Exclusive pictures of MSI's GeForce GT 520 card

Budget graphics cards might not be the most exciting of products, but Nvidia is looking at refreshing its entry level cards with the GeForce GT 520 in the very near future. Details of the new GPU have been leaking via Chinese websites for a few days now and VR-Zone can as first publication bring you exclusive pictures of MSIs N520GT card.

In all fairness, the card itself doesnt look like much, although were disappointed to see that MSI has chosen to go with an active cooling solution on what is likely to be Nvidias new entry level card. The half-height card sports a DVI, HDMI and D-sub connector, so nothing out of the ordinary here. MSI has gone with 1GB of DDR3 memory which again is a sign of this being a low-cost card, but it appears to be using very few memory chips to achieve this judging by the fact that none of the memory chips are visible.

The GT 520 GPU is also known as the GF119 and as with just about every other entry level card for the past decade were looking at a 64-bit memory interface. The GPU is reported to be running at 810MHz with the shaders at 1610MHz and memory at 1794MHz (effectively), although this is based on leaks from zol.com.cn and might not be the actual clock speeds of all cards. Were also looking at 8 ROPs and 48 shaders, again typical for an entry level Nvidia card. As to when the actual launch is, well, wed expect it to be in the next week or two, but well just have to wait and see.

DFI LAN Party VENUS Pictures @ VR-Zone

We have just received our sample of this limited special edition board from DFI. There are only 1000 of these boards out there and the DFI Fans and collectors will surely be rushing to grab them.

For more pictures and details, you can check it out over here.

EVGA Showcases P55 Boards @ Computex

We paid a visit to EVGA hideout at Grand Hyatt Taipei and checked out some of the upcoming boards based on the Intel P55 chipset. This board could be named EVGA 655 SLIFTW edition when the time comes supporting 3-way SLI.

Below is the live demo of the 655 board in 3-way SLI setup :

EVGA has another P55 board, E657in development with 12 phases power, dual clock generators and triple BIOS. Here's the sneak peek at the board :

There will be a Classified version too with more goodies included so stay tuned for it.

Last but not least, the Hydro Copper water block forsingle PCB GTX 295 card

Early MSI socket FM2 motherboard tips up

Thanks to one of our forum members we can show you an early picture of an AMD socket FM2 motherboard from MSI. Admittedly the forum post doesnt mention the fact that its from MSI, but the product model number gives it away.

The board is simply called the MS-7778 and it actually looks like an OEM product from MSI and wed guess the target customer is one of the big brand name PC makers like HP or Dell. The blurrycam picture doesnt really help when it comes to spotting a lot of details on the board, but we can clearly see the single x16 PCI Express slot, three x1 PCI Express slots and a half size mini PCI Express slot for something like a Wi-Fi module.

The board also seems to have six SATA ports of which two are fitted to the edge of the board at 90 degree angle, a single USB 3.0 pin header and two USB 2.0 pin headers. What we can see of the rear ports it looks like four USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet port, a DVI and D-sub connector and 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out. We would guess this motherboard is using the upcoming A85 chipset from AMD, although the current chipsets are meant to be compatible with the new CPUs, albeit with a socket change.

AMD has already announced that the company will be unveiling its new CPUs at Computex in two weeks time, so unless there are some more leaks, were going to have to wait until the 6thof June to find out the full details of the new platform.

Source: VR-Zone forums

Female Robot to Walk the Catwalk in Tokyo

Researchers at the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have created a new "cybernetic human" robot that is able to move, walk, create facial expressions, and will walk down the catwalk.

Although it can walk down the catwalk by itself, it hasn't met necessary safety standards to be able to walk with human models on the catwalk. It will, however, walk by itself during a fashion show in Tokyo next week.

Developers admit that their creation isn't ready to be used in the house as a daily chore worker yet, but the technology is surely getting there.

"Technologically, it hasn't reached that level," developer Hirohisa Hirukawa said. "Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure."

The robot, called HRP-4C, is 60 inches tall and weighs 95 pounds developers said in a statement. HRP-4C's predecessor weighed 128 pounds total. Its main purpose, for now, will be to attract attention at shopping malls or amusement parks, along with serving other roles in the entertainment industry.

It was designed to look like a regular Japanese woman, but has a silver and black body that makes it look like it's really wearing some type of space suit. When it walks the catwalk next week, it won't be wearing the clothes, so it looks more normal.

Its face was inspired by popular Japanese anime, as researchers were scared to make it look too life like.

"If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny," humanoid researcher Shuji Kajita said. "We have deliberately leaned toward an anime style."

The Japanese robotics industry is one of the best in the world, and continues to make breakthroughs toward the idea of having robots help people in the household. Several robots created at the Tokyo University of Science and Osaka University are being tested as receptionists.

Source: DailyTech

Does Your nForce Board Supports 45nm Phenom CPUs

Here's a chart to show you which nForce chipset supports the new 45nm cores (Deneb, Heka, Regor). Basically, MCP68 based boardswill not support the new processors while MCP61, MCP72 and MCP78 will be able to support. You can head over here to check the list of motherboard models that support the new CPUs.

Edimax working 802.11ac router and USB dongle

Taiwanese Edimax is generally known as a company that is offering budget routers with fairly antiquated UIs, but the company is working on new 802.11ac hardware that is looking like a big step up from its current hardware. Edimax has teamed up with Broadcom for the hardware and its initial products will feature simultaneous dual band support.

So far no model names have been decided upon, but were looking at some pretty serious hardware here. The router processor is a 600MHz Intensi-fi chip from Broadcom based on MIPS32 architecture and it sports Gigabit Ethernet support, has dual PCI Express interfaces, a built in USB 2.0 host controller and DDR2 memory support. The 2.4GHz 802.11n module appears to be the BCM4331 which supports speeds of up to 450MHz as per the little sign next to the router. The only downside here is that the 802.11n module gets stuck with PCB antennas which isnt fantastic, but an acceptable trade-off on a product like this.

On the 802.11ac side of things we presume that were looking the BCM4360 which is a three stream 802.11ac chip rated at speeds of up to 1.3Gbps, although Edimax sign states 1.35Gbps. The BCM4360 uses 80MHz wide channels and 256-QAM modulation as well as beamforming on both the transmit and receive end to manage these kind of speeds. It has a PCI Express interface and if you look at the PCB youll see that the 802.11ac module is connected to the main PCB via a mini PCI Express slot.

The router doesnt appear to be a final product though and were solely basing this on the fact that there are empty spaces for what appears to be a second mini PCI Express card, USB ports and various other components. Hopefully Edimax will at least go with a similar design for the final product.

As for the USB adapter were most likely looking at the BCM43526 which as the sign says, offers dual band operation with speeds of up to 300Mbps for 802.11n and up to 900Mbps for 802.11ac. The only problem here is the limitation of the USB 2.0 bus at 480Mbps, so its unlikely that this type of product will ever achieve their theoretical maximum speed. Either which way, we cant wait until we get our hands on some 802.11ac hardware to test, as it should make a huge difference during large file transfers, if nothing else.

DFI announces Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX motherboard NP100-N16C

DFIhas announced a new fanless mini-ITX motherboard - NP100-N16C. This motherboard utilizesa 45nm Intel® Atom™ N270 processor (1.6GHz clock, 533MHz system bus) with theIntel® 945GSE Express chipset and ICH7M I/O controller hub. Exhibiting a processor thermal design power (TDP) of just 2.5 watts, this value-optimized platform provides higher performance-per-watt than previous Intel x86 mobile platforms.

In addition to higher performance-per-watt, this new Intel® Atom™ based platform provides better graphics media support than competing low-power processors. Software compatibility with previous 32-bit Intel® architecture products makes this value-optimized platform a cost-effective, high-performance computing solution for portable and low-power embedded applications.

Also, the NP100-N16C utilizes one 240-pin DDR2 DIMM socket supporting up to 2GB of economical DDR2 800MHz or 1066MHz memory. Other significant NP100-N16C motherboard features include an 18-bit dual-channel LVDS display interface, VGA graphics interface, and DVI display interface. Also provided are 1 CompactFlash socket, 2 SATA ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 4 Serial COM ports, 2 PCI Express Gigabit LAN controllers, 1 PCI Express x1 slot, and 1 PCI slot. Audio support is provided via a Realtek ALC262 2-channel High Definition Audio (HDA) CODEC with S/PDIF I/O.

The NP100-N16C mini-ITX motherboard is ideal for cost-sensitive applied computing and x86 embedded systems applications including medical electronics, industrial control, security & surveillance, telecommunications, ATM/POS, digital signage, gaming and kiosk systems. It also has guaranteed availability for seven years to continually save customers the time and expense associated with additional product testing and verification processes.

Specifications:

- Mini-ITX form factor
- Intel® AtomTM N270 processor with HTT
- Intel® 945GSE Express chipset with ICH7M I/O controller hub
- Up to 2GB of 1 DDR2 800/1066MHz memory
- Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
- 2 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet LAN controllers
- 1 VGA display port
- 1 LVDS display interface
- 1 DVI-I port (DVI-D signal only)
- 1 IDE Ultra ATA/100 interface (Supports 2 devices)
- 1 PCI Express x 1 slot
- 1 PCI slot
- 8 USB ports
- 4 Serial COM ports
- 2 SATA ports
- 1 CompactFlash memory socket
- Integrated HD Audio with S/PDIF Input/Output
- Floppy Disk Controller option available on special order

Source: DFI

Early Microsoft Office 15 screenshots are out

Some screenshots have appeared online of Microsofts Office 15 productivity suite following a Technical Preview release that was provided to a number of businesses and partners last month. All applications within are designed to run as standard on Windows 7 or 8 with the ribbon interface that we saw introduced in Office 2007 making its return yet again.

However, things have been changed up extensively this time around with more of a Metro oriented twist to the interface. For one, the ribbon will now be collapsed by default and things like the gradients, panels and dividing lines which were common place previously appear to be mostly removed; all in Microsofts efforts to make Metro a less cluttered, cleaner experience.

Another new feature of Microsofts next-gen Office suite is the ability to broadcast select documents online. This is more or less an expansion of the "Broadcast Slide Show" feature in Powerpoint 2010 where all other Office applications have a similar functionality referred to as "Present Online". The function ties in with Windows Live where your documents are broadcasted.

While its still got fair ways to go before release (theres a public beta due out in the summer which is expected to have most of the new Office 15 features implemented), it looks like the next instalment of Office will be giving us some more real-estate to work with, thanks to its minimalistic layout that should integrate quite well with the Metro UI.

For the remaining screenshots, head over to the source folks.

Source: The Verge

Effects of CPU frequency on FPS (Single GTX 280)

We have always wondered how exactly does CPU frequency affects performance of our games, we have 3DMark 06 showing us increasing CPU frequency will lead to anincrease in the scores. To be sure that CPU frequency does have an impact on the performance of our graphics card, we ran 3 benchmarks in order to find out.

3DMark VantageCrysis WarheadFar Cry 2

We decided to vary the frequency from the lowest possible stable frequency to the highest possible stable freuquency.

Component Used

Processor: Intel Core i7 Extreme 965
Motherboard: Foxconn Blood Rage
Ram: 3 x 2GB AData 9-9-9-24 1600 Mhz
GPU: Asus GTX 280 1GB
HDD: 2 x 300GB Western Digital in RAID 0
PSU: Silverstone 1000W

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit
Video driver: Nvidia Forceware 185.85