6.20.2007
Integration Innovation - June Edition
Posted by Chris Morley

Hey folks, here’s another update on what’s going on with Velocity Micro products!

Radeon HD 2900 XT – Available in 512MB and 1GB Smoothness

ATI’s back in the game with their all new high performance DX10 video card. With a wildly different design from NVIDIA’s king of the roost G80, it’ll be interesting to see how the performance landscape pans out with DX10! Speaking of which, has anyone tried Call of Duty in DX10? Amazing. Check out the explosions and fog effects, as well as zoom into the grass as close as you can get – good stuff! Props also to Diamond for being a great partner...

Intel’s 3-series Grand Slam

There’s something comforting about Intel chipsets and motherboards. Remember the 440BX chipset? The 3-series chipsets support next-gen Intel processors and DDR3 memory down the road.

Intel’s refreshed their 965 line with a great offering of features and performance with the new 3-series lineup which includes, for now, the G33 and P35 chipset. Replacing the G965 and P965 respectively, the boards they have built around these chips are incredibly feature rich! My personal favorite, the P35 Dragontail Peak, adds 2 more SATA ports over the P965, as well as RAID, S/PDIF audio, and Dolby Home Studio certification. It’s a Media Series board, so of course it’s VIIV enabled. All of this for about the same price as the P965 Lemont board! You’ll find this board as the backbone of the ProMagix HD, ProMagix PCX, and the ProSonix Digital Studio. Expect it to refresh our CineMagix Grand Theater in the next week or so.

Next up are our G33 offerings, the G33 Frostburg and G33 Tower lake. These boards feature Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 with Clear Video Technology to deliver exceptional 2D visual quality and horsepower for Vista Aero Glass 3D GUI. The G33 Frostburg can be found in the Vector GX. The G33 Tower Lake, which is chock full of features like DVI and VGA, 7.1 Surround Sound, and RAID, is the backbone of the Vector PCX Digital Media PC (one of our best high performance digital media PCs in terms of features and value, IMHO) and the ProSonix DAW.

DDR2-800 or Bust!

Say goodbye to DDR2-667, all of our systems have been upgraded standard with Corsair DDR2-800 memory. And if you want even better performance, upgrade to Corsair Dominator memory with Dual-path Heat eXchange technology for faster performance and cooler operation.

Hello Hitachi

As many of you have noticed, we’ve mostly finished transitioning all of our desktops to Hitachi hard drives. Hitachi’s performance and value fits right in with our philosophy at Velocity Micro, and they’re here for the long haul, too, providing us with the support we need to ensure we’re delivering quality products to our customers. We’re proud to have Hitachi as a technology partner.

The Pentium is dead! All hail the Pentium!

In case you’re wondering if we’ve gotten a case of nostalgia in offering Pentium Dual Core technology, you’re in for a surprise. The all new Pentium Dual Core is based on Core 2 technology. While offering less L2 cache and a slower FSB than its big brothers, there’s no denying that the performance and price have filled a much needed gap in Intel’s processor lineup. So say goodbye to the venerable NetBurst architecture, and welcome a new value leader! You can find this processor as the base configuration for the Vector GX.

Play Movie 1.5 is coming!

What’s that? It’s Cyberlink’s plug-in for Media Center that allows seemless playback of Blu-ray AND HD-DVD media! It will replace our PlayBD plug-in that only does Blu-ray. And to boot, it does hook into NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD and ATI’s AVIVO technology to enhance visual quality and reduce CPU overhead. Here’s the real kicker – it also plays DVDs and it’s noticeably better in image quality than Microsoft’s own MPEG2 decoder! So even if you’re not interested in Blu-ray or HD-DVD; if you’re a discerning A/V enthusiast, Play Movie 1.5 is the bee’s knees.

[6.20.2007 @ 2:29 PM]  [Digg it]