News for 2011-01-27

* Intel 510 SSDs in Feb 2011
* AMD Catalyst 11.1 WHQL and 11.1a Hotfix - Latest video drivers w/ major improvements
* Scythe announces Universal Retention Kit 3
* LibreOffice 3.3 Final (2011-01-25) (fork/replacement for OpenOffice)
* Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HD problems pile up

http://www.silentpcreview.com/news-2011-01-27.htm

Let's hope the Intel 510 SSDs have a better launch debut than the X25-M G2s did. That was painful.

Business as usual for Seagate, then.

Are you referring to the TRIM firmware update failure? I know that was rough for the early adopters but since I wasn't directly affected I remember the X25-M G2 as the most reliable SSD ever. Feel free to refresh my memory if I'm looking at it with rose colored glasses.

I have an X25 too and it is fantastic. Windows 7 helps a lot.

I'm not sure what to make of these new devices. I won't be upgrading any time soon personally since most of the performance improvement comes from the lower latency rather than raw read or write speeds. Latency is unlikely to be much better than the already near instant speed of the current generation. Capacity and price point will be interesting to see. Next time I need one it is going to be another Intel.

Err, the article says that OpenOffice isn't open source anymore, which is incorrect. It's still LGPL, same as LibreOffice.

Any word on which specific Scythe coolers this is compatible with? I have a 1st and 2nd gen ninja sitting around with no hardware that I'm hoping this would help with.

Maybe this is newsworthy for SPCR -

AMD Llano APU to Get Dual-GPU Technology Similar to Hybrid CrossFire
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Llan ... 9740.shtml

sounds good to me!

Yes, I did make a mistake there. OOo is still LGPL but it has been taken away from the council and may become closed source or may die on the vine as the fork takes over.



I've read so many blurbs about it that used the wrong terminology to sum up the shift in the community.

If only they would include support for turning off the discrete GPU to save power when not in use... Laptops have the capability but they never bothered with it for desktop chipsets.

It would also be helpful if they could fix the problems associated with computing using the GPU, i.e. the fact that it brings Windows to a crawl because the GUI updates are delayed while blocks of data are processed.

Yes, first there was a delay by a few weeks in the initial roll-out date of the G2. Then when it had been out for only a week or so and the early adopters discovered the firmware update was bricking their drives there was a 'stop shipment' placed on the whole distribution chain. Intel had to recall their entire first batch and rework the firmware. This lasted for over a month. I remember, because I was having a system built for me at the time, and was counting on and waiting impatiently for the G2, frantically checking NCIX every day.

IIRC, the firmware bug only affected password protection resets (or something like that). Lots of tech blogs weren't impressed by the way the whole launch went down. But they did like the final result...and so did I. It's a great drive.