As gamers, video enthusiasts, designers, and now creative professionals require optimized PC solutions, the new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU promises to offer a 5x performance increase over integrated core-logic to today's notebook designs.

"With this new GPU, NVIDIA is able to expand its market footprint from gamers and design professionals to the creative generation of users, as well as firmly establish us at the heart of the fastest growing PC market?the notebook PC," said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president, GPU business at NVIDIA

Apple has adopted this new GPU for its new Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, announced yesterday.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a single chip, highly integrated design that is ideal for notebooks and smaller computing devices. It features 16 parallel processing cores that deliver a 54 GFLOPs of processing power. It also delivers up to 5x faster graphics performance than Intel Centrino 2, according to Nvidia. The GPU alsohas low power requirements allowing consumers to watch a full-length HD movie on a single charge.The integrated chip supports the Intel Core 2 family, Pentium D/4, and Celeron D with LGA775. It has 16 graphics cores each one clocked at 580Mhz, with shaders to be clocked at 1400MHz. The supported FSB is 1,333MHz, while the supported memory is DDR2-800/DDR3-1333.

DirectX 10,PureVideo HD, Hybrid SLI, CUDA, and PhysX are also supported.

Below you can see the basic specifications and the block diagram of the Nvidia 9400M GPU.

There is trouble ahead for Microsoft's Windows operating system. The Redmond company's flagship product is in for a tough run because of the U.S. credit crunch and the global financial problems it generated. In this context, both IDC and Gartner, two market analysis companies, warned that the PC industry have been affected by the impact of the worldwide economic crisis. Still, that is just a part of the picture. If the PC industry is hurt in terms of lower volumes of PC shipments, Microsoft will also be affected with sales of the Windows operating system intimately connected with the company's OEM partners.

The “global PC market finally felt the impact from global economic downturn. The U.S. professional market experienced the biggest hit from the economic crunch. The U.S. home market saw definite softness in PC sales after a few quarters of strong growth,” revealed Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner's Client Computing Markets group. “The Asia/Pacific PC market was impacted by a slowdown in China. PC growth in Latin America was slow relative to historical levels, but it was still in line with the forecast.”According to statistics made available by Gartner, PC shipments worldwide climbed to 80.6 million units in the third quarter of this year. The figure represents an increase of 15% compared to the same quarter of 2007. Still, Gartner explained that the growth is supported by strong unit sales in the mini-notebook segment with a focus on EMEA, the region composed of Europe, Middle East and Africa. Gartner put Hewlett-Packard in the lead worldwide with 14,7 million shipments and a 18.4% share of the market, Dell in second place with 10.9 million units sold and a market share of 13.6%, and Acer third with 10 million shipments and 12.5%.

IDC also emphasized computer sales barely managed to meet expectations. IDC claims that OEMs sold 80.1 million PCs worldwide, with HP having a market share of 18.8% and accounting for 15 million sold units. Dell comes in second with 14.2% of the market and sales of 11.3 million units and Acer gets the bronze for a market share of 12.5% and 10 million shipments.

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide PC Shipments, Third Quarter 2008 (Preliminary) (Units Shipments are in thousands)
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"The difficult economic environment accelerated toward the end of the third quarter. The commercial segment has been constrained due to tight IT budgets, while back-to-school spending helped somewhat in maintaining momentum," said Doug Bell, research analyst, Personal Computing. "IDC expects the ongoing economic woes in the U.S. to further impact consumer and commercial PC spending during the holiday season."

No less than 80% of the revenue attributed to the Windows Client division comes from original equipment manufacturers, namely sales of Windows operating systems pre-loaded on personal computers. In this context, if the PC industry slips, Microsoft will also slip. Of course, Microsoft is not relying strictly on sales of Windows in order to survive. In the 2008 fiscal year, sales of Windows generated a revenue of $14.45 billion out of the company's total $68.0 billion.

Lenovo has introduced a new range of notebook PCs with five choices of screen size and a diverse palette of color, style and design. The range is loaded with features including expanded facial recognition for simple and convenient log-in, gesture recognition for ease of use, one-key rescue system to recover data with just one touch and High-definition entertainment features.
Amar Babu, Managing Director, Lenovo India announced on the occasion, "Having received an overwhelming response to our consumer PC range, we are investing further in the Indian market with the launch of this impressive new product range. The consumer PC segment is one-third of the total PC market in India and is growing at a very fast pace. We are riding this wave and we believe this new range offers the best mix of great looking products with great features to consumers."Lenovo's new product range comprises of the U330, a premium, high-end, ultra-thin and ultra-light laptop; the Y330 a mainstream notebook aimed at high-definition entertainment and the S9 and S10 which are compact, fashionable Netbooks designed for everyday computing. This is rounded up by two other laptops namely the G230 and the G430 which are aimed at the budget market. Each of these laptops come equipped with features such as One-key rescue, Bright Vision, Dolby, Veriface, frameless screen and all the engineering of Lenovo.

The U330 comes with a deep blue glossy cover, 13 x 0.9 inch dimensions and weighs 1.95 kgs. The U330 is equipped with the latest version of VeriFace facial recognition technology, Dolby Home Theatre and touch-sensitive multimedia controls. The notebook comes equipped with HDMI with DDR III, ultra slim LED backlit display panel and a built-in DVD burner.It also includes switchable graphics to enable the user to run energy-efficient integrated graphics while on battery power and switch to high-definition discrete graphics for more powerful performance when “plugged in.” For security it comes with Lenovo’s Active Protection System (APS), a feature pioneered on ThinkPad notebooks, which helps protect the data on the hard drive if the notebook should fall. If the operating system should crash, users can recover their data at the touch of a button with the One-Key Rescue System. The U330 starts at Rs. 63,990.

Gateway made quite a splash in the mobile gaming community this past summer when it released its P-7811 FX notebook. Packed with gaming goodies usually reserved for high priced boutique OEM offerings, Gateway managed to cram a full blown desktop replacement into a sub-$1500 package (at one point, Best Buy was selling the FX notebook on sale for $1249 plus a free game). Having reintroduced itself back into the enthusiast sector, Gateway this time is focusing on the desktop market with a pair of new models, the FX6710 and LX6200.

The copper color trimmed FX6710-01 ships with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor clocked at 2.66GHz with 6MB of L2 cache on a 1333MHz frontside bus. Not often seen on a value priced desktop (if ever), the new FX boasts 6GB of DDR2 memory. A 750GB SATA II hard drive rounds out the non-volatile storage duties, and an ATI HD 4850 videocard with a 512MB frame buffer provides pixel pushing power on the gaming front. Other specs include an 18x DVD burner, 15-in-1 media card reader, 6 USB 2.0 ports, eSATA port, 2 Firewire ports, 7.1 onboard sound, and Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit.On the AMD side of the fence, Gateway's LX6200-01 comes configured with a Phenom X4 9500 quad core processor clocked at 2.2GHz with 2MB of L3 cache. The LX boasts a little more DDR2 RAM at 8GB, while the videocard gets downgraded an integrated ATI HD 3200 graphics.

Both the FX6710 and LX6200 are available now with an MSRP of $1200 and $780 respectively.

GIGABYTE proudly announces its revolutionary Ultra Durable 3 technology, first ever consumer desktop motherboard design to feature 2 ounces of copper for Power as well as Ground layers. Thus it delivers lower system temperature, improved energy efficiency and enhanced stability for overclocking.

GIGABYTE’s innovative motherboard design with Ultra Durable 3 technology features double the amount of copper compared to traditional motherboard designs. Doubling the copper offers more effective solution by delivering efficient spreading of heat from critical areas of the motherboard. Twice the amount of copper also lowers the PCB impedance by 2X and lesser flow of current results into less energy wasted. It also provides improved signal quality, better system stability and allows greater margins for overclocking. The GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 motherboards deliver up to 50°C cooler working temperatures.

The GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 motherboards equip solid capacitors developed by leading Japanese manufacturers which offer an average lifespan of 50,000 hours. The capacitors provide stability, reliability and longevity that is essential to meet the power needs of high-end processors as well as other components.The Quick Boost Technology offers 3 levels of CPU performance enhancement and GIGABYTE’s Dynamic Energy Saver (DES) provides better energy saving capabilities. It also supports DDR2 1366+ Native Memory.

With GIGABYTE’s retooled Dynamic Energy Saver, overclockers can experience the benefits of multi-gear power phase switching while overclocking. It also offers ultra stable and ultra smooth overclocking performance.

The GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 motherboards are available through Avnet India, Ingram Micro and Redington. GA-EP45-UD3P is priced at Rs.15000, GA-EP45-UD3R for Rs.13000, GA-EP45-UD3 for Rs.11500, GA-EP45T-UD3P for Rs.15500 and GA-EP45T-UD3R for Rs.13,500.