To be honest, building a computer inside of an aquarium filled with clear mineral oil, seems to be a great challenge and the guys at PugetSystems did it. They managed to submerge, first an old computer and then an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB of RAM (OCZ), with an NVIDIA 650i Ultra motherboard, a 8600 GT video card and a 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive.

They used an Eclypse System 6 Aquarium, Lian-Li motherboard tray, clear acrylic panel, silicon sealant, weather stripping, an air pump and bubble bar for the bubbles of course, and obviously 5-6 gallons of mineral oil.

This is just a fun model and Puget Systems won’t sell it. Here are more info if you want to build your own.

Because ASUS managed to set a standard in the mini-laptop market with their Eee PC, we’ve all been dead curious to see how the desktop version would look like. Is the design nice? What are the specs? Well, our questions have been partially answered because HotHardware got their hands on the real deal shots. I like it! How about you?

Because the Ati Radeon HD 3800 series has been very successful until now, AMD is planning to release the new Radeon HD 3830, to take on the new GeForce 9600 GT, best cheap card so far. I’ve managed to read some leaked details saying that it’s going to be built on the 55nm RV670 core, will feature a 128-bit memory bus and will include the common DirectX 10.1, PCIe 2.0 and UVD. It will feature up to 256MB and just like the HD 3850 and HD 3870, the GPU will feature 320 stream processors.

Pricing for the new Radeon HD 3830 is going to be in the $120-$130 range and if it’s going to perform well, it may be a bargain.

via HotHardware

For those of you that have an old scanner and want to throw it out on the streets, think again. First of all it’s not nice to put garbage on the streets and second of all our buddies from Instructables have a very good idea of what to do with it - a wind power generator.They used an old scanner, 8 rectifier diodes (1N4007), LM7805 voltage regulator (5v), a PVC pipe, plastic square for the tail and aluminum pieces. Go ahead and read it all over.

In January there were rumors of a new NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, that was supposed to work on 65nm technology and should support Quad SLI. The same rumors were expecting it to be 30% faster than a 8800 Ultra mainly because of the 1GB frame buffer, two PCBs, two 65nm GPUs and 256 Stream Processors.

Today we got some sort of a confirmation to all these, because packed nicely under the Albatron logo is the new GeForce 9800 GX2. It was spotted today during CeBit 2008 but no one from Albatron cared to give us more info regarding price or availability. We’ll update soon with more info.

via Engadget

Intel has the new 45nm Core 2 processors ready. They are coming from the Penryn family and are dubbed Yorkfield for the Core 2 quad-core designs and Wolfdale which is a Core 2 dual-core.

Wolfdale processors are going to be sold as Core 2 Duo E8500 and should have increased clock speeds of 3.16 GHz, have a 1,333 MHz Front Side Bus and consumes less power .Now that I mentioned less power the Wolfdale processors are going to consume 65W at 3.16 GHz while the former lineup was doing 75W at 2.6 - 2.9 GHz. The core voltage level is down to 1.225V from 1.325V.

The fact that Intel shrunk the chips is great. They’re now packing on those 107 mm2 up to 6MB of L2 cache compared to 4MB it had before. Core 2 Duo E8500 processors will use SSD 4.1 instruction sets that will speed things up when it comes to video encoding and comes with common already, hardware virtualization acceleration, execute disable bit (xD), 64-bit processing support, and SSE-2/3 support.

There is one small drawback. Though newer motherboards support 1333 MHz FSB most of them will need a BIOS upgrade to be fully compatible.

The guys at HotHardware managed to make the new Wolfdale Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 to run up to 4.3 GHz so the 3 GHz barrier seems to be way over.  Yes, they overclocked them.  If you want to read a more in depth review check them out.

Dell has a passion of releasing gaming desktop solutions and the latest addition is their XPS 630 model. It’s dubbed “the new challenger” and is a more affordable gaming rig in the XPS line, that supports dual graphics and some of the latest processors. But enough talk, here are the basic specs:

• Supports Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme and Intel Core 2 Quad processors that are overclockable
• supports NVIDIA nForce650 SLI Chipset
• graphics options : NVIDIA SLI Single/Dual (8800 GT or 8800 GTX) or ATI Crossfire Single/Dual (2900 XT)
• up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM (Overclockable Corsair DOMINATOR Memory, 800 MHz)
• up to 2TB hard drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 16 MB Cache, 7200rpm, SATA II)
• 4 internal HDD bays
• two PCIe X16 Graphic slots
• 750 Watt MAX model DT50E power supply unit
• 48X Combo Drive, Optional 16X DVD+/-RW Drive and Optional Blu-ray Disc Drive
• Light FX 2.0 (4 lighting zones)
• AGEIA PhysX™ Accelerator option
• Red and Black Bezel Color Choice

The price starts from $1,249 and you could get yours right now because it’s as good as you read above. The money you spend will offer a great gaming experience. Here’s a more detailed review.

When it comes to RAM it’s never enough. If you have 512MB you need at least 1GB and when you have it, then the next step is 2GB. It’s like money. The more the merrier. Here is where MetaRAM comes into the picture. Apparently they’ve developed a new technology that can double or quadruple the performances of your DIMM RAM module.

How does MetaRAM work?

It uses a 3D chip stacking technology to put extra SDRAM chips onto a DIMM that will actually make it 2 or 4 times “bigger”. However these additions wouldn’t work without the secret recipe : some sort of custom chips that obviously work only on those custom designed circuits.

“We had to make our chip look like a DRAM to the memory controller, and like a memory controller to the DRAMs,” said Suresh Rajan, the MetaRAM co-founder.

MetaRAM also uses WakeOnUse technology that keeps all the SDRAM chips asleep until they are needed. This should help read and write times and of course will reduce power consumption to around 2.5 watts.

One of the company’s channel partners will soon announce a server that will be packed with 256GB (should allow up to 500GB) of main memory and the price is going to be under $50,000.

256GB is enough, right guys ?

Here is the more detailed story : ArsTechnica

AMD just made it official that their newest ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series that we’ve heard to rock the desktops until now will also be available on laptops. The news was expected and AMD (NYSE:AMD) mentioned that HD 3400 and HD 3600 models already support DirectX 10.1, for the first time. The new chipsets will include PCI Express 2.0 support and will offer 1080p HD DVD and Blu-ray movies quality.

The new Radeon HD 3000 series for laptops have a nice addition using AMD’s Avivo HD Technology to free up the CPU when it’s not needed to “process”. This will lead to better power efficiency for longer battery life.

The new HD 3000 series will be used by Asus right away, while other producers will bring their laptops on the market in the first half of 2008.

The hard drives that come with computers today don’t fulfill our need for storage. Thus, many computer users purchase additional memory tools like external hard drives or external racks.

The product I have found today is a serial ATA (SATA) external rack that uses the USB connection. It supports 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives and an additional energy source beside the USB cable. The device has an eject button and a blue LED that shows it is in activity. The SATA Stage Rack retails for $47.

Buy it here.