Cyberpower Gamer Infinity Ultimate :An excellent gaming machine at a remarkable price!
June 15, 2007
IF YOU’RE LOOKING to upgrade your computer to a machine that muscles through gaming with ease,Cyberpower’s Gamer Infinity Ultimate will serve you well—at an all-inclusive price that most high-end vendors would charge for the CPU tower alone.
IF YOU’RE LOOKING to upgrade your computer to a machine that muscles through gaming with ease, Cyberpower’s Gamer Infinity Ultimate will serve you well—at an all-inclusive price that most high-end vendors would charge for the CPU tower alone. Our $3,999 review unit came with a 20-inch ViewSonic LCD monitor, a Saitek Eclipse II illuminated keyboard, a Razer Diamondback Plasma Blue gaming mouse, and Creative Labs’ Inspire P7800 speakers. Its heart was Intel’s new Core 2 Extreme QX6800 quadcore processor, overclocked to 3.6GHz.
Is it fast? It’s almost as fast as other QX6700- based (2.66GHz) PCs we’ve tested. The only reason for the “almost”
is nVidia’s shaky Vista drivers for the dual Ge- Force 8800 GTX graphics cards in Scalable Link Interface (SLI) configuration.
On our Futuremark 3DMark06 test, the Infinity Ultimate scored 14,736—nearly 1,000 points below the nearidentical
Windows XP-equipped ABS Ultimate X-Striker Extreme we reviewed last month, a kink that should be worked out by the time you read this. Don’t write off the Infinity Ultimate as sluggish, however. Running the game Supreme Commander in benchmarking mode garnered the PC an above-par SupComMark score of16,303 at a resolution of 1,2801,024. More important, it scored an average of 39.2 frames per second (fps)—exceptional, considering
the fast-paced, simultaneous action occurring in this real-time-strategy game.The Infinity Ultimate’s pice de rsistance might well be its Cooler Master Stacker 830 Evolution case. External connections (four USB ports, a FireWire port, plus mic and headphone jacks), along with the power and reset buttons, are at the top, rather than somewhere in the middle or bottom of the box. You also get six USB ports, a FireWire port, and eight-channel
audio at the back of the eVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard. Because of everything Cyberpower has stuck in the box, the case has only two external 5.25-inch bays left available for expansion, plus one PCI slot on the motherboard. The case is equipped with six fans and a Monsoon II CPU cooler with a front-mounted control panel, but it’s surprisingly quiet—no noisier than most dualfan systems we’ve heard. This desktop has legs enough to last—and once nVidia
straightens out its Vista-driver issues, you’ll need a crowbar to pry the grin off your face.
Microsoft Gives Glimpse of Internet Explorer 8
June 14, 2007
MICROSOFT SAYS it will continue to prioritize security and ease of use in the forthcoming World wide web Explorer 8 (IE 
browser and will seek to improve Web development in accordance with current standards. Microsoft plans to release IE 8 by late 2008, according to Chris Wilson, IE platform architect. “It’s clear we have a lot to do with the Web-developer platform,” he states. Specifically, Microsoft will make efforts to superior comply with Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) 2.1 specifications.
The company also wants to make its browser object model more interoperable, making it “easier to work with other
browsers and allow[ing] more-flexible programming patterns,” according to Wilson. “There’s work in the standardization bodies to do local storage and get superior security models,” Wilson states, adding that Microsoft is working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on standardizing HTML 5 and XHTML versions 1 and 1.1.
Adherence to standards is increasingly important to Web-site developers.
Because previous versions of World wide web Explorer strayed from standards, viewing certain sites in new versions
of World wide web Explorer, such as IE 7, can result in page errors, he says. “Web-development compatibility is really crucial
for building applications and…for us to deploy browsers, [but] it has to be an evolutionary step,” he states, noting that half a billion people use some version of Internet Explorer.“If we say, ‘Here is your new browser—it’s standards-
compatible,’ we actually disrupt the existing ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually make it better for anyone.”
Samsung Ultra Smart F700, A rival for the iPhone: The iPhone Killer?
June 5, 2007
Samsung is one of many tech companies that are not going to let Apple’s iPhone take the lead in the new generation of mobile phones. The new touchscreen based phone from Samsung is probably more business oriented than the iPhone but his HSDPA capability and 5 mega-pixel camera wil make the phone a real wireless multimedia device.
Samsung announced the introduction of Ultra Smart F700. This mobile phone will be showcased at 3GSM World Congress.
The Ultra Smart is a part of Samsung’s Ultra portfolio which boasts a full touch screen as well as QWERTY key pad. It reflects the recent trend in telecommunications industry of touch screen user interface and, for users who are not yet familiar with a touch-screen-only user interface, it also implements a QWERTY key pad and VibeTonz technology which allows them to feel the buttons accompanied by responsive vibrations.
Other features include 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, 5-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, 2.78-inch touchscreen display, pretty Samsung interface (designed by Adobe) and the usual slew of media features like a video and music player.
Like the iPhone, the F700 sports a touchscreen interface. But, here are two things that the F700 does better: Slide-out QWERTY keyboard and VibeTonz technology which responds to touches with vibrations.
Touchscreen might have its advantages, but sometimes real keys with tactile feedback just work better. And with the F700, you’ve the choice. Even if you select to use the touchscreen, the phone provides vibration feedback so it will likely work better than iPhone ” unless Apple decides to add this, which should be simple “.
At 16.4 millimeters thick, the phone will only be about a fifth of an inch thicker than Apple’s iPhone, and about a fifth of an inch thinner than AT&T’s 8525. Pricing and availability have yet to be determined, but without an 850 band, and considering the phone is being launched at 3GSM in Barcelona instead of at CES, which was here in the U.S.
Other technical aspects are also better based on the company’s specifications. A 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus bests the iPhone’s 2-megapixel unit. The new Ultra is also touted as one of the fastest Internet-capable phones anywhere: support isn’t only provided for HSDPA, but also for the new, 7.2Mbps download rates of the 3G wireless standard. The speed combined with the big screen lets it receive a 4MB MP3 in 4.4 seconds and makes full HTML browsing easy, the company says. Media playback is also provided for multiple AAC audio formats, Real, and variants of MPEG-4 including H.264.
However, it doesn’t measure up to the iPhone in terms of connectivity. The iPhone has WIFI support, which gives users more connectivity options.
The iPhone also comes with touch controls, and functions as an World wide web communications device with e-mail and Web-browsing functionality, as well as maps and search services. The iPhone also introduces a new user interface based on a massive multi-touch display and new software, according to Apple.
“The introduction of our Ultra Smart F700 reflects the needs of today’s consumers by including features such as touch screen, enhanced connectivity to mobile world wide web, and access to an array of multimedia content, which some are already calling an iPhone killer. ” stated Geesung Choi, President of Samsung’s Telecommunications Network Business. “The Ultra Smart F700 is a good example of how mobile phone will evolve in the future. Samsung will focus on bringing products that reflect and pursue our position as a premium leader” ..
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