VIA Technologies Inc., a global manufacturer of power-efficient processor platforms, has recently announced the release of its peculiar motherboard, codenamed VAB-800. The major peculiarity of these motherboards is that they will be delivered in two variants: with chips of VIA personal production, WonderMedia (800 MHz), and with Freescale ARM Cortex-A8 1 GHz chips. The volume capacities of DDR3 memory in either variant will equal to 1 GB. VAB-800 is developed in piro-ITX form-factor but is also compatible with blocks of ATX form-factor.



Motherboard VAB-800 accommodates flash-memory of eMMC type with the integrated SATA 3 Gbit/sec sockets. The total volume capacity of flash-memory equals to 64 GB. This model can boast a large number of internal sockets, including a couple of RS-232, two LVDS (to enable the connection with the up-to-date monitors), SATA, JTAG, SDIO, RTC, and a slot for the activation of the external power supply.


The manufacturer has taken care of the …

Xilence Company has introduced its first hull with sizetype Mini-ITX – it got the name Torino (or the original codename — GEH-XP-TORINO). The manufacturer claims that the new product, despite its compact size, expressed by the dimentions 348 x 214 x 219 mm, is well suited for construction of «a full-fledged handheld gaming PC.»



Externally Xilence Torino made in the form of its older brothers, Interceptor and Interceptor Pro, and basic material of production is 0.8 mm thick steel. The hull is equipped with three external bays (one 5.25-inch size and two 2.5 inch size) and four internal (all sizes 3.5 inches). On the front panel there are two ports USB 3.0 display and two 3.5 mm jacks for headphones and microphone.


The rear panel of Xilence Torino has two bays for expansion cards. The installation of video cards up to 270 mm is also supported. According to reports of manufacturer, they fulfilled a goal of improving the ventilation of 3D-cards, which have specially …

The middle-end lineup of HIS’ proprietary graphics cards has been refilled with a new small-sized model: the R9 270 iCooler Boost Clock 2GB GDDR5. It features 190x125x45 mm dimensions and maintains an etalon clock frequency template. Hence, its price won’t differ too much from the recommended one. The new-comer boasts a bright design with a blue PCB and light-blue fan blades. Despite the appurtenance to the middle-end segment, the card is able to demonstrate quite an appropriate performance.



As seen from the codename, HIS R9 270 iCooler Boost Clock 2GB GDDR5 is equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 video memory. The latter employs 256-bit interface and runs at 1400 MHz (nominal)/5600 MHz (effective) frequency. The heart of the card is AMD Radeon R9 270 GPU (28 nm, Curacao Pro architecture) with 1280 stream processors, 80 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. Its basic clock frequency makes up 900 MHz, while on overclocking this index rises to 925 MHZ.


The connection with PC displays might be …