Lowe's

AMD's $109 3D card focuses on low-cost gaming

With a new 40-nanometer manufacturing process behind it, AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 4770 3D graphics chip this morning. Available now on 3D cards starting at $109 (before a $10 online rebate), the Radeon HD 4770 is the first 3D chip built on the 40-nanometer process, which allows for faster, more power-efficient hardware than AMD's previous 55nm chips.

The various enthusiast review sites found the 512MB Radeon HD 4770 fast enough to play most current games at lower resolutions and image quality settings. Think 1,680 x 1,050 or lower and with little-to-no anti-aliasing. The Radeon HD … Read more

The 404 310: Where BOL wishes it was The 404

There's been a lot of tension between Buzz Out Loud and The 404 for the last couple of months, but today, it's all on! We're sick and tired of the "Bore Out Loud" stealing our women (*ahem* Natali Del Conte) and our joke show titles. We've never been as crass as to have "urine" in one of our show titles. We got pretty bad, though, with having "tickling the Bonch." But we really did tickle CNET editor Bonnie Cha that day.

It's official! We. Are. The. Four. Oh. Four: High-tech, low-brow. That's right. That's the winner to our tagline contest. Also, here are the winners to our Justin Yu photo caption contest (in order) for a copy of Wheelman for the Xbox 360:

What, the Hubble Telescope is down?! Don't worry, just tell me what you wanna look at. The 404's Justin Yu was taken into custody shortly after molesting a lumberjack, a 90-year-old woman, and robbing a Radioshack in Chinatown last evening. Luckily, there was no evidence of d*cktopping at any of these crime scenes. All the single printers, all the single printers!

In today's episode, we've got proof that gamers who play action-oriented video games have better vision than non-gamers. A man dies after trying to get healthier with the Wii Fit. Chinese people are spying on your pr0n collection and the NSA. Let's hope the Conflicker doesn't end the Interweb before they find too much dirt. The Pirate Bay joins Facebook. And finally, Encarta dies a slow, painful death after being stabbed by Wikipedia.

EPISODE 310 Download today's podcast |  Subscribe in iTunes |  Subscribe in RSS… Read more

That $20 (or $10, or $30) Indian laptop

There has been much vaunting on the Interweb these past couple of days concerning India's "$20 laptop." Or is it $10, or $30? In fact, the number of putative prices for the "Sakshat" device (which apparently means "before your eyes") comfortably exceeds the number of hard facts that have emerged.

For a start, it doesn't appear to be a laptop at all, if the picture relayed by Gizmodo Wednesday is anything to go by. Instead, it seems to be a small (10 inches by 5 inches) "storage device" with a … Read more

Venture firm picks up Transmeta chip patents

Updated at 10:45 p.m. PST with additional information about Intellectual Ventures

Intellectual Ventures has acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta, an erstwhile supplier of low-power Intel-compatible x86 processors.

Intellectual Venture Funding, an affiliate of Intellectual Ventures, has picked up 140 U.S. patents and additional pending patent applications owned by Transmeta, which was acquired by privately held Novafora in November of last year.

The Transmeta technology will be used "through two distinct routes," according to an Intellectual Ventures' statement. Novafora will improve its own proprietary designs by using some of the technologies invented by Transmeta. And … Read more

In the land of far-reaching layoffs, the budget desktop is king

If you find yourself running low on cash but still need a desktop computer for your home or office, the Dell Inspiron "S" series will fit the bill. We recently took a close look at the Dell Inspiron I530S-119B, a system that retains the "S" series' slimline chassis and a baseline set of components for a very affordable price tag. For around $500, you get a 2.5GHz Intel Pentium dual processor, a 128MB Intel graphics card integrated with the motherboard, a 500GB hard drive, and 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium.

We put the Inspiron I530-119B … Read more

OLPC slashes workforce in half, cuts salaries

The One Laptop Per Child project announced Wednesday that it is slashing its workforce by 50 percent, reducing salaries for the remaining staff, and restructuring its operations.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the group that aims to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries, announced the cuts in a company blog post:

Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While … Read more

The weekly Crave vodcast: All good things must come to an end

To all the Crave viewers:

Bonnie Cha and I would like to thank you for watching and hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did putting it together. But we're not going away!

CNET wants me to focus on some of my other projects, but we will work to try to bring something back down the road. Thanks again and please let us know what you'd like to see more of!

We appreciate everyone who wrote in and all the prizes will be sent out this week.

Click the video for a look back at our … Read more

For China, the financial crisis is an opportunity

I asked my colleagues in frog design's Shanghai studio about their perspective on the current economic downturn, and here's what they wrote back:

"The US may be the initiator of this round of global economic recession but it may not be the final payer. China's economy is about to suffer as well - and in more ways than one.

And yet, the people who have been around the longest know not to pay too much attention to one-direction comments. They know that the sufferers will always shout much louder than the beneficiaries. They also know that … Read more

Photos: Cracking open the 2GoPC

Low-cost laptops are pretty much the bare bones of what a user needs in a computer, so consider this an X-ray.

CNET sister site TechRepublic runs a regular series called "Cracking Open," in which it takes a look inside a variety of gadgets. Here's an excerpt of a photo gallery that takes apart the Classmate 2GoPC.

Click on the picture above for a full teardown of the low-cost portable based on Intel's Classmate PC reference design.