Playstation 3: Slim & Lite

Yes, Sony has done it again, another slim console. This playstation 3 slim & lite photo has been released on T3 Magazine March 2008 issue. It features the same 3.2GHz cell processor and pretty much the same features. Not sure on exact specs yet but here is the picture:

Macbook Air

So, Apple has released a new gadget. The Macbook Air. Is it just me or does this gadget yell "Rip-Off!". Sure it is the thinnest laptop in the world (only by a few millimeters), it is about as thick as your finger at the thickest part, and it has multi touch touch pad capabilities. So does the Macbook and Macbook Pro. The Macbook Air compromises on too many aspects. Firstly, it has no optical drive which isn't too much of a let down as many people don't use the optical drives but it would have been nice to have one. Next, it only has one USB port which will be taken up by a mouse and if you don't use a mouse then it will be taken up by an external optical drive (AUD$79) or the AUD$35 USB Ethernet add-on. Of course you could get a USB hub but thats another accessory to lug around. There are few more downsides to this laptop but I won't bore you with the information. The laptop with 2GB of memory and its old 65nm Core 2 Duo processor comes to the low low proce of AUD$2500 or if you want the 64GB solid state drive AUD$4000. If you're into a good looking really portable laptop for basic things such as email, word processing and browsing then this is the laptop for you but if you want a more powerful laptop, look elsewhere.

Intel® Desktop Board D5400XS

Intel has released a new desktop board in their desktop extreme series. It can take upto 2 quad core processors and can run both SLI and Crossfire at full speed (all sockets x16) with 4 video cards. Unfortunately it only supports upto DDR2-800 RAM and if you're going to dish out around US$600 for it then it isn't enough. But, overall it looks like a great motherboard.

Below are its specs:

Form Factor	Extended ATX (eATX) (12.00 inches by 13 inches [304.80 millimeters by 330.2 millimeters])
Processor	Support for 45nm Intel® Core™2 Extreme processors in an LGA771 socket with a 1600 MHz system bus Support for both 45nm & 65nm Intel® Xeon® processors in an LGA771 socket with a 1600, 1333, or 1066 MHz system bus
Memory	Four Fully Buffered DIMM (FBDIMM) DDR2 Module sockets Support for FBDIMM DDR2 800MHz, 667 MHz, DIMMs Support for up to 8 GB of system memory Support for ECC and non-ECC memory
Chipset	Intel® 5400 Express Chipset
Audio	Intel® High Definition Audio subsystem in the following configuration: 8-channel (7.1) Dolby Home Theater Audio subsystem with five analog audio outputs and two S/PDIF digital audio outputs (coaxial and optical)
Nvidia SLI* and ATI CrossFire* multi-GPU platform support	Nvidia SLI and ATI CrossFire technology enables two graphics cards to work together for ultimate 3D gaming performance and visual quality
I/O control	I/O controller for Consumer IR
LAN support	Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem
Peripheral interfaces	10 USB 2.0 ports (6 external ports, 2 internal headers) Six Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s ports, including 2 eSATA port with RAID support supplied by a Marvell* controller Two IEEE-1394a ports (1 external port, 1 internal header) Consumer IR receiver and emitter (via internal headers) One Parallel ATA IDE interface with UDMA 33, ATA-66/100 support (2 devices supported)
Expansion capabilities	Two PCI Conventional* bus add-in card connectors (SMBus routed to both PCI Conventional bus add-in card connectors) Four primary PCI Express* 1.1 x16 (electrical x16) bus add-in card connector

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