Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Neo Win are reporting some exclusive details about the new Microsoft Zune HD. They are claiming that these details have been confirmed by sources within Microsoft so in theory they should be true, which would mean we may be in for quite a treat from the new Zune HD.

Zune HD specs:

• Appoximately a 3.6 inch OLED touch screen
• NVIDIA Tegra processor/gpu
• 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB versions
• HDMI Connection to stream straight to your TV
• HD Radio.
• Web Browser.
• WiFi compatible, with wireless marketplace.
• Released, early fall.
• International Release
• Home AV packs, Car packs, Charge packs.

Image from Engadget

Netbooks have always been perceived as low cost, basic computers for general web and email type activities. Well Asus says no to that preconception and has decided to fit its Asus N1oJ netbook with a Nvidia GeForce 9300 discrete graphics chip.

The rest of the spec includes a 10" 1,024x600 native resolution screen, Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and Windows XP. With a price of £455.

Obviously you wont be playing Crysis on this but Cnet did manage to play Unreal Tournament III.

Over the past few years WEP encryption has been on the decline thanks to the serious security flaws associated with it allowing people to crack the encryption within minutes. This has led to more and more people using WPA and WPA2 to secure their wireless networks.

Russian security company Elcomsoft have posted a press release detailing a new method to cracking the increasingly popular WPA and WPA2 stating:

With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.

The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation, you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.

Granted this is never likely to be an issue for home users, though it could cause issues for a company using Wi-Fi.

It is worth noting that the main cause of concern would be a company using a static key. Also keys should not use English words but an alphanumeric string.

Via: securityandthe.net

NVIDIA have finally enabled PhysX support via a free GeForce Power Pack download that contains a free full copy of Warmonger, three PhysX-enabled Unreal Tournament 3 maps, demos of Metal Knight Zero and the Nurien UT3-based social networking service, and a couple tech demos.

As you may know Nvidia bought Ageia and the PhysX engine in February 2008 effectively rendering the PhysX add-in card redundant. PhysX is currently the only available solution for physics hardware acceleration.

Download the GeForce Power Pack

Ok so the details are a bit thin on the ground and the pictures are a little uninspiring as the unit is not branded. However some basic details on the new 9800 GX2 have been leaked.

This new NVIDIA graphics card is essentially a 8800 GPU using the 65nm Fab Process and in SLI on a single card. This will make it similar to the old 7950 GX2 and may support Quad SLI.

The Geforce 9800 GX2 will include:

1GB Frame Buffer

Two PCBs

Two 65nm GPUs

256 Stream Processors.

This information was from [H}enthusiast and they believe it to be trustworthy.

We previously announced that nVidia was about to launch the new 8800 GTS 512Mb after nVidia accidentally added it to there product page. As of today nVidia has officially launched the card. As with the new 8800 GT this card is this card is based on the G92 architecture which uses a 65nm fabrication process.

nVidia has been making a bit of a mess with its naming conventions as the performance of each set of cards can vary wildly. The 8800 GTS is possibly the main suspect, there are currently 3 varieties out already. 2 using 96 stream processors with 320 and 640 MB respectively and 1 with 112 stream processors with 640 MB. The 96 Stream processor 8800 GTS had 1600MHz (effective) memory clock with 64GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The new 8800 GTS which uses 256-bit memory interface, hence 512MB, uses a 1940MHz (effective) memory clock with a memory bandwidth of 62.08GB/sec.

The old 8800 GTS had 6 shader clusters each featuring 16 stream processors, 4 texture address units and 8 texture filtering units adding up to 96 stream processors, 24 texture units for addressing and 48 for filtering.

The new 8800 GTS has 8 shaders, 16 stream processors, and 8 units for both texture addressing and texture filtering. This results in more shader and texturing power than the 8800 Ultra. Putting it simply the card is quite a bit cheaper than a 8800 Ultra but should manage to compete in terms of performance (with memory bandwidth limiting performance slightly).

Bit Tech have had chance to do a review of some of the new units with some excellent results. If you are really interested in the performance of these cards I would recommend you read their review.

Some of the main findings from the review included that the card had less power usage than the 8800 GTS 320MB while idle and slight higher under load. This is mainly due to the new 65nm process.

Overall the performance was very similar to the GeForce 8800 GTX while managing to be quite a bit cheaper than the GTX. The GTS should retail for about £220 inc VAT with the GTX being around the £280 mark.

If you are using a large monitor 1920x1200+ and your budget handles it, it is still recommended to use the 8800 Gtx or Ultra due to their increased memory bandwidth.

It quite a good week if you are a PC Gamer. As of yesterday (29/10/07) Nvidia has started shipping its revised GeForce 8800 GT based on the new G92 architecture that uses the 65nm fabrication process, as opposed to the G80 architecture(90nm). The GeForce 8800 GT is designed to be a midrange card costing between $200 and $250 but with the new architecture they have managed to produce a card somewhere between the 2 high end cards, the 8800 GTS and GTX. Read the rest of this entry »