Review: Acer Aspire 8920G
The Acer Aspire 8920G is one of the new laptops enabled most of the features that is available in the market. The most striking features of this laptop is that it comes with Blue-ray disc and display of 18.4 in.
The Acer Aspire 8920G measures 441mm across, 300mm deep and 44.2mm thick it weighs 4.1 kilos and strikes an imposing figure on any desktop.
This laptop comes with Intel Core 2 Duo T9300. It has two cores running at a brisk 2.5GHz with an 800MHz Front Side Bus and 6MB L2 Cache, the latter of which is particularly advantageous when processing a large number of images.
The Acer Aspire 8920G features 4GB of RAM, though with 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate OS installed, not all of this will be used. For storage you get two 320GB hard drives, 640GB total, graphics are powered by a 512MB nVidia 9650M GS, there’s Wireless-N Wi-Fi for seamless high definition content streaming, an HDMI output and let us not forget about the Blu-ray reader and DVD writer drive nestled in there.
Features
Processor: Intel 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9300/
Graphics Chipset: nVidia GeForce 9650M GS/
64 Bit Computing Yes
Bluetooth Yes
Chipset Type Intel P965 Express
Colour Black/Silver
Connectivity 3.5mm Input, 3.5mm Output, HDMI Output, Infrared, RJ-11, RJ-45, USB 2.0, VGA
Data Link Protocol 802.11a/b/g
Databus Speed 800
Dedicated/Shared Graphics Memory Dedicated
Dimensions 441 x 300 x 44
Display Resolution 1920 x 1080
Display Type Super TFT
Drive Speed 5400
Graphics Memory (Mb) 512
HDD Capacity (GB) 640
Infrared Yes
Installed Cache Memory (MB) 6
Installed RAM (GB) 4
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate
Optical Storage Dual-Format DVD/Blu-Ray
Processor Speed (GHz) 2.5
RAM Type DDR2 SDRAM
Weight (kg) 4.1
Battery Life 2.5
Built-in devices Stereo speakers, subwoofer, wireless LAN aerial, Bluetooth aerial
Display Standard WUXGA
Notebooks & Tablet PCs Display Size 18.4
Pointing Device TP
No of Processing Cores 2
Review: Dell Photo 926 All-in-One Printer
Dell provides its user with Dell Photo 926 -All-in-One Printer where you can enjoy printing, scanning, faxing and standalone copying.This multifunction printer with built-in media card slots and USB port; has e-fax capability.It produces high quality photos and documents with print resolution up to 4800×1200 dpi and produces a scannable photo index.
Dell Photo 926 prints up to 20 pages per minute (ppm) in black, 48-bit full color flatbed scanner scans media at up to 1200×2400 optical dpi (19,200 interpolated) and it also provides built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Dell Photo 926 provide higher flexibility with the optional Wireless Printer Adapter 3300 (WPA). PictBridge connection for direct printing from your camera and Dell Ink Management System - an intelligent software program to look after your printer’s ink level.
Dell Photo 926 Specifications:
General:
Copier Type: Digital
Width: 17.4 in
Depth: 12.6 in
Printing Technology: Ink-jet – Color – Photo printer
Height: 7.2 in
Display: 2 lines
Weight: 11.9 lbs
Printer:
Minimum Ink Droplet Size: 3 pl
Ink Cartridge Configuration: 1 color cartridge (cyan, magenta, yellow), 1 photo cartridge (light cyan, light magenta, black)
Memory:
Supported Flash Memory: CompactFlash, Memory Stick, IBM Microdrive, MultiMediaCard, SD Memory Card, XD-Picture Card
Copying:
Max Document Enlargement: 400 %
Max Document Reduction: 25 %
Scanning:
Scan Element: CIS
Optical Resolution: 1200 x 2400 dpi
Interpolated Resolution: 19200 x 19200 dpi
Color Depth: 48 bit
Printing:
Max Printing Resolution: up to 4800 x 1200 dpi (mono) / up to 4800 x 1200 dpi (color)
Max Printing Speed: up to 20 pages/min (mono) / up to 15 pages/min (color)
Ink Palette Supported (Colors): Cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan, light magenta
Color: 4 or 6-ink
Document & Media Handling:
Original Type: Sheets
Max Copy Size: 8.5 in x 17 in
Supported Media Type: Cards, Banner, Labels, Envelopes, Photo paper, Plain paper, Coated paper, Transparencies, Iron-on transfers
Standard Media Capacity: 100 sheets
Output Trays Capacity: 25 sheets
Document & Media Handling Details: Input tray – 100 sheets, Output tray – 25 sheets
Speed Details: Printing : up to 20 pages/min – B/W, Printing : up to 15 pages/min – Color
PC Connectivity:
PC Connection Availability: Yes
PC Connection: Hi-Speed USB
Operating System Support: MS Windows XP, MS Windows 2000, MS Windows Vista, MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Software Included: Drivers & utilities
Power:
Power: AC 110/230 V ( 50/60 Hz )
Miscellaneous:
Direct Printing Specifications: PictBridge
Manufacturer Warranty:
Service & Support: 1 year warranty
Service & Support Details: Limited warranty – Replacement – 1 year – On-site, Technical support – Phone consulting – 1 year
Review: AMD’s ATI HD 4850 GPU
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 you see pictured here has a core GPU clock speed of 625MHz with 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 993MHz. The GPU is connected via 256-bit memory bus. The card is cooled by a single slot, copper fan sink. The drivers reported an idle temperature of around 80′C, and the card was too hot to touch. Pricing for the card is expected to be set at $199.
Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 go head to head with refreshed and new G92 -and GT200-based GeForces from NVIDIA, and the GPU used to create the new Radeon products is an absolute stormer.
In spite of having diminuitive dimensions for the die and a comparatively small external memory bus width, RV770 punches harder than any other GPU the Graphics Products Group at AMD have seen fit to release.
The RV670 before it, the RV770 is fabricated at TSMC on a 55nm process, which packs its roughly 965 million transistors into a die that’s 16mm per side, for a total area of 260 mm². The chip has grown from the RV670, but not as much as one might expect given its increases in capacity. The RV670 weighed in at an estimated 666 million transistors and was 192 mm².
In AMD’s new GPU is surely dwarfed by Nvidia’s GT200, a 577 mm² behemoth made up of 1.4 billion transistors. But the more significant comparisons may be to Nvidia’s mid-range GPUs. The first of those GPUs, of course, is the G92, a 65nm chip that’s behind all from the GeForce 8800 GT to the GeForce 9800 GTX. That chip measured out, with our shaky ruler, to more or less 18mm per side, or 324 mm². The second competing GPU from Nvidia is a brand-new entrant, the 55nm die shrink of the G92 that drives the newly announced GeForce 9800 GTX+. The GTX+ chip has the same basic transistor count of 754 million.
The near 960M transistor chip is a svelte 260mm square, and packs a hardly believable 800 scalar shared processors, arranged in R600- and RV670-like SIMD arrays of 80 each, via the same 16 x 5-way arrangement. Each SIMD array packs a data sampler unit capable of 16 scalar fetches and a quartet of bilaterally filtered results per clock.
Radeon HD 4850 uses 512MiB of GDDR3 (64GB/sec from 256-bit at 2GHz) with a 625MHz clock, giving 1Tflop/sec of FP32 compute, 20Gtexels/sec of INT8 filtering and 40Gpixel/sec Z-only writes.
Performance details include 1/4 speed FP64 compute ability (industry leading rates therefore result), half speed FP16 filtering (1/2 RV670 per sampler per clock) and full speed FP16 colour writes (2x RV670 per ROP per clock). So the ratios of compute/sample/ROP change compared to the older generation, while sharing the same basic architecture.
The $239 GeForce 9800 GTX+ looks to be a minor waste of NVIDIA’s time, Radeon HD 4850 more than a match, with HD 4870 taking on the $399 and $649 (LOL) GeFroce GTX 260 and GTX 280 and often beating the $649 part, especially when a reasonable level of AA gets turned on.
NVIDIA are in an instantaneous position of having overpriced new hardware almost straight out of the gate, with the $649 asking price of GTX 280 a significantly difficult sell for a gamer.
XFX GEFORCE 9600 GT Launched
XFX has now Unleashed its jumbo the “premium product” XFX GEFORCE 9600 GT.A strong competitor to NVIDIA’s PNY GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB.The NVIDIA’s graphics card has a clock speed of 650MHz on the core, 1625 MHz on the shader and 1940MHz on the memory. The card uses 512MB of GDDR3 memory with a 256-bit memory interface.
On the contrary the XFX GEFORCE 9600 GT has a core speed of 650 MHz with two overclocked versions the ‘Extreme’ and ‘XXX’ editions having a thrilling 680 MHz and 700 MHz, also with it is a shader clock of 1625MHz and a memory clock of 1.8GHz The card is compatible with PCI-E 2.0 and uses 512MB of DDR3 RAM. 
This fresh product brings with it next-generation GeForce graphics including PureVideo HD technology, which allows the PC to suport HD DVD and Blu-ray video playback with eyecatching clarity and resoloution. This card is also pioneers the 9600 GT series to offer up to 90 percent higher performance compared to other GeForce card in its class.
It takes parallely with it the Microsoft DirectX 10 support, NVIDIA’s Quantum Effects technology, Lumenex engine as well as Unified Architecture ensuring optimium game performance.The 9600 GT XXX edition is fully HDMI certified and includes a HDMI component kit and Company of Heroes DVD as a bonus game bundle.
The 9600 graphics card is stocked under the Rashi Peripherals all over India at a market price of Rs. 13990 with a 3 year warranty.
NVIDIA New cooler, cheaper, smaller GeForce 8800 GT
Even if it’s smaller, cooler, and cheaper than its higher end brethren, that unfortunately doesn’t mean it’s better: the formerly G92-codenamed NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT sits in the middle of the 8800-series with a single slot configuration that uses 100 Watts less power than the top of the range model, but with a lower clock speed and six less “stream processors.” It’s a fair bit higher spec than the GTX and GTS models though, with the same “stream processor” clock speed as the Ultra at 1500MHz, and a memory frequency of 900MHz. It also supports PCIe 2.0 and the pure video HD engine which offloads H.264 encoding onto the GPU. It sells for between $199-249, and should be available within the next few days at the usual online stores.
AMD ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series
The new ATI Radeon HD 2000 series is a top-to-bottom line of 10 discrete graphics processors for both desktop and mobile platforms. This family of GPUs delivers The Ultimate Visual Experience through immersive HD gaming with DirectX 10 and HD media playback.
The HD 2000 series also carries the dual burden of being a GPU and a platform for AMD’s “stream computing” ambitions, a fact that makes the software side of the HD 2000 quite interesting and worth spending some time on. Because most of my coverage of the GPU market now focuses less on gaming and more on graphics-makers’ high-performance computing plans, I’ll quickly run through the highlights of the consumer side of the new lineup before talking about AMD’s Accelerated Computing Software Stack.
The series boasts many firsts for the graphics industry, including a powerful second-generation Unified Shader Architecture (USA), a 512-bit memory bus designed for full performance high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, and new Unified Video Decoder (UVD) technology for high-fidelity HD media playback. The mid-range and entry-level GPUs are the first graphics products in the industry to use an energy-efficient 65 nm process technology to achieve silent, passive cooling and lower power consumption. The ATI Radeon HD 2000 series also builds on AMD’s Windows Vista leadership.
XFX 8600 GT “Fata1ty” Review
XFX released a new model GeForce 8600 GT recently, and again one from their Fatal1ty line-up of products, this being the second from that line.
“This is another great graphics card that the Fatal1ty brand can be proud of,” says Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel. “The initial card from XFX became wildly popular due to the unique cooling technology and this card utilizes the same feature.”
One of the card’s unique features is its Silent But Deadly cooling technology. This was created to dissipate heat without the need of a fan resulting in an effective cooling engine. This new system is far quieter and since air and dust are not forced through the heatsink, helps eliminate clogged heat sinks, which can cause overheating.
The other introduction 8800 Ultra is the flagship model of the G80 range and offers a sizeable performance jump over the G80. It is designed to be HDTV-, SLI-, and HDCP-ready, giving users TV-out functionality and the ability to double their performance capabilities and significantly enhanced scalability on more than 60 of the top PC games.
These products are now available along with a 3 year warranty at a suggested end user price beginning at Rs. 10,000 for 8600GT FATAL1TY and Rs. 45,000 for 8800 ULTRA from all the 50 Rashi branches and select Rashi partners across India.