eTeknix Tech Review Of 2011

Quarter 3 – eTeknix Tech Review of 2011

July: The Thai floods send hard drive prices on the way to the roof while AMD hit back at Nvidia with the HD 6990M

In late July devastating floods struck Thailand killing hundreds, dealing immense amounts of property damage and importantly for the computer industry devastating many hard drive production facilities. The flood waters had only just finished receding in late December and consequently the huge blow inflicted to hard drive production sent prices through the roof towards the end of late 2011 with prices being on average 2 -4 times more expensive than before the price hikes. Although the impact of the Thai floods was not immediate the root of the price increase is in July 2011. AMD also hit back at Nvidia’s launch of the GTX 580M with its launch of the HD 6990M essentially equivalent to a HD 6870 desktop graphics card except in a smaller form factor and with lower power consumption of 100W (same as the GTX 580M and with roughly the same performance….about 2% slower in general).

August: HP announce the TouchPad cancellation whilst ASUS debut the monster MARS II graphics card

The TouchPad was perhaps the biggest fail of 2011 when it comes to the Tablet market. HP chucked themselves in at the deep end, mass producing cheap tablets with their own design of Operating System known as the WebOS on relatively low hardware specifications. Deployed in a market where the iPad reigned supreme for usability, style and practicality the TouchPad was doomed to failure from the start. HP cancelled it and cleared stock by initiating a clearance price of $99. Surely enough at that price stock was easily cleared within a week or so and it turns out that for $99 the TouchPad was actually a bargain, if you were lucky enough to get one then kudos to you. ASUS were also busy launching their mammoth Mars II 3GB dual GTX 580 graphics card, a limited edition beast that would set you back around £1200 for performance you could get by putting two 580s in SLI for around £700. However, with only 1000 ever made it certainly gives buyers some nice bragging rights.

September: Microsoft teased us with the Windows 8 developer preview whilst MSI and Gigabyte get their dirty linen out in public over PCI-E Gen3 motherboards

Windows 7 has been a huge success in relation to Windows Vista and Microsoft has been working hard to try and trump Windows 7. Windows 8 was released on a developer preview release and judging by what we have seen so far Windows 8 will be the most resource friendly operating system in recent times as well as having the unique advantage of supporting ARM architecture in addition to x86 processors (the “normal” type). MSI and Gigabyte were also at it for most of September calling Hoax at each others motherboard design proposals, MSI claimed that most of Gigabytes boards lacked PCI-E Gen 3 compliant parts to even support the new technology with exception to the G1 Sniper 2. Gigabyte responded in a rather lackluster fashion proving their boards support PCI-E Gen 3 8X (same as PCI-E 2.0 16X) and then that was the end of the matter.