ASUS M2A-VM audio problems

It's been a long day. I awoke at 9am to find my radio station suffering from major audio glitches on air.
Rather peculiar as everything was fine last night. 4:29pm and I've given up for now and had to email PP to get assistance (they built the PC).

The audio seems to be stuttering with disk access/cpu usage (particuarly noticed if you defrag the drive, with the audio playing at, what seems to be, half speed).

Running the station via winamp for several hours has been a nightmare, something that I had to do to be able to troubleshoot (abeit unsuccessfully). Many reboots, reinstallations of soundcard drivers and windows updates has had me resort to running the PC on the PCI Audigy card. Whilst still the occasional 'stutter' it means The Cheese is back on air and streaming once again (as long as I keep background tasks to a minimum).

Ah technology! Wonderful when it works... a pain in the a$$ when it breaks!

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/ZollyMonsta/4581

isoHunt Receives 2 Quad Cores from AMD

isoHunt is one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the net. Although it's not a tracker like The Pirate Bay, it receives a similar amount of traffic. isoHunt is an efficient indexing site, which has enabled it become on par with the popularity of The Pirate Bay.

With the massive traffic load experienced by the Canadian based indexing site, it appears that AMD has found the perfect test site for their new Opteron 2352 quad core processors. To test out their new products, AMD gave isoHunt 2 of these powerhouse processors, reports the blog “Sunny Talks Tech”. The isoHunt administration appear thrilled so far.

"I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs," a forum administrator said. "These CPUs have been installed in our primary database server (as of this afternoon) and we'll definitely be following up in the near future with our impressions of these particular CPUs. (Although I'll admit that we ran all of our web traffic for about 20 minutes earlier today on those CPUs without any issue, so they're certainly powerhouses)."

As recalled by P2P-Blog, the Opteron 2352 derives from the troublesome 2350 series, which experienced a nasty bug last September, causing a delay in production and mass marketing.

Gary Fung's isoHunt is currently being pursued with legal action by the MPAA. AMD's choice to endorse isoHunt is an intriguing one. The Operon 2352 is a monolith of CPU design. With 4 cores running at 2.1 GHz and 2 megabytes of level 2 cache, not only will isoHunt thank AMD, but the entire population of isoHunt will too.

http://www.slyck.com/story1654_isoHunt_Receives_2_Quad_Cores_from_AMD

Asus plan on releasing an entire family of Eee products

Asus knows a good thing when it sees it, so they're totally going to cash in on the success of the Eee PC by releasing a series of other products that fall under the Eee banner.

Asustek has announced that in addition to the mini notebook that has taken the world by storm, they also plan on releasing the E-DT (desktop computer), E-TV, and E-Monitor.

Presumably, this entire family of Eee products will be just as easy to learn, easy to work, and easy to play as their subnotebook counterpart. The main selling point for the Eee-branded desktop computer, television, and monitor will still be the low cost and high build quality associated with the Eee PC.

The E-DT desktop PC will not come bundled with a monitor, but it will come powered by an inexpensive Intel Celeron processor. Later generations may take on Intel's Shelton'08 platform with Diamondville processors and 945GC chipset. Asus hopes to push pricing down to the $199 mark with the initial unveiling coming at CeBIT 2008.

The E-Monitor won't be just an LCD screen, instead taking on the all-in-one market currently occupied by devices like the Apple iMac and Dell XPS One. Features include a built-in TV tuner and a 19-21 inch display. Pricing is expected to be about $500 with the launch coming in September.

The E-TV will be a 42-inch LCD TV with integrated Linux-based PC functionality. They hope to keep pricing around the $1200 mark, hitting the market this September.


http://www.htlounge.net/articles/5194/1/Asus-plan-on-releasing-an-entire-family-of-Eee-products

Tags: Asus, TV, LCD, EEEPC

Asus announces the DVD-E818A2/A2T drive

A new exciting drive has been announced today by Asus: the DVD-E818A2/A2T burner. This series of optical drives is the world’s first ODD that supports 5X DVD-RW DL.

The ASUS DVD-E818A2/A2T optical drives features also fast data transfer speeds with DVD-ROM max data transfer rates of 24930 KB/s (18X), and CD-ROM max data transfer rates of 7200 KB/s (48X). Access times are also shortened with fast random access times for DVD access at 105 ms versus typical 95 ms CD access times.

This drive is claimed also to be quiet and provided with mechanisms to reduce vibrations (a consequence of high speed performance).

The complete specifications of this new drive are available at Asus.

http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/Asus-announces-the-DVD-E818A2_A2T-drive.html

Tags: ASUS, DVD Drive

Latest Asus Motherboard unveiled

Global Brand Pvt. Ltd. (GBPL), one of the leading IT solution providers in Bangladesh, recently unveiled the P5KPL-VM model of ASUS motherboard in the local market.

The P5KPL-VM mainboard, having the Intel G31 chipset inside supports Intel Socket 775 Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo, Pentium D, Pentium 4 and Celeron Processors, says a press release.

It also features 1066(OC)/800/667MHz FSB, PCI Express x16, Serial ATA interface, high performance integrated graphics engine, dual-channel DDR2 1066(OC)/800/667 memory, and HD Audio CODEC.

Users can experience faster graphics performance and higher video quality with this motherboard. It also supports Intel next generation 45nm Multi-Core CPU. It is recommended for multi-tasking, multi-media and gaming environments. The motherboard has a price-tag of Taka 6,500.

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=23511

Tags: Asus, Motherboard

ASUS Silent Knight, Triton 77, & Silent Square EVO

We have three new heatpipe heatsink-fan combos from ASUS here today to put our brand new test bed through its paces. How well did the Silent Knight, Triton 77 and Silent Square EVO perform? Hit the link for all the details. This quote ought to get you started:

We have three of their newest heat sinks ready to run the gauntlet. To say these heat sinks are unique looking would be an understatement, as you will see on the following pages. The ASUS Triton 77, Silent Square EVO, and Silent Knight II are ASUS' answer to the need for enthusiast class heat sinks. To say they have an uphill battle in front of them would be an understatement considering the competition in the cooler industry. But when you realize the company behind these products is ASUS, the playing field seems to get a bit more level.