Their spokesperson has confirmed than an unnamed driver issue has plagued their latest graphics boards and caused the delay. AMD was said to have done a retest on the boards using a new driver that will boost its performance.

The company has not revealed the price of the R9 290.

Thermaltake’s original Level 10 chassis was a remarkable collaboration with BMW DesignWorks in which the companies fundamentally restructured the PC chassis into a series of isolated compartments suspended from a central load-bearing wall. It was stunning, cost $800, and wasn’t actually that practical to use. With the Level 10 GT, Thermaltake has taken the basic look of the Level 10, slapped it onto a more standard full-tower frame, and slashed $500 from the asking price. The end result isn’t quite as sleek as its progenitor from an aesthetic perspective, but far outstrips the original in ease of use and practicality, and is not without a certain sci-fi flair of its own.

At 11.1 inches wide by 23 inches high and 23.2 inches deep, and weighing 28 pounds empty, the Level 10 GT is a hefty case. The case’s frame and right-side panel are made of black-painted steel, and the right side has a ridge with a handle cribbed directly from the Level 10, although it’s not part of the central pillar as on the Level 10. The front panel is made of plastic and contains four mesh 5.25-inch optical bezels and one 3.5-inch external-drive bay. The optical drive bays are toolless, with the latching mechanisms on the right side of the bays.

The left-side panel is where the action is. The rear two-thirds comprise a hinged-door panel that locks with a barrel lock, featuring a 20cm color-shifting fan (with directional shutters like a car’s heating vents) on the bottom and a clear plastic window on top. The front third of the panel is devoted to drive trays: five slide-out plastic 3.5-inch trays (with 2.5-inch mounting holes, as well) mimic the solid-aluminum drive trays of the original Level 10, but feature hotswap SATA pass-throughs, prewired with a five-head SATA power cable.

The 20cm color-shift intake fan on the side panel is matched by another on the front panel, as well as a 20cm color-shift top exhaust fan (which can be replaced by a 240mm radiator) and a 12cm rear exhaust fan. All intake fans, as well as the PSU intake, feature slide-out dust filters.

The Level 10 GT includes two USB 2.0 ports and audio jacks on the front of the right pillar, with two USB 3.0 ports, fan controls, and one eSATA port above the optical bays.

The Level 10 GT features a much easier install process than its predecessor—almost on par with the Corsair 800D. Its motherboard tray includes eight rubber-grommeted cable-routing cutouts, plus a large CPU backplane cutout. It has eight PCI expansion slots and supports ATX, microATX, and E-ATX motherboards. The motherboard compartment is sufficiently spacious to make installation of even the bulkiest systems a breeze, and the case easily accommodates 12.2-inch GPUs.

Thanks to its plethora of fans and capacious motherboard compartment, the Level 10 GT’s thermal performance was the second-best of any case in this roundup, bested (only slightly) by the Silverstone TJ11, which retails at $600.

If you admired the original Level 10 but couldn’t stomach its asking price or performance compromises, you’ll find the Level 10 GT more to your liking. It’s less sleek and, well, design-y, but in every other aspect it’s the superior case.

Those who bought the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD prior to this announcement need not worry, as “OWC is also retroactively extending two additional years of warranty coverage to owners of the Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G who purchased their drive beginning mid April 2011 when it was offered with a three year warranty.”

The SSD, which promises up to 559MB/s sustained reads and 527MB/s writes, is available in 120GB SSD, 240GB and 480GB capacities priced at $297.99, $569.99 and $1279.99, respectively.

“We’re very pleased to offer the industry’s longest warranty coverage on the latest and fastest SSD data interface and make it retroactive on all purchases of our Extreme Pro 6G SSD,” said Larry O’Connor, founder and CEO, OWC. “By building OWC Mercury SSDs with the best components and engineering processes available, we can offer consumers the best pre and post purchase assurances for the ultimate in SSD ownership confidence.”

The screen uses LED backlighting for power efficiency and it supports multitouch capability. The machine comes loaded with some interesting multitouch apps. The processor under the hood is a dual-core Intel D510 at 1.66GHz. The computer has 3GB of DDRII RAM and a 320GB HDD. An integrated optical drive is included along with a memory card reader, four USB ports, and the OS is Windows Home Premium Standard.

The machine also has WiFi and Bluetooth for connectivity and an integrated 1.3MP webcam. The stand the screen has is very slim and can be tilted for comfort from 10-degrees to 55-degrees. The AIO supports full 1080p resolution and has both HDMI and VGA inputs. The email Hanspree sent around shows the price of the machine to be £349.99 with VAT, but the Hanspree website lists the machine at £399.99 including VAT.

There was a joint research performed at the Chungbuk National University in South Korea, where the team of scientists from South Korea, Japan and Britain was led by professor Choi Jung-bum. This team worked on the applications of the quantum effect to successfully create the world’s smallest transistor.
Smallest Transistor
A local researcher at the University said, “This transistor could be used to enhance the capabilities of mobile electronic devices”. So, even when we already have dual-core mobile processors with good processing capabilities, we can surely expect more!

Professor Choi Jung-bum said, “The quantum effect transistor, which is just 2 nanometers in size, can operate in regular room temperature and effectively changes the entire paradigm of such devices” (read: mobile devices)

No words regarding the mass production or the availability were mentioned.

NVIDIA demoed the new goodness on a Honeycomb slate with 1280 x 800 resolution and the frame rates remained smooth throughout. In order to emphasize the generational leap that we can expect with Kal-El, the company switched off two of the four cores momentarily, which plunged performance down to less than 10fps. That means the simulations we’re watching require a full quartet of processing cores on top of the 12-core GPU NVIDIA has in Kal-El. Mind-boggling stuff. Glow Ball will be available as a game on Android tablets once this crazy new chip makes its way into retail devices — which are still expected in the latter half of this year, August if everything goes perfectly to plan. One final note if you’re still feeling jaded: NVIDIA promises the production chip will be 25 to 30 percent faster than the one on display today. Full video demo follows after the break.

The slide recently appeared on the ZOL forums, and has a number of figures erased from it, including the clock speeds. This was apparently carried out in order to protect the anonymity of the person who leaked the slide.

However, the slide’s remaining information confirms that both the top-end Bulldozer chips, the FX-8130P and the FX-8110, will feature eight cores. According to the slide, the latter will apparently even have a TDP of just 95W, despite all the processing cores.

The slide also suggests that AMD’s new processors will come with a revised version of the TurboCore technology that enabled later Phenom X6 CPUs to dynamically boost their core speeds depending on the workload.

Some intrepid forum users have attempted to guess at the figures erased on the slide by looking at the remaining outlines of the numbers. We’d recommend taking these figures with an unhealthy measure of salt, but the current numbers being bandied around are a stock speed of 3.8GHz (4.2GHz with Turbo Core) for the top-of-the-line FX-8130P. This is followed by the FX-8110 at 3.6GHz (4GHz with Turbo Core).