Apple New iMac G5

Touted as "the world's thinnest desktop computer," the new iMac resembles athicker version of Apple's LCD Cinema Display series, with the entire computer,including optical drive and power supply, built into a single case two inchesdeep. The system comes in three models. The low-end machine, priced at $ 1,299,is based around a 17-inch LCD and 1.6GHz PowerPC G5 processor, and comes with a533MHz front-side bus, 256MB of DDR-RAM, and a slot-loaded CD-RW/DVD combodrive. The middle system, priced at $ 1,499, ups the speed of the processor to1.8GHz with a 600MHz front-side bus, and swaps the combo drive for a DVD-RWSuperDrive. Both models come with an 80GB Serial-ATA hard drive. At the top ofthe range comes a 20-inch version, identical to the midrange model other thanthe larger screen and a 160GB hard drive; it is priced at $ 1,899. Apple claimedthe iMac will begin shipping worldwide in mid-September.

ASUS Shrinks Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II

Without much fuss, ASUS slipped out a revision of its Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics card. The revision breaks away from the common board design between the HD 7950 and HD 7970 DirectCU II models, and uses newer, compact PCB and cooler. The revision could ready ASUS for future price cuts of the GPU.

The new board design will be applied to both the standard and TOP variants. Its most notable feature is the reduced length, which appears to be down by an inch, if not more. Its unclear if there are any casualties of this design change. The cooler appears to be just a compacted version of the original, that looks a little less rough on the edges. According to one source, the new cooler features denser aluminum fin stacks, and uses six heat pipes to transport heat, instead of five on the original design. A secondary heatsink runs the entire length of the obverse side of the PCB, drawing heat from memory, MOSFETs, and other hot ancillary components, and cools them under the air-flow of the main heatsink.

The display output configuration is also changed, with the revision featuring two dual-link DVI apart from one-each of HDMI 1.4a and standard-size DisplayPort 1.2; in comparison to the original featuring two mini-DisplayPorts, and just one dual-link DVI. Apart from the design changes mentioned, both the base and TOP models of the new HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics cards retain the clock speeds of the originals. The base model ships with 800 MHz core, 5.00 GHz (effective) memory; while the TOP model ships with 900 MHz core and 5.00 GHz (effective) memory.

The revised ASUS HD 7950 DirectCU II graphics cards will initially sell at the same prices as those of the originals, although its expected that the revisions will give ASUS a better cushion against falling prices.Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, the Radeon HD 7950 from AMD features 1,792 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 3 GB of memory, and support for the DirectX 11.1 API.

Analyst Downgrades NVIDIA; Claims no quot;Major Catalysts quot; until Second Half 2012

NVIDIAs recent enthusiasm over Tegra 3 wasnt met with as many design wins as the analysts expected, and the fact that 2011 came and went without Kepler didnt went unnoticed with the financial analyst community.

If you feel that NVIDIA stock is unjustifiedly low at "just" $16 mark, the fact is that there are financial analysts who will call the company out if they feel theyre underperforming. According to 111-year old Sterne Agee investment group, NVIDIA is doing just that - underdelivering. The analyst firm announced theyre removing NVDA from "Catalyst Driven Idea List", their in-house overview of progressive companies.

Vijay Rakesh and Mark Kelley, financial analysts with the group weighed heavily on NVIDIAs loss of Tegra 2 design wins and lack of major design wins for Tegra 3, as well as increased competition from AMD:

"We had put NVDA on our Catalyst Driven Idea list on January 3 ahead of anticipated catalysts at CES and Mobile World Congress (MWC). While there were some catalysts at CES with the quad-core Tegra 3 integrating Touch on its Ninja 5th core, CES also saw a Win8 Tablet prototype running an NVDA Tegra. While we believe there could be more catalysts with MWC February 27, we believe NVDA shares are fairly valued here. MWC catalysts could include Tegra 3 handsets with Icera baseband and some 7-10 tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

Overall PCs Continue to be Weak & New Tablet Ramps are Just Getting Announced - We believe near term PCs are seasonally weaker, and while HDD supply is improving, we believe PC demand continues to be weak. Also for NVDA, Tegra 2 into tablets is ramping down, and while the company could have new Tegra 3 design wins into tablets, we believe the production ramp on any new tablets in the April Q will not be as material.

Discrete GPU Competition -- With AMD ramping 28-nm Radeon HD7970 which delivers 5-30% better graphics performance than competitor GPUs on the market, paired with integrated APU Llano and INTCs Ivy Bridge-Haswell, we continue to believe the core discrete GPU market could have some structural challenges."

The question remains if this removal from the list and claim that the stock price is a bit too high for their internal PT (Price Target). You can read the full report here.

Athlon 64 X2 6400+ quot;Black Edition quot; Appears

Athlon 64 X2 6400+ "Black Edition" clocked at 3.2GHz has made its firstappearance in Japan according toImpress.Expect it to hit retail by 20th August with pricing is between US$ 220-248.