Lothar’s News Roundup

Like the other direct-sales marques I listed above, ORB Audio stands outside the main cluster of audio manufacturers, throwing rocks at the windows of the rest of the industry with their direct-sales business model that allows them to avoid many of the expenses that could otherwise drive up the price of their product. And, of course, the company abstains from placing enormous unnecessary markups on their products to make up the difference.

The Altec Lansing Bluetooth speakers allow owners to stream music wirelessly from their cell phones. Imagine coming home, pointing your cell phone at your Bluetooth speaker and voila, music starts playing. How about going to the beach and easily listening to music without having to lug around a heavy boom box. With the T515, all you need is your cell phone and the Bluetooth speaker system. Best of all, the T515 is small, lightweight and comes with a convenient carrying case.

Today VIA is back and with a huge improvement over old C3. VIA has put a new design down on the table in regards to its C7 based CPU. Learning that its not a good idea to cut FPU's down to almost nothing, VIA has upped the ante to include a much more powerful FPU than what was ever seen on the C3 series of CPU. Using the quad-pumped bus that even Intel still uses for Core 2 was also a very smart move. It allows the CPU to have a much higher bus speed, providing it more data in and out, and with memory speed increasing, the more speed you can get between the CPU and memory the better, especially since the CPU is as slow as it is.

"The Best of Blu-ray Vol. 1" and "The Best of HD DVD Vol. 1" will include: 'Lethal Weapon,' 'The Road Warrior,' 'Swordfish' and 'Training Day.'"The Best of Blu-ray Vol. 2' and 'The Best of HD DVD Vol. 2" will include: 'The Last Samurai,' 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Unforgiven.' Note that the fourth title in the Blu-ray set is 'The Fugitive,' while the HD DVD box includes 'Troy,' instead.

We know from testing that there is little performance difference between the 320 MB and 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS video cards. The GPU is exactly the same between both, same clock speeds, the only difference is the amount of RAM. With the performance of the 320 MB 8800 GTS being close to the 640 MB 8800 GTS, and prices being so low, we had to see how this compares to the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT which is more expensive.