Don't Worry, These Cactuar Earrings Won't Do 1,000 Damage

Those of you playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn might want to keep an eye out on your inbox on September 20th through 21st, when Square Enix will be holding a special Tokyo Game Show event that could net you and everyone on your server a pair of exclusive Cactuar earrings.

The “Letter from the Producer Live” event will have two sessions; the first on September 20 at 8 pm PDT (11 pm EST) and the second on the following day at 8:15 pm PDT (11:15 pm EST,) where producer and director Naoki Yoshida will be sharing the latest on the world of Eorzea, along with a Q&A session with fans.

The event can be viewed through Square Enix’s official stream, and alternatively through NicoNico Live (Day 1 and Day 2)

During the event, they’ll also be having a “Titan Challenge,” where Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn players attending the game show will team up in parties of eight to challenge the mighty Lord of Crags within a certain time limit for a chance to win T-shirts.

Additionally, Square Enix will also be having a “Cactuar Lottery” that will be giving all players from a randomly chosen world a pair of exclusive Cactuar earrings for each time the primal beast Titan is defeated.

Read more stories about Final Fantasy XIV & PC & PlayStation 3 & PlayStation 4 on Siliconera.

Visiontek XTASY Radeon X800 Pro

Hartford Computer Group, supplier of VisionTek PC graphics cards, Argusdigital cameras, and INKE inkjet refill systems, today announced the immediateavailability of its VisionTek XTASY RADEON X800 PRO graphics accelerator poweredby the world’s fastest visual processor, ATI’s RADEON™ X800.

VisionTek’s new card is expected to be available within days from CircuitCity, CompUSA, Fry’s Electronics, Micro Center, and other outlets for VisionTekproducts. “ATI has enabled us to reach the larger gaming community who like tobuy from a wider range of national chains, on-line resellers, and localdealers,” related Michael Innes, director of sales for Hartford Computer Group.“We have a large base of loyal gamers and we wanted to give them a shot at thenewest technology as soon as it was available.”

The VisionTek XTASY RADEON X800 PRO is based on ATI’s RADEON™ X800 visualprocessing unit (VPU). The X800 PRO’s incredible performance is driven by amassively parallel pixel processing engine and six vertex pipes. VisionTek’s newcard features 256MB of next-generation, high speed DDR-3 graphics memory runningat 900MHz, a graphics core clock speed of 475MHz, and multiple video outputoptions including VGA, DVI-I, S-video, and dual monitor support. The card has asuggested retail price of $ 399.99 and is backed by VisionTek’s toll-freetechnical support and lifetime warranty.

VisionTek is a Premium Retail Partner for ATI in North America and has beenselling ATI based graphics products exclusively since February of 2003. "VisionTekhas recorded solid market share gains over the past year and they’ve really puttogether a great product offering," commented Rick Bergman, senior vicepresident marketing and general manager, desktop, ATI Technologies, Inc. "We areexcited to see our new processors matched with a supplier that has such a strongcommitment to providing outstanding service to North American customers."

The launch of VisionTek’s latest offering also marks the debut of aredesigned retail package that brings a fresh look and delivers more informationand excitement to retail shelves. “Here we are in the most innovative segment ofthe PC industry and all of the packaging for 3D graphics cards looks the same,”stated Jeff Hoeft, product manager for graphics at Hartford. “We were the firstto introduce a see-through plastic package and with our newest package designwe’ll have something that’s totally different from everybody else again.”

The $35 Raspberry Pi computer launches, crashes servers due to demand

If you thought the Apple fan boys (and girls) were silly for queuing up ahead of new product launches, then the craziness going on around the Raspberry Pi launch would have you flabbergasted. Not only has the $35 computer managed to crash the servers of both the retail partners, but people got up at daybreak to get their orders in as soon as the order pages went live.

Its amazing how much attention the Raspberry Pi has been getting in the media, with coverage on the television news, all just because its a low cost computer targeting the educational market. That said, the buyers at launch arent schools, as the first batch of 10,000 units is limited to one order per customer and this this case its mostly hardware enthusiasts and various companies trying to get their hands on it.

For the time being the availability is limited to only the more expensive of the two models that the Raspberry Pi foundation will be offering and thats only if youre lucky enough to place an order with one of its two distribution partners, RS Components or Premier Farnell. However, the foundation is moving over to a licensed manufacturing model where RS and Farnell will take over the manufacturing and this should hopefully alleviate some pressure from the foundation as well as get product out in the market.

The idea behind the Raspberry Pi was to create an affordable computer for schools that would allow kids to learn the basics of programming and general computer “hacking”. Its a fairly basic system that comes with a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC based on an ARM11 processor that operates at 700MHz paired up with Broadcoms VideoCore IV GPU and 256MB of RAM. Theres no on board storage, but an SD card slot is present. The cheaper – yet un-launched – $25 model has a single USB 2.0 port whereas the more expensive $35 model has two USB 2.0 ports and an Ethernet port with both models sporting an HDMI port, an composite video RCA connector, a 3.5mm audio jack and various other low-level interfaces and a micro USB port for power.

The Raspberry Pi will run various flavours of Linux and the foundation has been working closely with Fedora and Debian among others to create special versions of the OS that can run on the fairly low specced system. Various pre-compiled images will be downloadable from the foundation, of which some had already appeared ahead of the hardware launch and were sure more are to come.

As to how popular the Raspberry Pi will be with students is anyones guess as the moment, but at least the foundation has found itself a big enough following with the enthusiast market to make a splash in the general media which will hopefully help them to reach into the educational institutions. The question is if the teachers will be able to integrate something as complex as the Raspberry Pi into their lessons, know how poor some programing teachers are at teaching programming, with yours truly having spent some time studying programming many years ago. Either which way, we do condone what the Raspberry Pi foundation is trying to achieve, as its not an easy task to get students interested in programming.

Source: The Raspberry Pi foundation

Sony Slashes Price Of PSP Go Handheld Game Console

Sony will be cutting the price of its PSP Go by 37%, which is a great discount for those who are looking to get the portable handheld game console this festive season. The price cut is alsoto boost the sales of the PSP Go which has been rather disappointing in the past months.

According to news sources, the new pricing of the PSP Go willbeat US$199 as compared to the launch price of US$249. In Japan, the pricing is adjusted to 16,800 yen, which is around US$208. Well, considering the US dollars is falling and the Japanese yen is still relatively strong, itmay beworthwhile to order from US if you intend to buy online.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Rumour AMD Radeon HD 6790 releasing March 31st

The Radeon HD 6790 will be taking on the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, potentially replacing the now ancient HD 5770. Considering the GTX 550 Ti only barely edged out the HD 5770 on average, a tweaked and overclocked Juniper chip was much rumoured. However, the Radeon HD 6790 is said to be a Barts card, a heavily crippled and underclocked version of the HD 6850. If that is so, perhaps a HD 6830 nomenclature will be more accurate?

Very little else is known about the HD 6790, except the price - $130. With performance almost certainly well ahead of the GTX 550 Ti, and such an aggressive pricing, the HD 6790 may turn out to be an excellent value. If this is true, NVIDIA will be forced to sharply cut GTX 550 Ti prices in order to compete.

Source: DonanimHaber

ZTE announces PF200 and N910 LTE Android 4 handsets

Jumping the gun a bit on MWC, ZTE has just announced two new handsets both featuring the latest version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich along with LTE connectivity. The PF200 and N910 will be ZTEs headliners at the show in Barcelona next week. Details are still a bit sketchy, but well gather up what we can from ZTEs announcement until all is revealed toward the end of the month.

The PF200 is the higher specced of the two models with its 4.3-inch (950 x 540) qHD capacitive touchscreen, 1.5GHz (dual-core?) processor, 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, DLNA support, Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, GPS, LTE, mobile high-definition link (MHL) and near field communications (NFC).

The "mid-range" N910 has a 1.2GHz chip and a 5MP shooter on the rear with autofocus and flash. It uses a WVGA (800 x 480) touchscreen of unknown size and includes DLNA technology, LTE connectivity, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth. It must also be noted that ZTEs N910 is a CDMA-only smartphone which will inevitably affect its global availability.

We shall be back with more info in the coming days to clear up the specs a bit more and talk about where, when and at what prices ZTEs PF200 and N910 handsets will launch at.

Sony Ericsson going dual core with Xperia duo

Dual core smartphones are starting to gain more and more traction and so far weve seen devices from pretty much all of Googles Android partners with one major exception being Sony Ericsson. Well, it seems like the company is getting close to announcing the Xperia duo which is expected to be the companys first dual core smartphone and a picture of what is believed to be the upcoming handset has now made an appearance on the web.

Beyond having a as yet unknown dual core CPU the Xperia duo is expected to sport a larger screen, a 4.5-inch unit has been suggested and judging by the picture it reaches almost from edge to edge of the handset. Can we hope for a qHD 960x540 display, or is this trying to push our luck too far?

The processor is likely to once again be from Qualcomm and its very possible that itll be the MSM8260, but once again, this is purely based on speculation and Sony Ericssons current models. That said, we would go out on a limb here and say that Sony Ericsson might be eyeing ST-Ericssons Novathor U9500, but the problem here would be the different graphics solution used, something were not sure if Sony Ericsson would take a chance on.

If the picture of the handset is the real deal, then we can expect a front facing camera on the Xperia duo (if that really is the name of the final handset), something the Xperia arc is missing. Otherwise the design of the handset is similar to the Xperia arc, albeit a lot less angular as all the corners are now rounded. Hopefully it wont take too long until we find out what Sony Ericsson is up to, as the company desperately needs a dual core handset to keep up with the competition, at least as far as headline features are concerned.

Source: Xperiablog