Hitachi Starboard FX 77 Duo white board gets demoed on video

Hitachi's StarBoard FX 77 Duo multi-touch white board seemed impressive enough when the company announced it late last year, but if you've been waiting to see one in action before you transported your classroom into the future, Hitachi has now got you covered with a couple of demonstration videos. In this case, Hitachi has paired the rig up with its CP-A100 short-throw projector for maximum showoffiness, although it seems you can use it with any projector of your choosing. That, of course, also means that there's no electronics in the board itself, with the necessary cameras and other electronics contained in the sensor bar at the top -- which, as our presenter helpfully informs us, could come in handy if you want to drill a hole through it. Head on past the break for the full show.

Dell Studio Hybrid gets reviewed, does alright

Now that Dell's Studio Hybrid has gone on sale for the adoring public, you're probably trying to talk yourself into buying one. Not so fast, buckaroo. According to a review just posted by PC Magazine, this mini PC is probably only right for a certain sect of folks. On the upside, the unit arrives practically devoid of bloatware, which is astonishing and wonderful in its own right. Still, the Penryn T8100 CPU jammed within wasn't a top performer, so those looking for lighting fast performance will likely be disappointed. Furthermore, the lack of expansion options and weak integrated graphics were also frowned upon, but we wouldn't expect anything different given the design. In the end, critics deemed it a great buy for style-conscience consumers, but it couldn't help but mention that there "are more-powerful and more-expandable choices out there if you're less concerned about design."

Navigon 2150 Max now shipping in the UK

Navigon's 2150 Max isn't revolutionary in terms of design nor specifications, but it does feature a rather delicious list of features for just £229.99 ($458). All-too-trusting UK motorists can look forward to a 4.3-inch display, pre-loaded maps of 39 countries, built-in Bluetooth, text-to-speech and support for live traffic information. Oh, and in case our header was unclear, it's shipping this very moment in time.

Microsoft multi-touch Sphere surfaces in Redmond

There it is, right on cue Microsoft's Surface has gone spherical over at Microsoft Research. Rumored since March, the prototype relies upon an infrared system to detect hands, fingers, and objects as well as an internal (not external like Surface) projection system developed by Global Imagination (and customized by Microsoft) to deliver its multi-touch UI. At the moment, Microsoft is demonstrating photo manipulation, a spinning globe, 360-degree video, and a simple Pong-like game, the latter giving us a taste of future gaming possibilities. Sphere is expected to make its first public appearance Tuesday at Microsoft's Faculty Summit in Redmond. Ultimately, it will appear in public spaces like lobbies as part of a larger ecosystem of Surface gear. The prototype UI looks a bit jumpy compared to its tabletop cousin -- hit the read link to see for yourself.

AMD SB750 Update.. 9600BE...Sort of...

We are working on a final update to our first look at the new AMD SB750 Southbridge and Advanced Clock Calibration technology. Based upon requests, we are currently testing the 9600BE, 9550, and 8750 processors to provide an indication of overclock results based on older B2 processors and current non-BE units. In preliminary testing, we can already state that the Black Edition processors show the greatest promise when it comes to overclocking.

Also, we do not have any further technical information on exactly how ACC works. We have had several discussions with AMD but nothing concrete to report so far. There are some valid theories about what AMD is doing behind the big curtain, but nothing substantiated yet. Throwing caution to the wind, I would say inter-register fine tuning is occurring along with some other pipeline and clock optimizations. But I could be completely wrong (would not be the first or last time) if AMD ever opens the curtain for us to take a peek inside.

Foxconn has provided a new BIOS update tonight for the A79A-S motherboard that allows us to switch off the TLB fix as our preliminary results with the 9600BE have been a bit strange. Also, we have production release RAID 5 drivers to test in order to answer a few storage performance questions and we will take a quick look at 8GB memory clocking on this board in our update.

In regards to our 9600BE testing to date, our results have been unusual to say the least. We easily took our CPU up to 3.1GHz on the Foxconn board, but we have not noticed any dramatic differences with ACC enabled. As we approached the 3.1GHz range, our voltage requirements were 1.4825V with ACC enabled and 1.525V without it enabled. However, no differences in core clock speeds were noted on this 790FX/SB750 equipped board at these voltage settings. It was not until we installed this CPU in our 790FX/SB600 board that we noticed a true clock speed difference as our CPU sample would not go above 2.8GHz with 1.525V on the core. We found it strange that ACC did not really affect our core clocks as it had on our B3 processors. So, either the SB750 chipset provided a boost (not likely, but who knows at this point) or it's the board/BIOS combination from Foxconn. We are still testing on other 790FX/SB600 boards to discover any differences, but so far it appears this CPU is hitting a 2.8GHz wall on the Gigabyte, MSI, and DFI boards.

We decided to do one more test and that was to increase CPU core voltage to a maximum 1.575V (does that void the warranty?, editor - probably so) on the Foxconn board and see where that would take us with this CPU. With ACC disabled we hit 3.2GHz and thought that would be our limit based on earlier results. After some fine tuning of the cores with ACC enabled, we hit 3.33GHz as shown in the screenshot below. We would never run at this voltage on a 24/7 basis, but with the help of some serious cooling assistance from our CoolIT Systems Freezone Elite, we ended up with a platform that has been stable looping various tests for the past couple of days. That said, with the TLB fix enabled, performance has not been good so we are looking forward to what the results will be with the fix disabled.


We finally get our first 1GHz overclock on a Phenom but wish it did not take so many volts. Additional images are in the gallery.