News Bits: New voluntary battery recalls, New ATI graphics start shipping

New voluntary battery recalls announced

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission today announced a voluntary battery recall program in cooperation with Dell, HP, and Toshiba. There are a total of 65,000 Li-ion batteries being recalled, 35,000 of which are in the U.S.

The Sony-made battery cells can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers. Consumers who have a notebook with an affected battery should remove the battery from their computer immediately and contact their manufacturer. Click to the link to see if your notebook is affected. Dell computers compromise 15,000 of the batteries.

HP Battery Recall Website
Dell Battery Recall Website
Toshiba Battery Recall Website
Special thanks to forum member dtwn83 for submitting this bit

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series shipping to vendors

AMD's website reveals that it is shipping next-generation ATI Radeon HD 4000 series products to notebook vendors. The cards include the Mobility Radeon HD . . .

• 4650
• 4850
• 4850 X2
• 4870

Surprisingly, the Mobility Radeon HD 3870 was not picked up by anyone but OCZ in its Whitebook gaming notebook. It is not known at this time which manufacturers will be using the cards.

Special thanks to forum member 2.0 for submitting this bit

Centrino 2 fails to boost market share

Despite the launch of Intel's new Centrino 2 platform, the company's marketshare has only increased ever so slightly. iSuppli says that Intel's processor sales were only up a third of a point to 80.4 percent, and 1.7 percent on year.

Full Story (ChannelRegister.co.uk)

 

Alright ATI!

 

Wooo Hooo 4850 X 2 and 4870 !!!

 

So 4870 is better than 9800GTX in the desktop versions, right?

Let's see how the mobile ones fare.

 

That's great news from ATi.
God i hope one of those cards (4650, why not a 4850) will end up in the upcoming Dell XPS, that's rumored to be released in the first half of November... maybe that's what Dell was waiting for

 

GoGo ATI keep up nvidia,rest is over for u

 

No 4450? Blegh.

 

I'll be more excited when these actually materialize. The HD 3000 series was released so long ago, but basically just trickled into the market and did nothing to unseat NVIDIA.

I'd like to see the HD 4000 line wrestle some market share back from NVIDIA, though the absence of a low end entry is troubling.

 

I am quite curious at how the HD4000 series will do in notebooks, since ATI has done great in the desktop market, they've given very strong competition to Nvidia. My brother loves his HD4850.

I wonder how the price and performance of these new mobility cards will be against Nvidia's current offerings. I hope they'll put up as much as a fight as they are in desktops. I hope an ATI gaming notebook can be lower priced.

Now ATI, how is your XGP external graphics solution coming along?

 

yummy ati cards

 

I'm anxious to see what kind of performance the Mobility HD 4000 brings. I have two HD 4670 512MB in CrossFireX in my desktop, and they are smoking fast.

One 4670, which gets about 2900 in the GPU test of 3DMark Vantage, can run Crysis Warhead on mostly high settings @ 1440x900 no problem.

 

Yeah me too, I've got one 4850 and it really is one hell of a card. I just need to replace the stock cooler to get the core up to 700MHZ and then maybe a volt mod to go above and beyond.

 

wow i can see it now 4650 in a 13.3" anyone? Life is good i knew they were planning something huge.

 

Whenever the performances are the same, I always pick ATI or AMD.

Intel and nVidia are not good for innovation and the consumer.

 

That would be sweet. Also, noticed you said Life is Good. Any reference to LG being the only manufacturer to stuff a midrange card into a 13-incher?

I agree wholeheartedly. I personally like AMDATI more as a company that I do Intel and Nvidia. I used to be very skeptical about the corp-combo, but it's been pulling itself together.

 

Is there any reason why the Mobility Radeon 4670 was not included in the main NBR article? It showed up in the link to the AMD website...

 

Well, BenQ did stuff a 8600GT GDDR3 into a 13-incher, which is a bigger achievement than LG's 8600GS...

 

That BenQ unit looks nice, too expensive for me though.

It is nice to AMD hit the market, it helps keep the prices down and the variety high.

I bought two 4850's for my desktop for about the same price of my older 7800gtx it was replacing, for a "mid end" card its insanly fast. Just one of them can do DX9 Crysis 1920x1080 on Very High, two of them in crossfire is so fast that its pointless. I have to turn on Vsync for every game or it runs the games so fast with so much FPS that it makes my cpu & cards run too fast/hot.

 

Didn't someone say awhile back that AMD cards were so much more effective that a notebook version of one would be similar in performance to a desktop one? If so, I can see these new cards being quite fun to bring into the marketplace.

I wonder if AMD is going to use their integrated line as their new low end?

 

Well the hd 3650/3450 would probably be their mid -low end card for now

 

Say, when did the Mobility HD3650 "start" shipping? A year ago. When it become widely available for notebooks? Less than half a year.

 

i wonder what the 4650 will be like i was going to buy a barebone laptop with a 9800M but now i will wait my 2600HD will hold me over right along with my desktop i hope the 4650 is 256-bit memory that would be sweet that would throw nvidia off

 

And I just got a new laptop because I thought they would take longer, bugger.

 

I ordered my laptop 2 days ago.. bummer.

 

You obviously shouldn't be anything other than an end user... I don't which is better any orange or an apple???

The answer is it depends on what you are doing. IMHO Nvidia is the only way to go but if ATI open sources the 3d crap like they have the 2d I will change sides.

 

Wow, I'm affected by the recall apparently (I have a dv8000).

Thanks for the info

 

You're welcome. Please let us know how the process goes.

 

LG countered that with a 9600M GT in their next 13" I think that pretty much tops it for GPU in a 13"...

 

I think that I "will say NO" to Sony batteries forever after hearing of all this stuff in the last year or two.

Whenever I get a notebook, or any other electronic device with a battery, I always check to make sure it is a non-Sony battery.

 

4850 x2 + Intel Quad +CS4 = ...just imagine the power!

 

Finally some real competition to Nvidia in the notebook segment. We haven´t see many Crossfire notebooks. But now they will pop up. Nvidia has very good GPU´s. But I think it´s time for some real competition and lower prices in the notebook GPU area. Though my XPS M1730 8800m GTX SLI is blazing fast, however when some real benchmarks show up on Crossfire 4800 laptops then my next laptop could probably be an ATI one

 

Turns out I wasn't affected; weird though, I have a dv8000 and its around the time that they were talking about.

Oh well

 

Any word on if the 4870 runs cooler than the 3870?

 

lol, o.k buddy, thanks for advertising those cards/making everyone jealous

 

I hope dell was just waiting for ATi to update the m1530...

 

Dream on. The 4650 Desktop line isn't even 256bit.

 

Well, I've never actually experienced a 256-bit chip before; how much of a difference does it make?

1. A lot
2. A lot
3. A lot

In other words, I just need some perspective in terms of how much awesomeness 256-bit holds over 128.

 

It's the difference between playing Crysis on High or Crysis on medium: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/index.html

 

Guys, remember that we don't actually know what these parts are. They have the same NAME as the desktop parts, but we all know mobile parts can have the same name and actually have less than half the hardware of the real part.

Do you mean more efficient? If so, then no. AMD's GPUs draw more power than the Nvidia equivalents right now.

 

256-bit vs. 128-bit . . . you will definitely need a 256-bit card to play newer games at 1680x1050 and above.

I have 2x Radeon HD 4670 512MB in my desktop. They have a 128-bit bus and 512MB of GDDR3 memory. A single one can run Crysis at around 1440x900 with mostly high settings comfortably. However, two of them (which makes the effective memory bus 128x2 = 256-bit) can run it at 1680x1050 with all high/some very high settings.

 

ive got a single HD 4670 and 128bit isnt so bad, i play pretty much everything on high on any game, lol you could check out some youtube videos and reviews as proof, 256bit would be good but not necessary. its GDDR that makes a difference

my laptop still works like a charm and id upgrade to a gateway with an ATI card

 

I hope you're being sarcastic

 

Thanks guys. It was pretty much what I expected; just needed a custom-tailored answer, ya know?

 

HP boasted so much about how they were the only manufacturer not affected by the last major round of battery recalls. Guess they finally faced the issue and can no longer claim that their battery designs are any safer than those of other manufacturers.

 

Yes, that's what I meant. I think I must've been tired when writing that post. Anyways, I did read an article back about how NVIDIA used a very large, powerful architecture that required them to strip down their chips to be used in notebooks, while Ati/AMD had a smaller more efficient one that made more use of power in a smaller size so it wouldn't need to be stripped down as much for a notebook version.

extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2320860,00.asp

While this isn't the article I was thinking about it kind of explains it better. To be honest now that I think about it the chart I saw was from an AMD presentation so it would be heavily biased.

 

Yeah, that whole "we just have a mid range part" just sounds like marketing sillyness to me.

This is for desktop parts, but AMD's high end part draws slightly more than Nvidia's equivalent parts (and a lot more at idle).

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3408&p=9

I was thinking the difference was bigger though. Oh well, it flips back and forth every other minute anyway!