Chaintech bombards 3D media

I USUALLY DON'T MAKE FUN of mangled English, mainly because if someone tries to write in English as a non-native language, it will be much better than anything I could hope to do in any other language. That said, I have a few Chaintech press releases to round out the month of September, and one almost made me fall out of my chair I was laughing so hard.

Yes, the new Chaintech AA6800 is 'Driving DOOM3 With Bombarding Effect On 3D Media'. I don't know why, maybe because it was 4am when I first read it, but I found that extremely funny. The card itself is much more serious though, a 350MHz GeForce 6800 with 128 MB of 770MHz DDR memory. There is an AA6800G with 256MB of DDR3 at 1000MHz, and a AA6800U running at 400MHZ core with 256MB of 1100MHz DDR3. At the bottom of the ladder is the SA6800, it runs at 325MHz with only 128MB of 700MHz memory.

The AA6800G has a nifty blue heatsink and a blue LED in the fan so it lights up, perfect for case modders. They are also bundled with Commandos3, a solid game, and a bunch of monitoring and overclocking utils. Get to bombarding with Chaintech boys and girls.

The next Chaintech press releases is for the 6600 line, and these don't bombard nearly enough. There is a SE6600 and a SE6600G, both are PCIe parts. The G is the high end part, with 128MB of 1000MHz DDR3 and a core running at 550MHz. The lesser non-G part has 256MB of slower ram, no core clock was specified. It looks like Chaintech has a complete graphics lineup, from SIS and XGI to the 6800Ultra.

From Chaintech, we go on to the natural progression toward frogs, not Tadpole laptops, but Frogpad keyboards. Yes, Frogpad came out with a Bluetooth version of their keyboard, and it is called the Bluetooth iFrog. Check the site out for lots of cartoony frog graphics, and a very unique keyboard. Must resist puns, must have willpower. Hop to it. Nope, failed the willpower test.

From amphibians, we go on to reptiles, and happy ones at that. Smiling Gator productions has licensed the Source Engine from Valve, and will use it to power their MMORPG called Twilight War: After the Fall. You can read about it here, but no screenshots yet.

We close with a part that is not related to any animal, and the press release has English that is much better than mine, spelling error free, and grammatically correct to boot. Oh yeah, it is also a cool product as well, the iRiver H300 series MP3 players.

Right now, there is the H320 and H340 with a 20 and 40GB HD respectively. The H300s have some really nice features and one bad one. The nice features are a large color display, USB2.0, rechargeable battery, and audio in and out.

The iRiver players have long supported audio recording, something that more players should do. They also support OGG (YAY!!!) and ASF in addition to the more common MP3 and WMA formats. Can only record to MP3, but it does so in real time, a big plus in my book. The bad feature is that it supports 'secure' transfers from Windows Media Players. Boo, hiss, DRM infected products, karmic balance for the OGG support I suppose.

To round out this all in one player, it has an FM radio so you can listen to the more than 22 minutes of commercials an hour that Clear Channel has blessed us with. The H320 is available now for $329, and the H340 is listed as coming soon. Both are upgradeable to future formats, and everything I have seen points to good support from iRiver, and if they are anything like the flash based players, expect quality. µ