track, as Microsoft continues its Baked Beans strategy of slashing the price in quick succession.

Microsoft’s 360 strategy has become more than apparent since the most basic model, the Arcade rejig of the old basic package, is being sold for less than the Nintendo Wii ; one of the main selling points of which had been its low cost for mass appeal.

Microsoft announced a series of price cuts in the run up to Easter, putting the cheapest 360 models RRP to £199.99, with the top-end Elite model going for £259.99, and the move seems to have paid off with an increase in sales – 40 percent in the first week after the price cut was announced, though this naturally tapered off the following week, only to increase again over Easter.

The strategy puts the Xbox 360 firmly in the mass-appeal end of the market. Where once Microsoft had touted the console as a next-gen, extremely premium product with plenty of high-end nifty features, from the hard drive and graphics through to the online play ; now the console is battling in under the £200 wire, a price-point that traditionally sees a console break open new swathes of the market.

The PlayStation 2 had a renaissance in sales when it sneaked in under the barrier, and it is an ongoing example that low-low prices still shift a lot of hardware – the now extremely low-priced PS2 was one of the surprise strongest sellers over the Easter period, having already put in a strong performance over Christmas.

The 360, despite having been launched in 2005, has seen the likes of the PlayStation 3 – a year old on the UK market in March – catch up quite quickly. The PS3 reached the 1 million milestone in February, in less time than the PS2, which took 50 weeks to sell 1 million units. The Xbox 360 in contrast took 60 weeks to sell 1 million units, and is only now reaching the 2 million mark whilst the momentum of the PS3 is propelling it to catch up quite quickly.

The ace in Microsoft’s deck used to be that it brought the 360, which we must remember is only the second generation console from Microsoft taking on the previously completely undisputed champion, to market a good while before Sony ; cannibalising market share by sheer virtue of being on the market. Now that the PS3 is proving quite successful in its first year (though still not as successful as Sony would like), Microsoft is slashing the price of the 360 aggressively.

This will, Microsoft hopes, not without some merit, give the 360 some more momentum, opening the console to new consumers with a lower pain threshold than previous price points invokes, convincing them that the 360 is the far better option to the PS3. The effort is also aimed at cutting into Nintendo in a way the console had not been able to previously, through a two-pronged price and marketing effort.

It is no mistake that the lowest-end model of the 360 has been rebranded the “Arcade” edition, invoking family friendly visions to compete with the established Wii reputation as a console for all. Price and the perception of a mass family friendly appeal will sell more consoles than all the hardcore, high-end credentials in the world ; a position that Microsoft and others can thank Nintendo for creating in the past few years between the DS, Wii and a host of cute, intelligent, and different games.

So, Microsoft will hit 2 million Xbox 360’s in the next week. It has, with the introduction of the high-priced PS3 and low-priced Wii into its once lonely position as the next-gen console on the market, decided to go the route of tapping into the vast fields of low-price, mass-appeal consumers ; rather than try to play an expensive game with Sony, where the marketing battle to attract just one high-end gamer costs a lot more than it does to slash the price of a unit by £50 and make soothing noises at the masses willing to pay £200, but not £210, for their console.

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