BMW was present at the Arab Health exhibition held at the Dubai World Trade Center last week and I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Stephan Rauscher, Safety Engineer for BMW Global who explained how BMW is actively involved with passenger safety in their vehicles. Besides the passive features such as your seat belt, there are many electronic features in today’s BMW cars that, through sensors, detect a possibility of collision and accordingly inform the driver or make adjustments to your vehicle. Examples of such situations include your car moving out of the car tracks or detection of an object ahead of you at a slower speed.

Other than these safety features, Stefan also explained about BMW’s call center which is currently not available in the UAE, but is in Kuwait. The call center sends a crash report to an agent informing them of all passengers in the car, the area where the car was hit as well as other data such as the location of the accident. Again, the video below explains how it works by emulating a crash.

As you can see, BMW is really focusing on the safety aspect of their vehicles and considering how fast people tend to drive in the UAE, this is a good thing.

Quote: “The ENGTX580 is in a bit of a bind. When viewed by itself or
against other GTX 580 cards, it really proves its worth once cooling
and overclocking abilities are considered. It is on the same level as
the MSI N580GTX Lightning, but it is a slightly larger card in that it
takes up three slots as compared to two. It does not match the MSI
N580GTX XE, which is a 3GB card, but it is also significantly cheaper
(and actually available) as compared to that other high end card.
Where it stumbles is when being compared against the brand new AMD HD
7970.”

Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1848/1/

Article Link : http://www.rwlabs.com/article.php?id=589

The Smart Series is a new entry-level power supply series from Thermaltake, with the standard 80 Plus certification. Let’s see if the 630 W model is a good choice.

“The Smart Series is a new entry-level power supply series from Thermaltake, with the standard 80 Plus certification. Coming to replace the old Purepower and TR2 “standard” series, this new series features 430 W, 530 W, 630 W, and 730 W models, all with the standard 80 Plus certification. Let’s see if the 630 W model is a good choice.”

Article Link : http://www.rwlabs.com/article.php?id=589

Review URL: http://www.pureoverclock.com/article1432.html

Late last year I reviewed the AMD A8-3850 APU, which the first high-end Llano based offering from AMD, giving desktop users a taste of how successfully integrated graphics can work with a quad-core processor. And while the performance in multi-threaded applications was decent, as were the onboard graphics, the chip still felt somewhat lacking compared to the direct competition, which is the Intel Core i3-2100.

So today I’ll be looking at the new flagship APU from AMD, the Llano A8-3870K. Apart from having a 100MHz increase over the A8-3850, the ace up the A8-3870K is the fact that it has unlocked core multiplier. Of course, given that the Llano APUs aren’t being targeted towards the hardcore gamer, you won’t find high-end motherboards geared towards overclocking. As such, currently overclocking the A8-3870K is only possible on those motherboards who have an updated BIOS which supports switching the multiplier.

Outside of the unlocked multiplier, the A8-3870K has the same HD 6550D GPU with 400 Radeon cores running at 600MHz speed as the A8-3850. Now one of the coolest things about the Llano APUs is that they are targeted mostly towards HTPC users and the extremely budget conscious gamer who doesn’t want to play Battlefield 3 at Ultra high settings. As such, if the built-in HD 6550D GPU isn’t enough, you can pair it with an AMD Radeon HD 6670 graphics card for asymmetrical CrossFire where both the Llano APU’s integrated HD 6550D and the discrete HD 6670 work in tandem.