Asus has launched a new cooler in the Square series, which has gotten the name Lion Square. The new cooler is something new because it got its own perceiver. The cooler has four heating pipes made of copper and a bottom made of copper covered in nickel. The outside of the heater is made of Aluminum. Asus says that the CPU temperature will go down with 30 percent if you use this cooler. That does however not tell me much, 30 percent of what?

The fan supports up to 180W so there should be possibilities for some over clocking of the CPU without burning it. Lion Aquare fits Intel’s Core2 Extreme, Core2 Quad and AMD Athlon 64 FX/X2 Dual-Core. Personally i doubt the performance of the fan, i have never seen a good fan from Asus but hey this might be the first one.
(Source Asus)

The chipset G31, G33 and 045GC are the first chipsets that will get more expensive after the massive earth quake disaster in Sichuan. Intel’s factory has not been harmed but the places around it took huge damages under the earthquake. These 3 chipsets stands for 45 percent of Intel’s chip sale so it does not suprise me that the prices for the chipsets goes up. The price for 945GC has usually been on $15 if you buy 1000 units, now the price is on $18-19. G31 was usually on $23 but is now on $25-27. For G33 we can see an increased price from $28 to $31. Even though the price has increased the maid board producers do not plan on increasing their prices, because they are afraid of loosing customers.

Previous on my blog i stated that Dell will stop producing their XPS machines and let Alienware take over the gaming market. This was however not true, the reason is beacause according to a report that showed XPS taking a lot of customers from Alienware. What is really going on is that Alienware will produce gaming machines like they always have done. Dell will however invest millions of dollars in Alienware.

The XPS series will still be produced by Dell but it won’t be a pure gaming machine anymore. I do not know much more about whats going to happen to the XPS series, but out from the M1330 laptop we clearly see that XPS does not only want to make gaming machines.

AMD’s coming graphic card, AMD Radeon 4800 has now been delayed. The card should have been released in May, but now AMD changed the release date to somewhere between 15th and 22th June. This means that the card will be out almost at the same time as Nvidia’s GT200. So far we can expect to see the models 4850, 4870 and 4870 X2. Radeon HD 4850 launches in first and the other cards are expected to come out in July. Radeon 4850 will come with 512 MB GDDR3 while the two other comes with 512 or 1024 GDDR5. When it comes to performance the 4870 will perform about same as the 3870 X2. AMD’s Unified Video Decoder comes now in second generation and has gotten the name UVD2. AMD is also working with something they calls Powerplay to reduce the effect usage of their graphic cards.

When it comes to pricing the cards will be about the same as the 3000 series when it was new.  Personally i think Radeon can finally beat Nvidia with this series. However because of the delay we just have to wait and see.

Dell’s XPS series has long been the companies game machines but after Alienware was bought up in 2006, there have been several of “cloned” products on the market. According to a new report the XPS series have taken a lot of customer from Alienware. Dell has however now decided to stop the sale of the XPS series and rather have Alienware rule the gaming market alone. Alienware focus mostly on high-end gaming machines which can play the most demanding 3D games today. A typical machine from Alienware will cost you $3000 or more but if you add a SLI function you must pay at least $5000. Do you think these machines are worth it? In my opinion i believe it is better to build the computers yourself.