X-bit labs

Friday, September 9, 2005

Get GeForce 7800 GTX – Help Katrina Victims. EVGA’s Way to Overcome Katrina

Nations worldwide are trying to do their best to help those in need after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the USA. While different countries are sending equipment, people and money, numerous technology companies have their own way of showing the concern: some link Red Cross on their web-sites, others are trying to collect money themselves.

EVGA has put up one of its graphics cards for an auction at eBay web-site. In order to persuade people even more, the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card comes with an autograph by Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA President and CEO.

“In our efforts to support those affected by Hurricane Katrina, EVGA is donating 100% of the proceeds from this auction to the American Red Cross. In addition, EVGA will double the final auction amount and add to the total donation,” explains Joe Darwin, EVGA Director of Technical Marketing.

The highest bid set at press-time is $860 and the auction lasts till September 17, 2005.

• eBay: EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX - Hurricane Relief Auction.
• Red Cross.

Benefits from Additional Laptop Memory Investigated. Does Additional Memory Bring Performance Benefits to Mobiles?

TweakTown has posted an article about notebook memory upgrade performance benefits. The investigation was carried out on Dell Inspiron XPS2, a desktop replacement laptop that comes equipped with an Intel Pentium M 2.00GHz, 512MB of dual channel PC2-4200 memory, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra graphics chip as well as 17” Ultra Sharp wide screen LCD display.

In standard package the Dell Inspiron XPS2 is supplied with two 256MB memory modules. The author replaced them with a pair of 1024MB (1GB) memory modules. Quite naturally, the benchmarks results showed an increase in performance level in some test applications.

“Besides gaming, performance improved a lot by increasing the amount of memory. Windows boot times improved by about half, programs such as Paint Shop Pro 9 loaded much quicker and processed things much better. Windows operated much more smoothly when multi-taking – that is running several Firefox windows, streaming a local radio station in WMP, checking e-mail, several IM clients operating and copying files. Try the above with only 512MB and the notebook struggles to handle all the tasks at once. It does them all at once but it’s not a very nice experience. Overall by adding a total of 2GB memory to the XPS2 improved the notebook to what I first expected when buying it – a dream system which is much quicker than my old desktop system. Take the strain off the hard drive and add more memory and you’re in business,” concludes TweakTown.

• TweakTown: Benefits of Upgrading Notebook Memory.