Seagate’s latest batch of drives, the ironically titled Free Agent series are not compatible with the Open Source operating system Linux. The problem is to do with the power-saving systems of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS. The NTFS is only a small problem to Linux users who have a kernel with NTFS writing enabled or can work mkfs. But the “power saving” timer is a real problem. There are a few work-arounds but Seagate Tech Support says they do not know what they are (how about consulting Maxtor guys LOL). All in all it’s confirmed that their latest drives do not support Linux.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 has a clock-lock at 862MHz for the GPU. The RV670 GPU has multiple power phases internally, and PowerPlay is activated all the time. When you overclock the GPU, the PLL VCO divider will over volt the card just enough to cause a lockdown. The upgraded video BIOS available here will allow you to unlock the full potential of the card. You could tinker with the card to clock the RV670 chip all the way to 900MHz, massive 123MHz faster than the default clock.

AMD Phenom 9700 (2.4 GHz) launch has been cancelled and only 9500 and 9600 will be available for now. Some technical problem has been found in 9700 which causes system to freeze at 100% load on both the cores. The Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) errata is an L3 protocol issue causing a system hang when running certain client workload applications independent of platform. AMD is immediately introducing updated BIOS which will correct the TLB errata.

Transcend rolled out its largest 16GB Class 6 SDHC card in global market, which is based on the new generation of SD cards (SD 2.0) that support the FAT32 file system format.

Fully Class 6 compliant, the card features fast data transfer speed of 6MB/s and satisfies the high-capacity demands of today’s new SDHC devices such as high-end digital cameras or digital camcorders. The massive 16GB memory capacity is enough to store over 8,000 high-resolution 7M JPG photos, thousands of video clips, or even complete full-length high quality movies. Other features included ECC (Error Correcting Code) to automatically detect and correct errors during data transfer, preventing data corruption and missing files.

Intel launched its long-awaited new ‘Penryn’ line of power-efficient microprocessors, designed to deliver better graphics and application performance as well as virtualization capabilities. The processors are the first to use high-k metal-gate transistors, which makes them faster and less leaky compared with earlier processors that have silicon gates. The processor is lead free and by next year Intel is planning to produce chips that are halogen free too, making them more environmentally friendly. Penryn processors jump to higher clock rates and feature cache and design improvements that boost the processors’ performance compared with earlier 65-nm processors, which should attract the interest of business workstation users and gamers looking for improved system and media performance.

Price of DDR2 RAM goes down again. They are getting cheaper day by day. This big drop in price is due to lower cost of manufacturing the memory chip. Also using denser 1 Gbit dies, companies can now manufacture 2 GB per standard unbuffered desktop DIMM, or 4 GB per dual channel kit. This reduces the number of die required to make larger sized RAM. Looks like its time to add more RAM to my system!