SSDs.

The not necessarily brand new, but a subject worth covering.
ssd have had long enough now to come in capacities of normal hard drives, but unfortunately the prices associated with these are more than extortionate.
For a 1 terabyte ssd, the prices are in the thousands of dollars.
When you can get a 1 terabyte hard drive for around fifty.
Again, although i'm English i'm talking in dollars because that's where my audience seems to be.
Although the kind of ssd you need will ultimately come down to how you intend to use it.
If you're going to be using a ssd as a primary and your only drive then you'll need a drive with an equally good write speed as read speed (OCZ have good drives for this, 285mb/s read 275mb/s write. Although if you're only using the ssd as the operating system drive and then a larger spinpoint hard drive as the slave then you can negate a larger write speed for a greater read speed (Corsair C300s are perfect with 355mb/s read 75mb/s write).
PCI-E ssds are even faster, but the speed does come with a considerably larger price tag.
A 50gb PCI-E ssd will cost you $215, that is a serious amount of money for such a small amount of storage.
Even with 540mb/s read and 450mb/s write.

In summary, if you're willing to purchase a ssd for the prices which are around then go ahead.
My recommendation is get an operating system drive, like the Corsair C300, then just have a larger spinpoint drive, for instance the Samsung F3. This combination would cost $185 from newegg, that is good for the speed and capacity you would be getting out of it.

I'll see you all again, but goodbye for now.

Bulldozer? Sandy Bridge? ATI?

With the recent release of Sandy Bridge, Intel seem to have taken a leaf out of AMDs book.
These cpus are benchmarking much higher than the processors that Intel would usually sell for this price, for $320 you can purchase the i7-2600k. This benchmarks only slightly lower than the i7 970, which is almost three times the price.
In saying this AMD are going to try to regain some grounds with the introduction of Bulldozer, and Bobcat.
AMD are hoping that this will be the success that Opertron was against Intel in the server sector.
Again, as a blog i'm trying my best to be impartial so we'll just have to see.
I just hope that AMD sticks to its guns and continues to offer very effective processors.
Unfortunately with the recent problems AMD has had with its ATI graphics cards they are going to be trying hard to keep their market share and possibly increase it with the impending release of the GTX 560.
What is ATI going to do? They are going to be lowering the price of all 6XXX series graphics cards, and with an impending driver release for all of these to attract a serious amount of attention back to themselves (after the unfunctional drivers for newly released cars and the fan/component conflict which ended with having to sand down the corner inside so the fan would fit) but other than that we can only hope that ATI continues pushing forwards in its endless fight with nVidia.

For now I say goodbye, until next time.
Thank you for reading.