Daily News Brief: Asus Adds HDMI to Xonar Soundcard

New Xonar Soundcard Implements HDMI

Gone are the days when Creative and AdLib would find themselves duking it out for sound supremacy, and quite frankly, the add-in soundcard market has gotten a bit stale. But that doesn't mean there exists no more room for innovation. Asus, who's quickly becoming a viable player, unveiled the "world's first HDMI 1.3a compliant audio/video enhancement combo card." The Xonar HDAV1.3 can output uncompressed multichannel high definition audio from Blu-ray flicks, boasts a 120dB signal-to-noise ratio, and of course comes with an HDMI port. Creative, it's your move...

AMD's Puma Dissected

New details have emerged on AMD's Puma platform, which the company hopes will help it grab some mobile market share away from Intel's Centrino. At the heart of the platform rests the Turion X2 Ultra processor, a tweaked version of AMD's earlier Turion X2. The Ultra comes with double the L2 cache as before (1MB versus 512K), supports HyperTransport 3.0, an improved memory controller, and introduces several power-saving features that originally debuted on Barcelona.

Call of Duty 4 Retail 1.6 Patch

A new patch is available for Call of Duty 4, updating the game to version 1.6. The 283MB download brings the following changes:

• New server browser filters
• Fix for a Denial of Service attack
• Four new multiplier maps

To date, CoD4 has sold 10 million units, and the next iteration is expected to land on retail shelves later this year.

Buy a Mac, Get an iPod

Summer vacation hasn't even begun for most students yet, but to kick off the upcoming school year, Apple's offering a free 8GB iPod touch or 8GB iPod nano to eligible students, faculty, and staff members who purchase a Mac. The promotion runs from now until September 15, 2008 while supplies last.

Dangerous Domains

According to a new study by McAfee, the most dangerous domains belong to Hong Kong (.hk), China (.cn), and the Philippines (.ph). McAfee came to the conclusion after studying 9.9 million websites in 265 top-level internet domains, and found that 19.2 percent of all .hk sites pose a security threat, compared to 11 percent of .cn sites. The Philippines trailed them both at 7.7 percent, but noted a nearly three-fold increase in overall risk from 2007. More here.

More Nehalem Coverage

Review website Anandtech got their hands on not one, but two Nehalem processors and offers up a bevy of benchmarks. If the early numbers hold true, the future looks bright for Intel's upcoming lineup. Operating at 2.66GHz, Anandtech noted performance gains ranging from 20-50 percent over the the Q9450, also clocked at 2.66GHz.