Crucial, a sub-division of Micron, recently released a new memory kit in its BallistiX Tracer series. The Crucial BallistiX Tracer PC3-10600 (1333MHz) is specifically built for performance enthusiasts and case modders who want to push the performance envelope while adding flash appeal to their boxes.
The Ballistix line of high-performance memory modules features advanced speed grades, low latencies, and integrated aluminum heat spreaders. Ballistix Tracer memory features a black PCB, black integrated heat spreaders, and one or two rows of eight "chasing" red and green LEDs atop the module, circulating in a random pattern based on memory utilization. A custom-designed circuit relays bus activity to the LEDs, allowing them to accurately reflect usage of each memory module. In addition, eight blue ground effects LEDs emit a constant glow near the pins.

What is a Ballistix Tracer DDR3 240-pin DIMM? Ballistix Tracer 240-pin DIMMs are found in DDR3 memory. DDR3 boasts an improved architecture allowing very fast data transmission.

A Ballistix Tracer dual inline memory module (DIMM) consists of a number of memory components attached to a black printed circuit board. Gold pins, found on the bottom of the DIMM, provide a connection between the module and a socket on a larger printed circuit board. The pins on the front and back of a DIMM are not connected to each other.

To use DDR3, your system motherboard must have 240-pin DIMM slots and a chipset that supports DDR3 — which is a different technology than that of than its predecessors, DDR2 and DDR. DDR3 incorporates different sockets; they are not interchangeable or backward-compatible. (Information about which memory technology your system uses is included in the Crucial Memory Advisor tool.)

The number of black components on a Ballistix Tracer 240-pin DIMM can vary, but it always has 120 pins on the front and 120 pins on the back, for a total of 240. Ballistix Tracer 240-pin DIMMs are approximately 5.25 inches long and 1.18 inches high, though the heights can vary. These 240-pin DDR3 DIMMs have only one notch within the row of pins, and each technology has the notch in a slightly different location on the module.

- Main features

* DDR3 PC3-10600
* 6-6-6-20
* Unbuffered
* NON-ECC
* DDR3-10600
* 1.80V
* 128Meg x 64

If you haven't heard, ATI's HD 4870 kicks some serious gaming ass. Nvidia's received the message loud and clear, so the company's gone back to the drawing board and now plans to release a revised version of its GTX 260 videocard. The tweaked GTX 260 pushes the number of stream shaders from 192 up to 216, expected to result in a 5-10 percent performance increase. To prevent confusion in the market place with existing GTX 260s,speculation suggests the new card may carry a 'Gold' moniker.

This isn't the first time in recent memory that Nvidia has revised an existing SKU, with the company earlier this summer shrinking the 9800 GTX's core from 65nm to 55nm and boosting clockspeeds, which resulted in the 9800 GTX+. But this time around, DigiTimes reports graphics card makers are voicing concerns that the Gold release will leave them with an oversupply of original GTX 260 cards that no one wants. Whether those fears prove founded or not depends on how Nvidia plans to price the new release, which so far has not yet been announced.

We'd all love to run a pair of 4870 X2 videocards, but for certain workstation tasks, these gaming-centric videocards would prove inappropriate. For those who put work before play, AMD today introduced two new workstation cards, one at each end of the performance spectrum.

Taking its place on the high rung, AMD's new flagship FirePro V8700 is based on the 4800 series with 800 stream processors. The company claims the V8700 is about 40 percent faster than its previous flagship offering. The card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and sports a total bandwidth of 108.8 GB/s. Two DisplayPorts and a single dual-link DVI interface round out the feature-set.On the lower end, the FirePro V3750 drops the stream processors down to 320 and comes with a more conservative (that's a nice way of saying 'much lower') 256MB of GDDR3, resulting in a bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s.

Both the V8700 and V3750 will be available sometime this quarter with an MSRP of $1,499 and $199 respectively.

Siggraph is just around the corner, so it should not be too surprising that Intel is talking more seriously about Larrabee, a discrete graphics product due for launch in “2009 or 2010”. Intel decided to provide a few more slices of information that are likely to fuel a new round of rumors on the Internet.
Intel’s presentation to analysts and journalists held several interesting details, the design idea and high-level technology approach of Larrabee, but our two most burning questions were left unanswered and, at least partially, positioned in a territory that opens an opportunity of wide speculation: How many cores will Larrabee have and how will those cores compare to discrete graphics offerings from Nvidia and AMD/ATI? We don’t know for sure, but we received some hints.According to Intel, the idea of Larrabee was born out of a need of CPU programmability and GPU multi-parallelism. While Intel promises that Larrabee, which will be based on a many-core x86 design, will provide “full support of current graphics APIs”, the company said that it will offer developers a clean canvas to develop new APIs for new features. The hope here is that game developers will take advantage of x86 coding to come up with unique features that cannot run on GPUs.Intel has developed a 1024 bits-wide bi-directional ring network (512 bits in each direction) for Larrabee to enable agents to communicate with each other in low latency manner resulting in what the company describes as “super fast communication between cores”.

As previously reported, Larrabee x86 cores (each Larrabee core is actually a full x86 core) are based on a modernized dual-issue Pentium design with a short execution pipeline. The chip design was enhanced with a vector processing unit (VPU; 16 32-bit ops per clock), multi-threading (4x with separate register sets per thread), 64-bit extensions and sophisticated pre-fetching.So, how many cores will this many-core product have? Intel says this is still a secret. The presentation charts however, which we were not allowed to publish, talk about Larrabee examples with 8 to 48 cores. These numbers are in the range of rumors we heard so far and it would not surprise us, if an 8-core chip in fact would be the entry-level product of this “2009 or 2010” product. Intel often said that Larrabee is “highly scalable,” so 48 should be possible. Count in Hyperthreading and the products talked about can deal with 32 to 192 threads simultaneously.

Performance of Larrabee is a “secret” as well, as is the answer to the question how many Larrabee cores Intel will need to match Nvidia’s or AMD’s GPUs. But we would hope that Intel would not debut a product as important for the company as Larrabee with a performance that is significantly inferior to what is available on the market at the time of launch.

Scalability may become one of Larrabee’s biggest assets. Intel claims that Larrabee cores can scale almost linearly in games such as Gears of War, FEAR or Half-Life 2, Episode 2. 16 cores will provide twice the performance of 8 cores, 24 cores three times the speed, 32 times four times, etc. “Almost linearly” translates to “linearly within 10%”, Intel said.

It is interesting to note that Intel mentioned that Larrabee will “fully support IEEE standards for single and double precision floating-point arithmetic.” AMD’s and Nvidia’s GPGPUs support double-precision processing as well, but typically suffer dramatic hits in performance when exposed to double-precision apps. For example, Nvidia told us that the firm’s latest Tesla cards theoretically can hit 900 GFlops to 1 TFlops in single-precisions but just about 100 GFlops in double-precisions. Intel did not say how Larrabee performance is affected in double-precision environments.

Have you ever run into an old ex-girlfriend only to realize she's nothing the way you remembered? Or fired up that retro-game and wondered what you found so appealing about it in the first place? Every once in awhile a blast from the past (like bringing WarGames back to theaters) will make a worthwhile comeback, but more often than not, old relics are best left buried, and Albatron might be finding this out.Earlier this month the company let it be known it would be bringing Nvidia's 8-series videocards in 8400, 8500, and 8600 trim to the PCI bus, but those plans have hit a snag and it might be awhile before we see another PCI videocard. Even though the PCI bus has been around since close to the dawn of time, not all motherboards stick to the same signaling implementation for the PCI interface, and Albatron fears that compatibility with different motherboards could become a problem.

Sam Nada, Albatron's International PR representative, says the company's engineers are working on optimizing the BIOS to ensure a smooth rollout, but it will be a couple of weeks before the new Retrotechnology cards make a debut. But what's a couple of weeks if you've already staved off the upgrade bug for this long?

It's official! At a recent GameFest 2008 even a Redmond, Microsoft unveiled some details about the successor to the DirectX lineage - the DirectX 11. No doubt, DirectX 10.1 is still going strong with optimized video cards from both ATI and Nvidia battling it out, but Microsoft seems to have chalked out basic outlines for the next iteration of the multimedia API.

For starters, Vista will be supported as well as other OS versions that may appear in the future. The main part is that existing DirectX 10 cards will be supported along with the newer ones that will come out then for the new DirectX11.However, the fact that could excite enthusiasts is news about the capability to take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor. With DirectX11, the processor might find a helping hand from the GPU. This does not necessarily translate into slow performance due to this shared workload. Instead, multi-threaded resource handling will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines.